Shaoshan, China — September 9 marked the 50th anniversary of the passing of Chairman Mao, who led the Chinese people to national liberation and forged an arduous revolutionary line against the bourgeois road. His death and contributions to the world revolutionary movement were celebrated worldwide; one such place was Shaoshan, China, the hometown and birthplace of Chairman Mao.
Thousands of youth and people gathered in the Shaoshan centre to honor his legacy. The masses held portraits, brandished banners and flags, along with Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong, and chanted slogans celebrating Chairman Mao, the heights of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and the struggle of the proletariat and peoples of the world for national liberation and socialism. Slogans included, “Chairman Mao’s later years are the most brilliant and correct new chapter of Marxism-Leninism” and “Long live the working class, carry on Chairman Mao’s legacy, and see the revolution through to the end!”
However, the police goons of the social-imperialist Xi Jinping government and the bourgeois-rotted “communist party” of China surveilled the people to ensure they did not “linger too long” and proceeded to attack and repress the youth masses during the commemoration, snatching the very flag honoring the final years of Chairman Mao.
A student of Maoism in China reportedly visited the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in Beijing to pay his respects; however, he was subjected to security checks before being detained by the bourgeois police. The police inspected phones, VPNs and browsing histories, withheld books, and made remarks upholding the bureaucrat-monopoly rule of the revisionists; some included, “We know what you get up to” and “Think about your own future.” Another had a collection of Chairman Mao’s poetry taken away and had to provide his name and phone number to the anti-people authorities.
The police repression of the social-imperialist Chinese police is emblematic of the bourgeoisie’s attack on the revolutionary line and the Chinese Revolution since the victory of national liberation led to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, after 22 years of protracted People’s War led by the Communist Party. A month after the death of Chairman Mao, the core revisionists, Ye Jianying, Hua Guofeng, Wang Dongxing, and Deng Xiaoping, sought to discredit and destroy the revolutionary movement of millions of workers and peasants toward the socialist road, consolidating the Right line within the Communist Party and carrying out the counterrevolutionary seizure of political power from the proletariat. The October 6, 1976 coup arrested Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan, purged other supporters of the revolutionary Left and thousands of leading cadres, and brought the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to an end. Jiang Qing and her comrades were later subjected to political show trials intended to condemn the revolutionary Left and repudiate the Cultural Revolution itself.
The new leadership systematically reversed the political and economic gains of the socialist period, dismantling collective agriculture, expanding commodity production and material incentives, restoring managerial authority over workers, opening the country to foreign capital and world markets, and broadly carrying out the restoration of capitalism. This reversal suppressed forms of mass political participation developed during the Cultural Revolution, rehabilitated cadres previously removed for taking the capitalist road, and abandoned the continuation of class struggle under socialism in favor of production, profitability and capitalist accumulation. Revisionist political economy was accompanied by the repudiation of the GPCR, the rehabilitation of Confucianism and other ideas criticized as feudal and reactionary during the revolutionary period, and the Deng clique’s effort to present capitalist restoration as modernization. The consequences extended throughout Chinese society: national minorities were subjected to forced assimilation and Han chauvinism, the proletariat to wage labor, the peasants to renewed domination over land and production, and women to intensified subjugation and violence. Internationally, the new leadership progressively abandoned socialist China’s former support for revolutionary and national liberation movements, replacing proletarian internationalism with realpolitik State relations, capital export and strategic cooperation with reactionary governments. In this way, the revisionist clique set China firmly on the capitalist road, culminating in its development into a new social-imperialist power.
Despite the bourgeoisification and wide dominion over the Chinese masses since the coup, including the notorious Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, the Chinese proletariat and peasants have not stopped rebelling against the bourgeoisie, realizing the truth that it is right to rebel.
The contributions of Chairman Mao and the Chinese Revolution to the ideology of the international proletariat did not come from thin air; they came from ruthless struggle against the big landlords, bureaucrat-comprador bourgeoisie and World Imperialism, along with the two-line struggle against the bourgeois line. Born in the tide of the Boxer Rebellion, Chairman Mao was determined to liberate the Chinese people from the vestiges of feudalism, bureaucrat-capitalism and imperialism. Following the triumph of the October Revolution by the peoples and nations of the collapsed Tsar empire, and building on the universal contributions of V.I. Lenin, concretized and defended through the construction of socialism through the great leadership of J.V. Stalin, Chairman Mao developed proletarian ideology into what would become its highest stage, serving as a guide for revolutionaries throughout the world.
As U.S. Imperialism and Chinese Social-Imperialism descend further toward reaction in their battle to redivide the world, the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world must learn, defend, and apply the lessons of Chairman Mao and the Chinese Revolution that they wish the world to forget. Without forging a class-conscious line at the points of production and social reproduction the movement cannot achieve its tasks of developing the revolutionary masses in service of the total overthrow of imperialism and the establishment of new socialist societies in the pursuit of world communism, the very same goals Chairman Mao strove for.
