I WAS rather disappointed with the interview with Ellen Friedman, headlined “Contours of the class struggle in China.” [1]

To be sure, Friedman provides critical and effective insight of some of the conditions and processes affecting working-class struggle in China, and the facts that she provides about the Honda strikes show the dynamic nature of the class struggle amongst the Chinese working class. But I strongly disagree with her statement concerning the absence of any real drive for social change among Chinese workers.

Friedman writes that Chinese workers differ from their counterparts in Europe and North America as well as in Latin America in the fact that they do not have a history of democratic process and institutions, and that this is one reason why Chinese workers have not raised demands around fundamental social change, and have instead limited their demands to immediate struggles over economic conditions and the enforcement of existing workplace regulations.

Friedman’s argument here seems to reify the liberal-democratic state as the basic content of what we should understand by democratic institutions, but what she misses is that, for socialists, our vision of democracy is not limited to the familiar institutions of capitalist democracies, such as representative systems of government and concepts such as the rule of law, as instead we look towards a more radical understanding of democracy, as being about popular control over production and the distribution of social surplus.

Moreover, when it comes to the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, socialists in the Leninist tradition also understand that democracy must encompass the issue of national self-determination. In these terms, of course, China has a democratic tradition—because it had one of the most radical revolutions of the post-Second World War period, which was simultaneously an anti-colonial revolution and a social revolution that—while it may not have ultimately overthrown capitalist social relations in the same way as the Russian Revolution—did totally transform patterns of land distribution in China and dramatically improve conditions for women, amongst other achievements.

In addition, over its subsequent decades, and especially during the Cultural Revolution, China’s revolution was, at times, and even if in an inconsistent and fragmented way, characterized by attempts to image new forms of political participation and new modes of political expression, of which the big-character poster (dazibao) is perhaps the most famous example.

I raise this critique of Friedman’s understanding of democracy not only as a historical or theoretical point, but because the language of the Mao period remains central to Chinese working-class struggle today and constitutes a powerful legacy and set of symbols, practices and discourses, on which workers are able to draw to articulate their demands.

This was true of the involvement of the working-class in the Tiananmen demonstrations, it was true of the struggles through the 1990s around workers who were being disenfranchised through the process of restructuring and privatizing state-owned enterprises, and it is also true of migrant workers today. In fact, I would argue that you cannot make sense of the militancy of contemporary class struggle in China without understanding the Mao period as a decisive historical legacy.

Benjamin Kindler, New York City