Where there is repression, there is resistance – Mao.

‘Qiu disappeared April 29.

‘State security agents seized him that day from Beijing’s outskirts, his classmates say. Qiu’s offense? He was the leader of the Marxist student association at the elite Peking University, a communist of conscience who defied the Communist Party of China.

‘Over the past eight months, China’s ruling party has gone to extraordinary lengths to shut down the small club of students at the country’s top university. Peking University’s young Marxists drew the government’s ire after they campaigned for workers’ rights and openly criticized social inequality and corruption in China.

‘That alone was provocative. In recent years, China’s leaders have been highly sensitive to rumblings of labor unrest as the sputtering economy lays bare the divides between rich and poor — fissures that were formed, and mostly overlooked, during decades of white-hot growth’.

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June 4th marks the 30th anniversary of the day on which troops entered Tiananmen Square and opened fire upon protestors. It was an outcome of the restoration of capitalism in China, the victory of the ‘capitalist roaders’ within the Communist Party that Mao had warned against and led struggle against.

The idea that things can turn into their opposite is a very challenging one, but it is true.

The violent repression at Tiananmen Square is proof that the Communist Party was no longer revolutionary, no longer socialist but a case of ‘capitalism without democracy’.

The Chinese parliament currently has about a hundred billionaires among its delegates, most are nominally ‘communists’. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/02/chinas-parliament-has-about-100-billionaires-according-to-data-from-the-hurun-report.html

Maoists and other pro-democracy dissidents are imprisoned and now ‘disappear’ at the hands of state authorities. https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/on-december-24-2004-maoists-in-china-get-three-year-prison-sentences-for-leafleting/

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2125541/chinese-scholars-sign-open-letter-calling-release

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/if-i-disappear-chinese-students-make-farewell-messages-amid-crackdowns-over-labor-activism-/2019/05/25/6fc949c0-727d-11e9-9331-30bc5836f48e_story.html?fbclid=IwAR0SOnpzbmRBUyB6j3uYJ02PkAALeAyxGtqV03hzPrWuQVK6sb6eHMr8hmQ&utm_term=.4e004ccb1811

The people, however, understand revolutionary change and their own socialist revolution is within living memory.

Where there is repression, there is resistance.

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Photo of statue at York University, Canada, commemorating the resistance of students and workers in Tiananmen Square.