'THE POLITICAL fate of China is up for grabs" announced a recent US government report. The CIA think China has a 50-50 chance of breaking up after the death of Deng Xiaoping.
The vultures are already hovering over his sickbed - Prime Minister Li Peng and President Jiang Zemin both hope to benefit from Deng's demise.
International capital also sees this moment as decisive.
Since 1989 up to $200 billion has been poured into the country. In 1994 foreign trade was more than $200 billion. The trade surplus with the USA was $23 billion in 1993.
Internally the turnaround has been just as dramatic.
GDP has grown by over nine per cent a year since 1980. There has been a similar rise in national income. Living standards and expectations for urban workers have risen markedly.
Now that peasants are no longer Brute repression crushed 1989 revolt by students and workers forced to remain in their villages tens of million of them have moved in search of better prospects. They arrive in cities which have not yet developed the usual mechanisms of social regulation needed by urban environments. The situation is tense.
The fear of peasant revolt was a prime motivation behind the privatisation of land and the partial introduction of capitalist methods of production in the countryside.
The Communist Party judged that the accompanying fragmentation of the peasantry was the only way they could guarantee their position in the face of growing discontent.
Now the fruits of that policy are being borne in another form of mass discontent.
Strikes and other forms of industrial action are now commonplace, especially in the new special export zones the government has established along the coast. In Shenzhen, the largest one, there have been 1100 so-called "collective labour disputes" over the past two years.
Minimum wage
Most of the unrest occurs in foreign owned factories. This is very embarrassing for the "socialist" government of the Communist Party. Seventy per cent of workers in Shenzhen are paid below the official minimum wage and most are forced to do an average of 150 hours overTime a month.
The zone's newspaper reported that "workers are not allowed to talk when they have their meals; when walking to and from the factory, the dormitory and canteen, they are required to follow a special line en route; if they step beyond this line they will be punished by being forced to stand to attention for long periods, or suffer monetary penalisation."
This sort of treatment recently provoked a strike of 3000 workers. Health and safety standards are appalling and routinely ignored.
In spite of this, international capitalism is piling on the pressure for further curbs in worker's conditions and pay.
In a significant move Toshiba's president in the northern city of Dalian has recently petitioned the authorities bemoaning the rise of labour militancy. His company have threatened to move their operation to the Philippines.
A recent report in the Financial Times actually shows a slowdown in the rate of Japanese investment. Nevertheless, said a spokesperson for Toyota, "phases of uncertainty, even a leadership change, will not affect the move towards market opening."
Whether he is proved correct hinges a great deal on what happens in the succession battle. The range of possibilities depends very much on the choices made by the CCP after Deng.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 83, May 13 1995, Page 8