Part 9 - LA36 KB articles 1988 98 and cuttings 005 009

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9 cannot be separated from the ground laid and the positions defended in those years. What can be initially summed up from that period is that it is not sufficient to fight revisionism with dogmatism, and that this itself will also lead to potentially disastrous consequences in both internal and external policies. It cannot be stressed strongly enough that China's ability to conduct its present policies fundamentally reflects, not a success of imperialism in undermining China, but China's own successes, which enable it to deal with foreign powers and capital on the basis of increasing equality and self-confidence, to mobilise every possible positive factor to build the strength of the socialist state and the quality of life of its people, and to turn the old imperialist weapon of divide-and-rule against the imperialists themselves. It is in accord with Lenin's reputed remark that the capitalists will sell us the very guns with which we will shoot them. It is not on account of political preference that foreign capital flocks to People's China rather than bourgeois-landlord India or Yeltsin's bonapartist Russia, but rather on account of the success and vitality of China's present road of development, which rests on socialist foundations. The international bourgeoisie tries to attribute China's development to a supposed embrace of capitalism because it does not want the workers and oppressed to see that socialism is not just some abstract ideal, but a real, living and practical alternative. In the period since 1989-91, its main propaganda focus in its unremitting war against socialism has therefore centred on distorting, denying or concealing the realities of People's China. This campaign falls on two counts. First, if China really has returned to capitalism, why is it still the concentrated target of attack by the international reactionary forces, from the jingoist media campaign at the time of the Hong Kong handover to last week's provocative and outrageous nuclear tests by the extreme reactionary government currently in power in New Delhi? Second, if China's achievements are based on capitalism, why have such catastrophes befallen the peoples of the former Soviet Union and other former socialist countries? And why have China's achievements eluded the peoples of India or Brazil, or for that matter such erstwhile 'tiger' economies as Indonesia?

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