The Chinese Communist Party was born a century ago on July 1, 1921. Several dozen courageous revolutionaries came to Shanghai to start building a party that led China out of its misery.
At that time, China was being picked apart by imperialist powers, including the United States. Foreign gunboats prowled along the mighty Yangtze River.
Shanghai itself was divided into foreign “concessions” which were occupation zones. In one of them a whites-only club displayed a Jim Crow sign saying “Chinese and dogs not allowed.”
The Chinese Revolution swept away all that filth. As Mao Zedong declared in founding the People’s Republic on Oct. 1, 1949, “China has stood up!”
Lenin led the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that helped unlock the door for workers and oppressed people everywhere. The socialist revolutions in East Asia — China, Korea, Laos and Vietnam — smashed through it.
The transformation of China since 1949 has been stunning. China’s women stepped forward with unbound feet. Life expectancy has doubled.
Illiteracy has been virtually wiped out, while over 30 million Chinese students are attending college.
China has built more miles of high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined. Over 900 million metric tons of steel are made in China, over half of the world’s production.
It’s taken New York City 90 years to open three stations on the unfinished Second Avenue subway. Just between 2009 and 2019, China opened 21 new subway systems.
While capitalism is cooking the earth, socialist China has reforested an area of 123,000 square miles, twice the size of New England.
None of this progress is to the liking of the billionaires and banksters who run the United States. Even before 1776, Massachusetts shipowners dreamed of China’s “unlimited market.”
John Jacob Astor smuggled opium to China. His profits helped make him the biggest slumlord in the Americas.
Another big drug lord was Warren Delano, whose opium profits established the family fortune and helped put his grandson Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House.
The pivot and the lies
Thirty years ago, the overthrow of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries in Eastern Europe was a terrible defeat for every poor person. The next target of the Pentagon and CIA was the People’s Republic of China.
The White House proclaimed a “pivot to Asia,” which meant aiming their bombers and nukes at China. They keep China’s Taiwan province from being restored to the People’s Republic. The U.S. Navy continues to throttle the Pacific Ocean like it’s Lake Michigan.
U.S. generals have never forgiven China for helping to defeat them in the Korean War. Chinese volunteers died alongside their Korean comrades, including Mao Anying, a son of Mao Zedong.
Lies are another weapon that Wall Street and its media use against China. While the CIA’s “French Connection” was pouring heroin into New York City, Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger was claiming China was responsible for the dope trade.
Sixty years later, the capitalist media is peddling another big lie. They claim that China was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. With no evidence, their media claims that the coronavirus somehow leaked from a Wuhan lab.
The millions of people in the U.S. who are hungry, jobless or facing eviction or foreclosures, don’t need lies. The $700-billion-plus Pentagon budget is stolen from them.
The 2.2 million people in U.S. prisons — a quarter of the world’s total — need jobs and freedom, not falsehoods about Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
When Malcolm X was in prison, he was thrilled to read about the Chinese Revolution. Mao Zedong met with Mabel and Robert Williams, who led armed self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan in Monroe, N.C.
China today is helping Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, whose economies have been strangled by the U.S. and Europe.
Every progressive person should reject the slander against the People’s Republic of China. Hands off China!
Happy Birthday to the Chinese Communist Party!
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