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August 7, 2022August 10, 2022

Mark McConaghy, Can Taiwanese Nationalists Think Zhonghua Once Again? Reflections on an Impossible Confederation Amid the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis

There could be no more fitting illustration of the arrogance of American power in the world than speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to the island of Taiwan. After days of breathless will-she-or-won’t she anticipation, and furious Chinese government warnings, Pelosi’s U.S. Air Force C-40 touched down in Taipei a little before 11pm local time on Tuesday August 2nd. It was the first time in twenty-five years an American speaker of the House has visited the island in an official capacity.

Over the next 18 hours Pelosi luxuriated in photo ops with Taiwanese politicians and business leaders, lunched in a colonial mansion once built by occupying Japanese forces, and even found time to stroll around the grounds of a Chinese Nationalist (KMT) detainment center that has been turned into a human rights museum. Placing her visit within a binary global frame of “autocracy” vs. “democracy,” Pelosi spoke repeatedly about the “ironclad” commitment of the United States to Taiwan, an odd statement from the representative of a government that does not recognize Taiwan as an independent state.

Pelosi casually tossed away the suggestion that what she was doing was out of line with longstanding diplomatic precedent, or that her visit was inflammatory at a time of incredible tension between Euro-America and Russia/China. With the world roiling from a brutalizing ground war in Eastern Europe, inflationary pressures across global supply chains, climate catastrophe, two simultaneous pandemics, and the generalized market inequality of 21^st-century capitalist life, it is remarkable that Pelosi felt the best use of her time would be to publicly embarrass the Chinese military, then depart the region under US military escort to leave her Taiwanese counterparts – and the people of Taiwan — to face the inevitable backlash.

Flash forward twenty-four hours, and the excited local cheerfulness over official American attention in Taiwan has turned into fretful anxiety over live-fire military exercises around the island launched by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). According to recent reports, eleven dongfeng missiles have landed in the seas around Taiwan (four of which went directly over the island), amidst a six-zone ring of military activity that has been discussed as a potential permanent blockade by the PRC of the island. The economic damage occasioned by Pelosi’s visit is already being borne by Taiwanese farmers, fisherman, and merchants – whose products are now being banned in the PRC — while critical commercial shipping and flight paths have been disrupted, potentially permanently. Taiwan’s air and naval forces, quantitatively overmatched in comparison to their Chinese counterparts, have mobilized for a reactive war. American naval assets continue to stay in the region, but they offer scant information and even less reassurance. Between Taiwan and the Mainland, a new normal of threatened military confrontation, economic disruption, and utter disregard for diplomatic de-escalation seems upon us.

It is critical at this point to produce some kind of grounded critique of how matters have spiraled so completely into this impasse. At the most basic level of analysis one can say that the current predicament is an expression of the long-standing hubris of all three governments involved in the crisis. This has involved the active promotion of discourses and policies that inflame and divide, the weakening over time of de-escalation mechanisms, and the abandonment of productive, long-standing norms. All three governments are culpable in bringing us to this point.

Pelosi’s visit has been called reckless (Thomas Friedman in the New York Times) and the basic contradiction in the US stance regarding the Chinese world has been critiqued (that is, constantly treating Taiwan as an independent state while publicly assuring the PRC that they stand against Taiwan’s independence). The hypocrisy of the Chinese position should also be critically noted: though the PRC proclaims that “across the strait all are one family” (兩岸一家親), if this were even remotely the case why would it be necessary to threaten to invade and occupy Taiwan? By mobilizing for war, China has proven to the world that the Republic of China on Taiwan is an independent country which they can only try to control from the outside. Meanwhile, China’s words and actions will only further amplify the distrust the Taiwanese people feel toward that regime. Each day of military threat to Taiwan creates more of the enemies the PRC claims they need to stamp out. It is a classic expression of a colonizer’s dilemma.

But let us also focus on the Taiwanese government, which is not blameless in this whole affair. While it is sometimes argued that Taiwan as a state is “caught” between two superpowers (or empires) with little agency of its own, in fact Taiwanese governments over time have had considerable options available when it comes to managing cross-straits relations. This is clear with the different nature of those relations under various administrations since democratization (1990s). The Taiwanese government is not a passive actor. Rather, we must look at how current Taiwanese state rhetoric and policies have inflamed tensions considerably since Tsai Ing-wen’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) came to power with a parliamentary majority in 2016. Indeed, with the US and China locked in a battle for global geopolitical and economic hegemony, it will be largely up to the people of Taiwan to come up with productive solutions that keeps war at bay. For this reason, a critique of Taiwan’s government is vitally important.

Cross-straits relations are volatile, and they are held together by a series of necessary and productive ideological sleights of hand (strategic ambiguity, in popular parlance). When the political leaders of the United States abandoned their diplomatic recognition of the ROC on Taiwan in 1972/1979, they were still afflicted by lingering affection for their long standing KMT allies. The US thus passed the Taiwan Relations Act through Congress, which provided for continued arm sales to the island and vague claims about the US defense of the island’s integrity. On the face of it, this is paradoxical. Why would the United States government allow arms sales to a regime whose national legitimacy it had just denied? Here is the first sleight of hand. While the formal derecognition allowed the US to publicly declare fealty to a mandated “one China” policy, the Act allowed the US to declare support for Taiwan; at the same time, all sides began massive capitalist investment in China under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms while also managing and ignoring the ambiguous volatility

For its part, the PRC government always protested the arms sales, but with the re-orientation of the economy towards capitalism, the focus turned to GDP maximization with an influx of foreign investment and market liberalization. Thus, the second ideological sleight of hand: while the ROC on Taiwan was still a de-facto independent state, the PRC on the mainland could insist that a process of peaceful rapprochement and eventual reunification was underway. It could treat the island in juridical terms as one territory among many within one China headed by the CCP. Meanwhile, capitalist market reforms set soon made mainland China one of the world’s largest centers of capital accumulation, while producing deep economic links with both Taiwan and the United States. Indeed, Taiwan remains one of the largest capital investors in China and itself is reliant on the Mainland for a significant portion of its overall exports. In 2021, the Mainland and Hong Kong accounted for 42% of Taiwan’s exports (over 188 billion USD), compared to just 15% for the United States.¹ Ambiguous volatility again was managed.

Political and economic normalization across the straits was achieved by the so-called 1992 consensus, essentially an agreement between the CCP and the then-ruling KMT on Taiwan to conceptualize cross-straits relations as a question internal to the Sino-world (what can be called the 中華世界 zhonghua world). Within this framework, disagreements between the two parties over sovereignty, governance, and history were to be worked out directly, on their own timelines, without outside interference. While distrust and armed deterrence still existed, and while threats were always on the horizon and at times exploded into confrontation, nevertheless the consensus struck a fragile but crucial balance. With Taiwan considered by both governments as internal to the Sino-world, the option of removing the island from a pan-Chinese framework (that is, the option of Taiwan declaring independence) was taken off the table, thus respecting the PRC’s ideological red line against an autonomous Taiwanese republic. Connected through independent, if informal, diplomatic relations to Japanese and Euro-American allies, who never stopped their own commercial, technological, and cultural relations with the island, over time, Taiwan was able to build a society defined by democratic governance and intellectual openness. This social form stood as a daily rebuke to the essentialist fantasy about “Chinese culture” being incompatible with democracy. In this sense, Taiwan occupied the Sino-world in a very unique way.

With the election of the DPP in 2016, the fragile commitment to a zhonghua world disappeared. The DPP immediately rejected the 1992 consensus. In rejecting the bilateral framework between Taiwan and China, Tsai’s administration rushed into the arms of the American security empire, almost begging the Americans to make Taiwan into a full neo-colony. And with Trump’s election in the US, US-China tensions began to rise precipitously. From 2016 onward, there have been few positive statements from Tsai Ing-wen and other senior ministers in Taiwan about anything related to China, not just as a country, but as an inherited culture of reference. Instead, there are endless invocations of the shared values of “democracy” and “freedom” that define the “Indo-Pacific” region led by the United States. The DPP’s de-Sinicization efforts have attempted to transform Taiwan, through sheer magical thinking alone, into a society that exists without reference to a larger overall modern Chinese project. This has hollowed the ROC state form of pan-Chinese meaning all together.² The fine line between Taiwan as geopolitically part of the PRC (rejected by most Taiwanese) and Taiwan as historically part of a Sino (zhonghua) world has been erased.

In this sense, the PRC are not wrong in their critique of the DPP as a political institution committed to de-sinicization. The origins of the DDP as a formal political party can be found in Taiwan’s nativization (本土化) movement, which began from the late 1970s and has gathered momentum over the following three decades, having now become the dominant ideological force on the island. Born out of justified outrage over the denigration of local Taiwanese languages and histories, as well as the authoritarian policies of the KMT’s post-1949 one-party regime, intellectuals such as Yeh Shih-tao, Su Beng, Chen Fangming, Tzeng Guei-hai and many others mobilized post-colonial theory to create a new idea of the Taiwanese as a self-determining people, ethnically, linguistically, historically, and politically distinct from China across the straits.

Taiwanese nativist scholarship is thus marked by an intense search for “Taiwanese subjectivity” (台灣主體性): those elements of Taiwan’s history which can be seen as forming the basis of a distinct national consciousness. As the scholar Su Beng, repeatedly celebrated publicly by Tsai Ing-wen, put it in a famed moment of his nationalist historiography A Four Hundred Year History of the Taiwanese People (台灣人四百年史):

The struggle against A-shan (阿山, i.e. Mainlanders) that defined the 228 revolution… thoroughly destroyed the connections within the realm of consciousness that the Taiwanese people had with the Chinese people, connections that had once existed because of the shared blood relations between them. Taiwanese nationalism, that is the fervent desire for the independence of the Taiwanese ethnic-people, began to advocate for the interests of its people, concerning itself with the fate and future of its people. This thoroughgoing national ideal became the Taiwanese people’s single and highest principle.³

This Taiwanese nationalism is the epistemic fuel that fires the current government’s political agenda in Taiwan. It has upset the delicate balance of cross-strait relations. When the notion of the Sino (中華zhonghua) is completely eliminated, there remains little shared epistemic framework between Taiwan and the PRC, to say nothing of political sympathy or trust. To be clear, it is obvious that Su Beng can say whatever he wishes; it is the Taiwan government’s embrace of this position that contributes now to the epistemic and political impasse.

The tenor of discourse in the Taiwanese media, on the Taiwanese internet, and from sections of the Taiwanese government, make it all but impossible today to suggest that Taiwan must find some way to think the Sino once again. Any such suggestion automatically opens one up to being stigmatized as a sellout, of welcoming unification under PRC rule, or of being a fellow traveler of the CCP. The mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, whose family was a victim of the 228 violence in 1947, has been critiqued in such terms.

Yet material realities of geography, history, language, state structure, as well as forces and relations of production across the strait cannot be dislodged by sheer ideological incantation alone. Has this recent crisis not shown what happens when a government wholeheartedly becomes the pawn of American geo-political gamesmanship? And when the PRC, in its own nationalist interests, takes advantage of this situation?

The Sino-world may be on the precipice of war. The only responsible path forward is to rethink it in loose, flexible, but integrated ways, safeguarding the security, dignity, and peace of the multiple nations, peoples, regions, and societies that comprise it, while recognizing the manifold layers of its material and ideational past, as well as its potentially shared future.

In my view, this rethinking is not possible if the Taiwanese government continues to hold to its unwavering nativist nationalist position, and if it continues to believe in the ideological fantasy that American assistance will provide protection and peace for the island (Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, among many others, all suggest otherwise). One way of signaling to Beijing a genuine desire for peace would be to start to speak and think through the category of the Sino (zhonghua) once again. The category has served as an important source of fragile cohesion and delicate trust in the region in the past. It also has the added benefit of largely according with the socio-cultural realities of the island’s own life world.

To be clear, a discourse on the Sino is not adequate alone. We need to remain critical of the way in which capitalist accumulation in both societies work to deepen social inequalities, and the way in which “cross-strait” relations are, first and foremost, capitalist relations. Here, it is important not to fall into the trap of “a global analytical turn that takes the culture of the state and the state of culture- not materialist political economy in all its breadth and depth- as the magic conceptual determinant of history and the arbiter of the present/future.”⁴ When we do so, we normalize the “magical fantasy of capitalism with no limits,”⁵ which leftist thinkers must resist..

However, if the drums of war are to be silenced, some basic framework must be re-forged to bring cross-strait relations back onto a peaceful track. There is a line of historical socialist thinking in Taiwan- one that stretches from at least Xie Xuehong to Chen Yingzhen- that once upon a time elaborated the Sino as a necessary and productive category to think and manage cross-straits relations. It is this legacy that I propose remains relevant today.⁶

For its part, Beijing must guarantee that no part of the Sino-world be subject to violence by any other part, and that differences across countries, states, ethnicities, and regions are respected.

Yet is there anybody on either side of the strait that has the courage to think, no less speak, in these terms? Can the US intervention be stemmed? We are talking here not of forced reunification, nor of perpetual military gamesmanship, nor of the fantasy of outside hegemons keeping a chimerical peace. Rather, we are speaking of a quiet federalism of dignity, mutual recognition, and peace.

This, it seems to me, is the only morally responsible position for progressive thinkers. Anything else is just goading on the forces of war.

Mark McConaghy, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaoshiung, Taiwan

Notes

¹ See the ROC’s Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Bureau of Foreign Trade for relevant statistics: https://cuswebo.trade.gov.tw. For popular reporting, see Evelyn Chang, “Taiwan’s trade with China is far bigger than its trade with the U.S.” https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/05/taiwans-trade-with-china-is-far-bigger-than-its-trade-with-the-us.html

² For a critique of this ideological sleight of hand performed by the Tsai administration, see McConaghy, Mark. “The Potentials and Occlusions of Zhonghua Minguo/Taiwan: In Search of a Left Nationalism in the Tsai Ing-wen Era” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2022, pp. 38-53. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0131

³ Shih, Ming (1980). A Four Hundred Year History of the Taiwanese People (台灣人四百年史). Pengdao Culture, p. 1096.

⁴ Rebecca Karl, The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China, Duke University Press, p.72

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ For Xie Xuehong’s socialist project, see Mark McConaghy. “Between Centralizing Orthodoxy and Local Self-Governance: Taiwanese Sinophone Socialism in Hong Kong, 1947-1949” The Journal of Asian Studies (ISSN: 0021-9118). 81:1, pp. 63-79. (February 2022). One of Chen Yingzhen’s most powerful statements regarding what he saw as the historically necessary inter-relationship between socialism and pan-Chinese thought in the Sinitic world is his “Towards a Broader Historical Vision (向著更寬廣的歷史視野),” reprinted in Shi Minhui, ed., 1988, Selections from the Debate on Taiwanese Consciousness (台灣意識論戰選集), Taibei: Qianwei Chubanshe, 31- 37. Chen Kuan-hsing’s leftist critique of Taiwanese nationalist thought is also relevant here: “The slighting of racial, class, gender, and other marginal perspectives with a fixation on ethnicity, is the Taiwanese nationalists’ most tragic blind spot.” Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, p. 53.

July 8, 2022July 8, 2022

Dirty Work: Chuang on China, Communism, and Social Contagion

This is an excerpt of an interview with members of Chuang conducted as a collaboration among Cinder Bloc, History Against Misery, and The Antifada podcasts. The full interview is available here.

Question: A lot of people in the US think that China’s state control and authoritarianism gave them an advantage in controlling the virus in relation to other “democracies.” How accurate are these accounts?

Chuang: Our book addresses this in detail, so we won’t spend too much time on it here. But, basically, this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s wrong in two key respects. First: it’s hard to see how the emergence of a global pandemic, that could have been limited to a local epidemic if only authorities had taken seriously the reports from healthcare workers on the ground, can be portrayed as having been “successfully” controlled. It was the on-the-ground failure of the political system and the higher-level public health apparatus in China in the early months of the epidemic that transformed the outbreak into a global pandemic. This was then followed by a similar and even more spectacular failure in the US.

Second: the local containment of the pandemic in China in the months that followed had as much or more to do with the vast volunteer mobilization of the Chinese population as it did with the official response on the part of the central state. Moreover, this mobilization occurred not because people had faith in the government’s response and sought to support it but precisely because people didn’t trust the government to effectively organize the lockdown. They were often responding to abject failures, such as the fact that healthcare workers who were dependent on public transport had no way to get to work in the middle of the lockdown—so volunteer driver services emerged, and many of these heroic volunteers actually contracted the virus and died.

Overall, this is just another iteration of how people used to say that “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time,” as if more authoritarian regimes are, despite their failings, ultimately more efficient. But it’s a complete myth: Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time. Whatever advantages an authoritarian political regime has in accelerating capital accumulation—usually only in the short-term—don’t actually make it better or more efficient at the sort of administration that helps everyday people. Obviously, China isn’t a fascist regime and most of the portrayals of it as “totalitarian” are nothing but socially acceptable forms of orientalism. But the political system certainly has that authoritarian rigidity that most late-developers have adopted to compete with the leading factions of capitalists in the most powerful countries.

And, if anything, this rigidity actually hurt the Chinese response—as when local officials engaged in widespread media suppression early on in the epidemic and were backed up by the central state, all at precisely the time that widespread media attention would have been most helpful. Again, the book covers all of this in quite a bit more detail. We base the argument on the experience of our members who were in China at the time and on interviews with friends across the country, including in Wuhan.

Q: So, ultimately, what does your analysis tell us about the relationship between mutual aid and the state in times of social and ecological crisis?

C: This is something that’s a bit hard to address, simply because the meaning of the term “mutual aid” has been changing so rapidly. Today, it seems that the word has lost some of the radical edge it had in the older anarchist usage, where it both emphasized a general political philosophy rooted in the natural sciences (as in Kropotkin’s formulation, which was very popular in China in the early 20th century) and referred to autonomous co-organizing among proletarians as a tactic in long-run political struggles, which was especially important in moments of deep crisis or among the segments of the

class at the bottom of the racial hierarchy who are exposed to the worst brutalities of the system and suffer long-term unemployment. This latter sense was particularly salient for thinkers like Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, who categorized mutual aid as one of many tactics in the anarchist “survival program” that could be applied to poor areas across the US—and this is still a meaning that some mutual aid programs invoke today.

On average, however, it seems like mutual aid has been reverting to something like the even older usage it once had among utopian socialists and religious associations in the 19th century, where it effectively just designated a vaguely political form of charity, in which better-off progressives would organize through church groups to support those in need. In the west, this change in meaning can be attributed, at least in part, to the rising prominence of NGO-style organizations that clothe themselves in radical language and consider “civil society” to be a major site of political struggle. These organizations are often even staffed by former anarchists or other fellow-travelers of the defunct anti-globalization left and they represent the unfortunate conclusion of that era for most participants—even while some emerged from that movement on a more radical trajectory. Many of the new “mutual aid” societies set up in the course of the pandemic in the West are essentially a repeat of this experiment at a larger scale, even if they’ve been more wary of reliance on federal grants and philanthropic donations from the wealthy and are outwardly critical of the “non-profit industrial complex.” Frequently, this tension develops into a political struggle within these organizations over the meaning and function of mutual aid.

In the larger sense, this is all obviously an artifact of receding state capacity in Europe and the US. In China, the situation is very different. On the one hand, state capacity is increasing rapidly and there is an active state-building project underway. On the other, the term “mutual aid” lost its anarchistic connotations over a hundred years ago—in fact, it arguably never had the exact same connotation, since Kropotkin was being read within the context of Chinese political philosophy, where local self-organization and a seemingly anarchistic reliance on informal convention rather than the rule of law were both components of good imperial governance and were not understood as standing in opposition to the state. The socialist developmental regime used similar language, via things like “mutual aid teams” in the countryside. So instead of a “radical” mutual aid geared toward survival, we see a domesticated form of mutual aid that’s part and parcel of the ongoing state-building project.

That said, we have little sympathy for the critiques of mutual aid that we heard in parts of the left during the past few years from various people who have underestimated the scale, potential and, most importantly, necessity of autonomous action in the face of catastrophic circumstances. This is especially true when these critiques then morph into calls for a more vigorous state response, contrasted with what they call “neoliberal” autonomous organizing.

But the same holds for those who are simply bemoaning the reality that mutual aid organizing has little radical edge and advocate instead for some sort of truly autonomous “international working class movement” that obviously doesn’t exist. This sort of critique ignores our basic political reality. Ultimately, all sorts of “mutual aid” are going to happen anyway. The longed-for state response will not materialize, there is no international communist movement that offers any better alternative, and people will go on helping each other all the same. Mutual aid should be seen as part of the terrain on which organizing takes place and communists should participate in those projects, amplifying their antagonistic edge where possible.

At the same time, we do not naively believe that the kinds of disaster communism that sprout up around major crises are in and of themselves a tool for permanently overcoming the current state of things. Mutual aid is not a premonition of communism. It’s a meager survival strategy.

There are symmetrical errors here: those who critique mutual aid as nothing more than “neoliberal” charity, and those who praise mutual aid and “autonomy” as if they are the new world in the shell of the old. Both these positions are utterly wrong. Their critiques also tend to talk past each other. The term mutual aid is so broad that it’s easy for each party to cherry-pick an example that makes their case. In contrast, we emphasize that mutual aid is simply a tactical factor in the political struggles that already exist. The current political trajectory seems to suggest that this particular tactic, in all its variations, will persist for some time—even though it will evolve in different directions in different places. There’s not really any choice about whether or not you have to engage with it. But it certainly shouldn’t be idealized and the goal for communists is ultimately to overcome mutual aid, building more expansive forms of political power and preparing for fully social, rather than merely local, reproduction and collective flourishing.

In entering this already-existing terrain, the first step for communists should be to critically distinguish between many different concrete activities that have taken on the name “mutual aid” in particular places. In China, as elsewhere, elements of the local and central state react to breakdowns in their ability to keep up with developing events in a variety of ways, with violent repression playing a role alongside softer elements of counterinsurgency and cooptation. What we want to emphasize is that the relationship between the repressive tools of the state and the mobilization of various volunteer efforts in the early period of the COVID pandemic in China was neither a totalitarian aberration, totally separate from the responses of “western” states, nor a direct mirror of all capitalist disaster response worldwide. In the Chinese context, where state capacity is increasing, what we see as “mutual aid” is just as often the rationalization of local mechanisms of governance. This is particularly true in conditions where the capitalist class leading the state-building effort is explicitly drawing from the Chinese philosophical tradition, which places a special importance on seemingly “informal” mechanisms of statecraft.

Q: And what about globally?

C: In repeated climate disasters worldwide, from hurricane Katrina in the US to responses to the Covid pandemic worldwide, we’ve seen preexisting or spontaneously organized mutual aid networks function to meet pressing needs that local or national states are unable to. Often, as was the case with mutual aid efforts during the early pandemic period in China, these networks are most effective precisely in the places where the people active in them do not trust the state to provide for their needs. At the same time, autonomous organization for mutual aid can threaten either the public legitimacy of the state or the role it plays in maintaining property relations, as people make do for themselves and others around them. But this only really happens if mutual aid is accompanied by a sort of antagonistic autonomy. If this is the case, then these efforts might be met with real or threatened repression. At the same time, such projects are rarely antagonistic to the state—at least in the present moment—and this makes them fairly easy to co-opt. While mutual aid networks in the early pandemic period in China were not violently suppressed, they were eventually asked to hand over their roles to the state and they almost universally did so.

This is somewhat similar to events in the wake of disasters elsewhere: Where crises have not completely collapsed the feasibility of the status quo, it has been difficult for mutual aid projects to transform into long-term outposts for political struggle. In Wuhan and other Chinese cities where volunteer organizations were a key part of the early response to the coronavirus outbreak, these groups essentially dissolved after the first few months of crisis. At the same time, we saw the retooling of local groups such as residents’ committees for more effective management. In this way, the opening created by mutual aid groups was more or less effectively co-opted, and current propaganda efforts emphasize the role the party-state has played in ridding the country of coronavirus.

June 26, 2022June 27, 2022

Matthew Galway, Dictatorial Devarāja: Charisma and Autocracy in Cambodian Political Culture and the Rise of Hun Sen

On 16 November 2017, Cambodia suffered a “terminal blow to democracy,” when the nation’s Supreme Court officially dissolved the Cambodian National Rescue Party (គណបក្សសង្គ្រោះជាតិ/CNRP), the principal political rival of Hun Sen (ហ៊ុន សែន, 1952-) and his ruling Cambodian People’s Party (គណបក្សប្រជាជនកម្ពុជា/CPP).¹ Advocates for the CNRP’s dissolution accused the party led by Kem Sokha (កឹម សុខា, 1953-) and Sam Rainsy (សម រង្ស៊ី, 1949-) of plotting to overthrow Hun Sen. The dissolution dictated a five-year ban on over one hundred CNRP members, and the subsequent CPP electoral sweep in a 2018 non-competitive election further cemented Hun Sen’s autocracy. The 1991 promise of free elections in a democratic country long dead, Hun Sen has maintained a hold on political power despite his questionable past. His patronage networks are stronger than ever, and his cult of personality is visible in the thousands of schools (largely funded by his elite loyalists) that bear his name. He is omnipresent in Khmer media and often delivers long, bellicose speeches in which he attacks his political rivals. Hun Sen’s political longevity is due in no small part to his alternate appeasing of national elites, who wish to benefit as much as possible from a rapidly changing Cambodia, and of common folk, who regard him as one of their own.²

A one-time Communist Party of Kampuchea (បក្សកុម្មុយនីស្តកម្ពុជា/CPK; “Khmer Rouge”) Battalion Commander, Hun Sen steadily rose to power by consolidating the CPP around him. In the years since his consolidation of political leadership in 1985, the CPP and its forerunner organization, the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party (គណបក្សប្រ ជាជនបដិវត្តន៍កម្ពុជា, KPRP), have maintained a firm grip on Cambodian politics, either alone or via imbalanced coalitions. They have overseen Cambodia’s transition from a Maoist Party-state (1975-1979) to a Hanoi-backed state (1979-1989) to the “liberal democratic” Kingdom of Cambodia (1993-present). Through it all Hun Sen, has transformed a fledgling democracy into what Stephen Heder describes as a “substantively empty shell” that, through political patronage to friendly elites, systemic yet functional corruption, and oft-violent autocratic subjugation of dissent, has transformed Cambodia into Hun’s own personal fiefdom while establishing his family as a political dynasty.³

How did Hun Sen accomplish this autocratic coup de grace to democracy and how does he now maintain power and support? One explanation is undoubtedly that Hun Sen and his CPP promote their government as the masterful engineers of Cambodia’s rapid socioeconomic reconfiguration structured around amassing wealth in a few elite-centric sectors, while pretending that intensifying poverty in all other sectors is simply the cost of doing business. In post-independence Cambodian political culture, the ways in which Hun Sen marshals personal charisma in addition to his performative and effective combination of the so-called three “claims of qualification to rule” play well. These claims are: possessing royal lineage and/or authority; holding technical expertise acquired through education; and having past experience as a participant in armed struggle.⁴ A fourth “claim,” that runs across all post-independence Cambodian heads of state, is charismatic prestige (from the Buddhist term Pāramitā, which describes enlightened beings).

Autocracy in Cambodian Political Culture

Hun Sen’s autocracy is not unprecedented in Cambodian political history. In fact, it has drawn on semiotics, allusions, narratives, and lessons from rulers past and present to appeal to tradition-minded agricultural workers, profit-driven urbanites, and those staunchest of Cambodian nationalists who regard his strong and consistent leadership as the personal embodiment of Cambodian prosperity.

In the modern era, arguably the most important of the characteristics of a powerful ruler was the quality of charisma as a signal of one’s merits. In recent Cambodian history, no national ruler was more charismatic than Norodom Sihanouk (នរោត្តម សីហនុ, 1922-2012), the “King Father.” As head of state after 1953, Sihanouk enjoyed widespread popularity at home and abroad for ushering in Cambodian independence from France. Sihanouk received a classical French education at several prestigious colonial schools in Phnom Penh and Saigon. His articulateness, worldliness (as a frequent traveler, most famously to Maoist China in the 1950s and 1960s), anti-imperialism cum neutralism, and reputation for securing Cambodian independence in 1953 fulfilled all the claims of qualification to rule. His frequent appeals to Buddhism, most famously his advocacy for “Buddhist socialism,” positioned him as a righteous “one who has merits” and who governed in accordance with Buddhist teachings and, thus, could ensure Cambodia’s national security.His removal from power by Lon Nol on 18 March 1970 in a bloodless coup while Sihanouk was in China, “was envisioned,” as Ian Harris notes, “in cosmological terms,” as conservative Buddhists understood Sihanouk’s fall from power.⁵ The Lon Nol interregnum (Khmer Republic) and the CPK governed Cambodia from 1970 to 1975 and 1975 to 1979, respectively, with the same four claims of qualifications to rule as those used by Sihanouk and later, by Hun Sen.

For his part, by 1969 or 1970, Hun Sen was a card-carrying CPK member and Battalion Commander in Democratic Kampuchea’s Eastern Zone. As I explore in my book, The Emergence of Global Maoism, this was when the Party leadership and propagandists branded themselves as the “Organization,” the guarantor for future happiness.

The Rise of an Autocrat: From CPK Apparatchik to CPP Leader

Hun Sen was born Hun Bunnal in Peam Kaoh Sna commune, Kampong Cham Province, in southeastern Cambodia in 1952, shortly before Cambodia won its independence. He was born to a reasonably wealthy Sino-Khmer rice- and tobacco-farming family with lineage that traced back to Chaozhou, Guangdong Province, via his grandfather. At 13, Hun Bunnal studied as a monk in Phnom Penh at a Buddhist pagoda and enrolled in classes at Indradevi High School (វិទ្យាល័យឥន្ទ្រទេវី). In 1969, he left school and, after the Lon Nol coup, he joined the CPK movement to capture Phnom Penh.

A shroud of mystery surrounds Hun Sen’s CPK years. He changed his name to Hun Sen in 1970 and claims that he joined the movement upon hearing the now-deposed Sihanouk’s broadcast from Beijing for Cambodians to take up arms. By his own account, although he was a loyal CPK soldier by the time of the capture of Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975—he sustained several injuries, including to his eye, in the line of fire—he claims to have ignored CPK orders thereafter.⁶Whatever the case, in the CPK, Hun steadily rose from rank-and-file soldier to officer in the Special Forces regiment of Region 21, and then to Battalion Commander in Democratic Kampuchea’s Eastern Zone. Hun Sen formally quit the CPK in 1977 and, fearing that CPK purges of the Eastern Zone would target his Battalion, fled to neighboring Vietnam, where he assisted the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) in its plans to remove the CPK.

Hun Sen gradually gained the trust of his Vietnamese collaborators. He adopted a Vietnamese name (Hai Phúc) in “a gesture of solidarity” and provided crucial intelligence on CPK soldiers and military operations across the Kampuchea-Vietnam border. Hun’s Vietnamese handlers entrusted him with gathering fellow ex-CPK exiles and escapees to form a tactical fighting unit in 1978 that engaged with CPK forces during the Vietnamese counterattack, which toppled the Cambodian Communists in 1979. Then, Hun Sen stepped onto a new battlefield—politics.⁷

Because of his dubious past, any turn to politics required that Hun Sen re-invent himself, not as a Red Khmer, but as someone who was not a true believer in the Communist cause. Hun gradually repackaged himself as someone who played a vital role in the CPK’s removal from power and as the leader who, through personal example, would usher in a new era for Cambodia.

Autocrat Rising: Hun Sen as Prime Minister

Hun Sen proposed himself as one with technical expertise, and, in the context of Cambodia’s dismal economic situation after the CPK-era, this technocratic demeanor was of major importance to his political ascendance. In his capacity as PRK Prime Minister, from 1985 until 1989, and State of Cambodia Prime Minister, from 1989 to 1993, he consolidated political support from elite and rural sectors by encouraging Cambodia’s economic transformation. His aim was to end the era of “two markets and three prices” (state and free markets, prices for provisions, livelihood, and of the free market) and collective agricultural production to usher in a new era of “one market, one price,” with a system of individual property rights. Not all of his government’s designs panned out. The rural credit program was an abject disaster by 1988, as many rural families simply could not afford to repay their debts. More recently, Hun’s steadfast, almost blind commitment to transform Cambodia into a regional economic leader coincided with his unwillingness to curtail federal corruption and invest in the countryside rather than double-down on financial pledges to the Cambodian military.⁸Twenty years of “Hunsenomics” has not resolved the century-old problem of land ownership, and the CPP’s land program has left large swaths of rural Cambodia destitute, while a wealthy minority of Cambodians (around ten percent of the population) owns nearly sixty-six percent of the land.⁹

Hun Sen has withstood these storms unscathed through his deft deployment of political patronage and elite-centric politics. His combination of functional political corruption, grandiose promises, and at times outright xenophobia, are all features of his political arsenal to this day. Corruption and repression of his enemies notwithstanding, many Cambodians welcome the stability and security that Hun Sen’s CPP brought after the murderous turmoil of the PRK and CPK years. Hun Sen’s commitment to drawing in foreign investment in Cambodia also stimulated the emergence of a nouveau riche class of elites and made those few urbanite Cambodians who were already wealthy even more prosperous. This is a core of his support.

Not a Kingmaker, but a Maker-King: Hun Sen Re-Invents Hun Sen as Devarāja, 2016-Present

Hun Sen has enjoyed sweeping popularity, even despite the 1997 split between him and the royalists. In fact, in the 2008 elections, the CPP won convincingly for a third consecutive time in spite of credible allegations of corruption. How has Hun Sen held on to power despite widening inequality in the rural sector and with no royal connections? The answer lies in how he recasts his own narrative within the longer trajectory of charismatic rulership and political authority in Khmer history. There are two facets of Hun’s self-legitimation effort to establish and secure his own foundational dynasty. The first is his strategic invocation of an important legendary figure, Sdech Kan/Preah Srei Chettha II (ស្ដេចកន/ព្រះស្រីជេដ្ឋាទី២), a commoner who, in the early sixteenth century, usurped King Srey Sokonthor Bât, and thence came to embody the kingmaking myth of the nation. The second is Hun’s strategic use of royal symbolism to link himself to great rulers of the past and to connect his person to kingship even in the absence of royal lineage.¹⁰

Hun Sen has grafted his own life experiences and image onto the Sdech Kan narrative to redraw the lines between royal authority and his own. Sdech Kan was a charismatic man who rose to power through personal aptitude and just struggle against an unjust monarch. As Hun Sen describes in his version of the Sdech Kan story: “Sdech Kân or Preah Srey Chettha did wonderful work in what should be termed a democratic revolution, because he liberated all outcasts under his area of control. Because of this, he became the strongest commander and King in his own right.”¹¹

Hun Sen, in his own mind, is a modern Sdech Kan, by virtue of his struggle against an unjust government, the CPK, and his expertise that has led Cambodia’s economic sector to grow, even if very unevenly. The narrative, importantly, also helps Hun Sen to shroud the all-important royal lineage “claim of qualification to rule” by inserting himself as the technocrat, the expert ruler, and the only man who could usher in an era of prosperity for Cambodia.

In addition, Hun Sen deploys “regal legitimations” to justify, at least rhetorically, his autocratic political turn and claim to authority, all while establishing his family as a political dynasty. His “regal references” elevate his person to the level of a Khmer king, a charismatic, august, and legitimate ruler whose autocratic turn is entirely justifiable to maintain peace and prosperity. Hun draws upon royal semiotics to cast himself as the people’s revolutionary: a politically and historically necessary person for Cambodia’s current moment.

A perfect example of this effort was on view during Hun Sen’s 2-3 December 2017 peace ceremony at Angkor Wat, which took place a mere two weeks after the CNRP had been dissolved. No members of the Cambodian royal family were present at the ceremony. The choice of location at Angkor Wat meant that this ceremony represented Hun Sen’s most brazen claim to the political lineage of ancient kingship. He also used this peace ceremony to wrest the title of “father of peace and reconciliation” away from Sihanouk. He thus drew upon “regal legitimations” to render his person inseparable from a heroic lineage of Khmer rulers and Cambodian peace and stability. His autocratic turn thus became justifiable in the name of royal continuity.

Regardless of whether the majority of Cambodians buy into his peddled narrative and historical revisionism, Hun’s ultimate plan to establish his own family dynasty to govern Cambodia appears to be working. His eldest son, apparently poised as successor-in-waiting, Hun Manet, is a ranking lieutenant-general in the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces and heads his father’s bodyguard corps. His daughter, Hun Mana, is director of Bayon Radio, a huge outlet for favorable CPP media, and has ties to more than twenty companies, including as chairperson for Star Airline and Helistar. And his nephew, Hun To, is linked to LHR Asean Import Export, even if he was for a time implicated in a massive drug smuggling operation. Through these ties, Hun Sen is sowing the seeds of a political empire.

Concluding Remarks

As a historian of twentieth century Cambodian history, it is remarkable to observe what Hun Sen’s autocracy has accomplished. Absent a royal link, Hun is quite happy to invent one, whether through uneven coalitions, charismatic appeals and oration, or historical revisionism. Despite his spotty economic record, his party has been able to “sell” one of the poorest countries in Asia a tale of prosperity and promise. A former CPK military man, Hun Sen has all but buried his past as a full believer in the Communist cause and possible active participant in the Cambodian genocide, to reinvent himself as a modern leader with mystical qualities. For all these reasons, the future looks bleak for a restoration of democracy in Cambodia.

Author’s bio: Matthew Galway is a Lecturer of Chinese History at the Australian National University and author of The Emergence of Global Maoism: China’s Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement (Cornell University Press, 2022). His research focuses on the globalization of Maoism, intellectual history, and radical overseas Chinese networks in Southeast Asia and Latin America. His second book, Experiments with Marxism-Leninism in Cold War Southeast Asia, is forthcoming with ANU Press. He is a contributor to Made in China Journal (2021-2022), Afterlives of Chinese Communism (ANU Press, 2019) and Translating the Japanese Occupation of China (UBC Press, 2020), and has published his research in The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Cross Currents, China Information, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Asian Ethnicity, and Left History.

Notes

¹ Jonathan Head, “A Terminal Blow to Democracy,” BBC News (16 November 2019) [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42006828]. Accessed 18 May 2022.

² Matthew Galway, “Cambodia: Hun Sen’s Unrelenting Grip on Power,” Ear to Asia Podcast, Asia Institute, University of Melbourne (12 April 2019) [https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/asia-institute/ear-to-asia/episodes/episode-43].

³ Steve Heder, “Hun Sen’s Consolidation: Death or the Beginning of Reform?,” Southeast Asian Affairs (2005): 114.

⁴ Steve Heder, “Cambodia’s Democratic Transition to Neoauthoritarianism,” Current History 94 (December 1995): 425-429; and Astrid Norén-Nilsson, Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2016), 14.

⁵ Ian Harris, Buddhism in a Dark Age: Cambodian Monks under Pol Pot. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), 1.

⁶ Strangio, Hun Sen’s Cambodia, 23.

⁷ Strangio, Hun Sen’s Cambodia, 24.

⁸ David P. Chandler, A History of Cambodia. 4^th Edition. (Boudler, CO: Westview Press, 2008), 293.

⁹ Strangio, Cambodia, 183-184. See also See Matthew Galway, The Emergence of Global Maoism: China’s Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949-1979. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), 109-136.

¹⁰ Astrid Norén-Nilsson, “A Regal Authoritarian Turn in Cambodia,” Journal of Contemporary Asia (December 2021): 1, 18-19.

¹¹ Hun Sen, “Visit of Samdech Hun Sen and Bun Rany to the Former Royal City of Sanlob Prey Nokor in Kompong Cham,” Cambodia New Vision 97 (28 February 2006), 2, as quoted in Norén-Nilsson, Cambodia’s Second Kingdom, 48.

June 2, 2022June 8, 2022

Sarah Raymundo, Marcos Jr. Presidency: A Long View

For three decades, contemporary public discourse on the Philippines has been marked by reference to a period called the “post-Marcos era.” Weeks after a high-stakes national election, that widely-accepted historical marker is suddenly obsolete.

What makes its obsolescence possible is the rehabilitation of the Marcos political dynasty to the highest position of power with Ferdinand Marcos Jr. being proclaimed as the seventeenth president of the Republic on May 25, 2022 in the fastest vote count in Philippine electoral history.

Marcos Jr. won the presidency by a landslide 31,629,783 votes–over 16 million votes ahead of second-place opposition candidate, incumbent Vice President Leni Robredo. Independent poll watchers Kontra Daya (Against Fraud) and the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) International Observer Mission (IOM), however, report, with evidence, that the 2022 polls were “marred by fraud and irregularities,” from vote buying to red tagging; from machine malfunctions to massive disinformation.¹

For many progressives including BAYAN (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan/New Patriotic Alliance), the face of the Left in the Philippine legal mass movement, a Marcos win in the 2022 elections means a continuation of a failed Duterte leadership. As a semi-colony of United States imperialism and host to the plunderous and expansionist ventures of China, the Duterte ruling clique has plunged the nation into a crisis worse than its previous experience of economic decline, unbridled corruption, widespread hunger, severe unemployment, and wholesale surrender of sovereignty.

To portray the Marcos Jr. win as a “Marcos revival” is only part of a larger picture. It does not capture the permanent crisis brought about by the legacies of colonialism in its past and present forms. To see through the farce, a historical understanding of the tragedy that was the original Marcos dictatorship and a political-economic approach to the nature of oligarchic politics in its consolidated and fractured forms at different historical junctures is in order.

The fortunes of the local Philippine oligarchy and the protracted struggle against it cannot be divorced from US global imperialism in general and US militarism in particular. As evidenced by the Pacific war theatre mounted by the inter-imperialist war between Japan and the US during WWII and the current rivalry between the US and China, the Philippine oligarchy plays a crucial role in the reproduction of a Philippine economy that absorbs the crisis of unequal exchange or the drain of value from the periphery to the imperialist core.

The role of the local oligarchy in the periphery is to ensure that the political and economic structure of the transfer of wealth from the periphery to the imperialist center is stable and secure. Thus, the local oligarchy as broker of unequal exchange is obliged to embrace the modalities of US global militarism—from armament sales to military control of populations. The current iteration of this relationship is the implementation of counterinsurgency—a central governing scheme among the local ruling oligarchy.

Colonialism and the making of the local oligarchy

The Marcos-Duterte tandem represents the most recent consolidation of political dynasties comprising a powerful faction of the Philippine oligarchy. The victory of the deposed dictator’s son is largely characterized by news reports and analyses as an “overwhelming landslide win.” An exclusively quantitative and narrow definition of fraud mutes the role that elections play in a sovereign nation that is still haunted by a perennial agrarian-national question. An inquiry into political leadership can only take these crucial questions into account.

In his study of The Modern Principalia,” political scientist Dante Simbulan traces the evolution of the Philippine ruling oligarchy from Spanish colonial rule to US imperialism.² Simbulan’s analysis locates behavioral patterns and attitudes of elites and masses within the context of a semi-colonial and semi-feudal agrarian economic organization—a manifestation of the enduring influences of feudal structures under colonialism.

The consolidation of Spanish political control was based on a colonial imposition of the encomienda system. This system allowed loyal and deserving encomenderos to own vast tracts of land and collect tribute from the indios or natives who lived within the area. Their methods of extraction and punishment were brutal with the goal of crushing any manifestation of native resistance. The official doctrine of counterinsurgency is as old as colonialism, which has no other objective other than the total subjugation of Filipinos under foreign rule.

The brutal conquest of the barangays³ on a national scale meant the recruitment of the ruling datus (chieftains) to constitute the principalia. This elite class comprised a cacique bureaucracy under Spanish rule. This privileged group became loyal agents of the Spanish colonial administration and were tasked with collecting tributes from their respective barangays. Unlike in the old dispensation, the cabeza (head) de barangay is now expected to surrender the tributes to the encomenderos. The latter imposed quotas on tributes, which drove the cabezas to collect more than they should in anticipation of shortages. ⁴

The current infrastructure of state repression and bureaucratic corruption is traceable to and founded on these colonial conditions.

A rupture from Spanish colonialism took root in the Propaganda Movement (late nineteenth century) led by the “alienated intellectual members of the principalia”⁵ who had studied in Europe. Stirred by liberal currents abroad, these young elite propagandists came back to the country demanding reforms from their Spanish colonizers. But what they got was a revolution from fellow Filipinos led by the Katipunan whose working-class leaders like Andres Bonifacio were deeply inspired by the Propaganda movement.

As the first national revolution in the Asian region to defeat a western colonizing power, the 1896 Katipunan Revolution inspired the development of revolutionary anti-colonial consciousness throughout Asia.

Tracing US Counterinsurgency

Anglo-American interests already dominated local trade and agriculture in the early 1800s. By 1898, as the Spanish colonial regime began to crumble and with the ascendancy of US imperialism in the Pacific, the anti-colonial and anti-feudal revolution gained more traction even among the caciques. They became latecomers in what was a process of national consolidation. The same elites quickly changed their political standpoint once the US showed capability to crush the Philippine Republic. From the Spanish-American war to the ghastly atrocities of the American colonial war on the Filipino people, a rich history of imperialist aggression and revolutionary resistance ensued.⁶

The Filipino principalia that developed during Spanish colonialism easily adapted to US imperialist interests. With its professional, military and bureaucratic services fully aligned with American colonial administration and its vision for a US-dominated post-colonial era, the principalia was modernized through education and training. ⁷

But what truly separates American rule from its Spanish predecessor is its process of state formation through military entrenchment. From the Commonwealth to the Republic of the Philippines, state formation was administered by military figures like Douglas MacArthur and William Taft. American colonial rule placed counterinsurgency at the heart of Philippine bureaucratic governance with land-owning caciques reaping the rewards of colonial collaboration, including a whole formal and informal army protecting their feudal estates and political power. This was matched by the formation of peasant unions that clinched an alliance among organized workers and anti-imperialist intellectuals.

The sharpened conditions of class war eventually led to the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines under Crisanto Evangelista and the Huks or the guerrillas that fought the anti-Japanese resistance in the 1940s. The Huks developed into a revolutionary anti-imperialist army that ignited revolutionary nationalism until it was crushed by US Counterinsurgency.

In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), through Air Force Colonel Edward Landsdale, partnered with Filipino CIA asset Ramon Magsaysay to crush the Huks in the name of “democracy.” Magsaysay’s rise to presidency and his title as “father of democracy” fits America’s infrastructure of war that relied on a partnership between US counterinsurgency and oligarchic bureaucrats. The brutal liquidation of the Huks through covert operations would not have been completed without the reinforcements contributed by General MacArthur, who mobilized the Filipino oligarchs who had collaborated with the Japanese to now work for the new American dispensation.⁸

The Philippines position as the most crucial anchor for US hegemony in Southeast Asia was first tested and proven by the success of the Landsdale-Magsaysay covert operations.

Contending forces

Historians have come to speak of “the long 1960s,” as the decades following WWII witnessed a radicalization that was founded on the strong global wave of Marxist-inspired national liberation struggles, which reached an apex in the 1970s. These years were marked by massive political actions—both radical and reactionary—in various parts of the world. In the Philippines, the re-establishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in 1968, followed by the founding of the New People’s Army (NPA) in 1969 in Central Luzon, and the Bangsa Moro Army-led Muslim separatist movement in Mindanao became threats to US interests and a section of the local oligarchy represented by Ferdinand Marcos, whose presidency lasted from 1965-1986.

A competing faction of the ruling elite represented by Benigno Aquino became the face of mainstream opposition that complemented the revolutionary anti-imperialist and separatist movements. On parallel grounds, these forces assailed imperialist interests and challenged the conduct of oligarchic governance in the country.

This history shows that the twenty-year Marcos rule was neither an exception nor a self-contained phenomenon. It was a logical outcome of the US Counterinsurgency State’s organizing and subsidizing a faction of the oligarchy to contain counter-hegemonic forces in the post-war period touted as Pax Americana. American peace meant the constant sabotage of any program for national liberation and self-determination from the Katipunan, the Huks, the NPAs, and the Bangsa Moro struggle through various regimes from Aguinaldo (1899) to Duterte (2022).

The evolution of the Philippine oligarchy is intertwined with the history of the continuing US military control of the Philippines. Military control in this sense is not only a set of military agreements that allowed for US bases to be located on Philippine soil, and that now allows for US arms supply to the Philippine army and US troops to train with Filipino soldiers on Philippine soil. The project of US global hegemony that reached Philippine shores in the late 19th century is intertwined with the history of capitalist accumulation from its free market to monopoly phase.⁹

US-led global militarism is both a partner and outcome of the capitalist system’s reliance on the military sector for the regulation of its own crisis-ridden business cycles. To accumulate profits amidst systemic economic crisis, US imperialism promotes counterinsurgency as a permanent state policy. This entails the continued recruitment of Filipino bureaucrats from oligarchic families who will ensure the stability of unequal exchange and US global militarism through the implementation of counterinsurgency.

The Marcos ouster in 1986 is a product of internal contradictions that led to the weakening of a US-backed Marcos oligarchy by the broad united front that pushed for democratization against dictatorship. This broad democratic force flowed from the national democratic movement’s organizing of the peasant-worker alliance and sectoral formations of patriotic and democratic citizens. Aimed at genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization, the national liberation struggle in the Philippines sought to fight and defeat the Marcos dictatorship because full democratization of Philippine society is the basis and condition for solving the persistent agrarian-national question.

From the perspective of taming global conflict, the US hand in the ouster of Marcos was well within the mechanics of American capitalist business cycle and global militarism. At this juncture, rivalry between the US and the former Soviet Union, defined by the threats of all-out militarism and mutual nuclear destruction had receded as the respective economies were being, for the moment, “civilianized.”¹⁰ The world was in the early phase of neoliberal globalization during which the production of information technology instead of global war was posed as a primary driver of the capitalist business cycle. The optimism about independent democratization of former colonies and the ascendancy of civil society and NGO politics temporarily prevailed, all of which sat well with the buzzwords of the post-Marcos era, “civil society, democratization, voluntarism.” However, the US war on the former Yugoslavia, the permanent US-Israel war on Palestine, the series of all-out war policy and counterinsurgency inflicted on communist and Bangsamoro forces and the US “war on terror” after 9-11 rendered liberal optimism baseless.

Counterinsurgency and the Marcos-Duterte Victory

The Marcos-Duterte electoral victory speaks of the rottenness of a political system dominated by oligarchs and the ascendancy of US Counterinsurgency in Philippine politics. In such a setting where a small number of families, borne out of colonial and imperialist impositions on Philippine society, reproduce themselves through the flagrant use of guns, goons, gold, massive disinformation, all in the name of crushing all forms of opposition through counterinsurgency, no meaningful reforms can be achieved even with the recent party-list system that was enacted to give voice to the common people.

The systematic sabotage of oppositional politics includes a systematic repression by state agencies under the direction of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC). The NTF-ELCAC was formed in 2018 after Duterte scuttled the Royal Norwegian Government-assisted peace talks between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP).

Chaired by Duterte himself, the NTF-ELCAC is the mechanism by which the Executive Order 70 or the institutionalization of the Whole-of-Nation Approach (WNA) is implemented. The NTF-ELCAC for which a budget of 16 billion was allocated in 2021 and 28 billion in 2022 is an adoption of the US Whole-of-Nation Approach. In an article that troubleshoots the US WNA as applied in four case studies, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and Mindanao (a major island in the Philippines), it is stated that in the era of globalization, US foreign policy is dominated by “attempts to bring peace and stability in conflict-plagued areas.”¹¹

The NTF-ELCAC, implemented under the WNA principles, systematically targets and persecutes critics of the Duterte regime through red tagging and by labeling the New People’s Army a network of citizens purportedly supporting “communist terrorist groups.” This totalizing state-led political vilification has led the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, to critique practice of red-tagging” that is used to scale up state responses for “countering terrorism and conflicts” alongside “key national security laws and policy and their acute impact on civil society, including human rights organizations, lawyers, political and judicial actors, journalists, trade unionists, church groups and others.”¹²

The Marcos-Duterte tandem represents the worst brand of oligarchic politics and abuse of power. Their victory is a product of fraudulent elections resulting from a sustained disinformation drive to change the narrative about the Marcos dictatorship. This victory is a result of the Commission on Elections that is by no means independent and biased in favor of the Marcos-Duterte tandem. The non-transparent characteristic of the automated voting system makes it vulnerable to fraud. This victory is also enabled by the massive use of funds stolen by the Marcoses as well as the funds and resources from the incumbent Duterte regime. Support from other factions of big business and former governing elite factions like presidents Joseph Estrada (ousted in 2000) and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was abundantly showcased during the electoral campaign.

Prospects

The opposition that lost in this election had to face the formidable power of political dynasties converging as one oligarchic clique— Marcos-Estrada-Macapagal Arroyo-Duterte, all of whom followed the US Counterinsurgency playbook to maintain the hegemony of unequal exchange and global militarism as they amass wealth and power domestically. Marcos Jr. is the new agent in this long history of state subservience to imperialism. But Robredo’s 15 million votes is neither a small number nor does it emerge from a narrow vote origin. The Kakampink Movement for a Robredo presidency is a breakthrough in building a broad united front against tyranny.

The militant labor federation, Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU, May One Movement) made an unprecedented move of endorsing Robredo and Pangilinan and spearheading a broad alliance of workers under the banner of “Workers for Leni” (Robredo). The endorsement of the left-wing party-list coalition known as Makabayan for opposition presidential and vice-presidential candidates Leni Robredo and Kiko Pangilinan was met with enthusiastic engagement by activists across many social sectors. When massive crowds began to gather for the Robredo rallies across the country showing the organic support amassed by the leading opposition, Robredo and her team instantly became the target of Duterte’s red tagging. Denying malicious associations being made between himself and Robredo, NDFP Chief Political Consultant Prof. Jose Maria Sison in a post-election interview avers:

To their credit, the forces of the Robredo-Pangilinan tandem, the entire conservative opposition, the patriotic and democratic forces, the Christian and Muslim organizations and the broad masses of the people denounced the crimes of the Marcoses and Dutertes before and during the electoral campaign and gathered the largest electoral rallies that dwarfed those of the Marcos-Duterte tandem. The sheer size of the fake avalanche vote for this tandem is being used by the enemy to undermine the political strength and confidence of the masses.¹³

The mass organizations under the banner of BAYAN representing the militant national democratic left held a protest action on the presidential proclamation of Marcos Jr. on May 25, 2022, with “Marcos, Itakwil!” (Reject Marcos!) as the marching slogan. They were met with police violence, pushed and hit with police shields and pummeled with two water canon tanks. But they stood their ground and asserted the right to protest. The patriotic and democratic forces are determined to reject a Marcos presidency.

The broad united front against the Duterte-Marcos tandem that took shape in the Left’s melding with the Kakampink Movement is historic, broad, and unprecedented. But what is to be done now?

Asked about the practical application of creativity in political organizing, Sison responds:

“…the organized masses must be mobilized to engage the unorganized masses according to their common and specific interests. There must be a united front within every class and within every sector and there must be also a broad united front embracing all the oppressed and exploited classes and sectors and taking advantage of the contradictions among the reactionary classes in order to isolate and defeat the enemy at every given time.” ¹⁴

The Marcos revival in Philippine politics is a historic event. The passage of time and resonance of this event has made it so. During the dark years of the Marcos dictatorship, people lived and many died defending rights without the rights enshrined in the1987 Constitution to protect them. The prospect of living a better life under a Marcos Jr. presidency is dim. But the history of oligarchic politics and counterinsurgency in this country is a legacy of colonialism and a modality of imperialism that was fought and defeated albeit incompletely by past and present struggles for national liberation and social justice in different parts of the Global South. Now, more than ever, getting organized and a tighter grip on anti-imperialist and anti-fascist struggle is the strongest defense we need; and it is all we have after losing to the son of a dictator.

Endnotes

¹ https://kontradaya.org/fact-check-may-9-2022-polls-marred-by-fraud-irregularities/
https://ichrp.net/interim-report-of-the-philippine-election-2022-international-observers-mission/

² Dante Simbulan, The Modern Principalia: The Historical Evolution of the Philippine Oligarchy (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2005).

³ A barangay is a political structure based on kinship system. Organized around a family-government structure, the barangay was made up of thirty to 100 families (Simbulan, The Modern Principalia, 14-15).

⁴ Simbulan, The Modern Principalia, 17-19.

⁵ Simbulan, The Modern Principalia, 30.

⁶ See Cedric J. Robinson, “The American Press and the Repairing of the Philippines” in Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism and Cultures of Resistance, ed. H.L.T. Quan (London: Pluto Press 2019), 195-208.

⁷ Robinson, “The American Press and the Repairing of the Philippines,” 197.

⁸ Robinson, “The American Press and the Repairing of the Philippines,” 198.

⁹ A compelling theorization of globalized militarism in relation to value flows and profit accumulation through nuclear and military production and distribution is in Peter Custers, Questioning Globalized Militarism: Nuclear and Military Production and Critical Economic Theory. (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2007).

¹⁰ Custers, Questioning Global Militarism, 1-2.

¹¹ Brett Doyle, “Lessons on Collaborations from Recent Conflicts: The Whole-of-Nation and Whole-of-Government Approaches in Action in InterAgency Journal Vol. 10, No. 1, 2019 (Kansas: Arthur G.Simons Center for Interagency Cooperation) 105-122.

¹² In “Situation of Human Rights in the Philippines, Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights” https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Countries/PH/Philippines-HRC44-AEV.pdf

¹³ Interview between the author and Jose Maria Sison, May 22, 2022
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360826719

¹⁴ Interview between the author and Jose Marisa Sison, October1, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkJSqTfPtDk&t=14s

April 28, 2022April 30, 2022

Pun Ngai, China’s Infrastructural Capitalism: The Making of a Chinese Working Class

Published on May Day, to celebrate workers of the world

THE PRELUDE

Entering history, entering movement. This paper is a political project. It sketches a larger plan for writing about China’s infrastructural capitalism and the making of the Chinese working class. This project emerges from a revitalization of the leftist movement that occurred in the wake of the Jasic labor rights struggle (2018). The valiant efforts of the Jasic technology workers and their supporters to fight union-busting and the oppression of laborers helped inspire a rebirth of global Marxism that attempts to confront the failure of the first wave of socialist movements, global capitalism’s subsequent neo-liberal turn, and the current populist regression. This project is situated at that historical conjuncture and within the legacy of China’s modern revolutions. Since the 1920s, China’s working masses have expressed their firm belief in class struggle and fought for a Marxist vision of communism. As part of a global effort to prepare for the imminent wave of new emancipatory movements, we also locate our project in global anti- capitalist movements while we also attempt to overcome the parochial and nationalistic approach of actually existing Chinese Marxism.

We are a group of instructors and students. We argue that Chinese capitalism has already entered a new age of monopoly capital. It is not only supported by new developments in high technology but, more importantly, by increasingly authoritarian state power, which has been instrumental in constructing the infrastructural base – such as building projects, new economic zones, highways and high-speed railways, digital platforms and logistics, etc., both internally and externally – in order to reproduce expanded capitalism, resulting in fierce imperialist battles among global powers. We conceptualize this historical process as “infrastructural capitalism,” which vividly embodies the materiality of expanded capitalism and its inherent crises, ruptures and cleavages, within which new class struggles can take root.

A NEW EPOCH FOR A LEFTIST MOVEMENT?

Is a leftist radical movement against capitalism possible in contemporary China? At a time when the power of the state looks totalizing, and the success of any leftist movement appears more distant than ever, we anticipate that the potential for such a movement is always present within China’s growing capitalist crisis. The origin of this project, conceived as a weapon of criticism, emerges at a critical juncture in Chinese capitalism and resistance from the student-worker alliance that came to be widely known as the Jasic struggle (Pun 2021).

The unionising campaign by the workers and radicalised students, who openly identified with Marxism and Maoism, took a radical direction not seen in recent decades in confronting capital and the state. The sudden outburst that brought the student radicals onto the political stage in 2018 first elicited puzzlement. They demonstrated an entirely different face compared to China’s migrant labour movement, whose political and ideological orientation was shaped by a predominantly liberal or reformist outlook in civil society and academia. The migrant labour movement had received support from international agencies since the early 2000s, support that grounded the movement’s liberal approach and ultimately overshadowed the richness and complexity of indigenous political struggles in China, especially by suggesting that the struggles of the present were disconnected from the generations of radical struggles that had come before.

The significance of the current emergence of student-worker radicalism has been the subject of intense political debate within the labour movement and the progressive left in China and abroad. It is easy to treat their radicalism as an aberration from the otherwise liberal mainstay of the labour movement. However, this is to miss the lineage of such radicalism, which can be traced back to the first generation of Chinese communists in the early twentieth century. The Jasic alliance’s explicit positioning as Marxists in that lineage posited a threat to the actually existing official Marxism of the current Communist party, by exposing how the self-proclaimed socialist state no longer stands for the interests of the working class (Andreas 2008; Karl 2020).

It is this critical Marxist tradition that we seek to unearth. We rely on classical Marxist theories meant for grasping the revolutionary potential of the working masses. We do not fantasise a bright future, as we are facing a very stifled and tense political atmosphere due not simply to attacks from an increasingly authoritarian state, but also to the setbacks faced by the emergent radical labour activism. This left-wing labour activism, while inexperienced, has shown its determination to challenge Chinese and global capitalism and the new conflicts among the existing and emerging imperialist states.

CHINA’S INFRASTRUCTURAL CAPITALISM

We define the contemporary moment of Chinese capitalism as infrastructural capitalism. It is characterised by the transition from competitive capitalism to a stage of monopoly capital and emerging imperialist rivalry, as well as a state-led attempt to escape the crisis dynamics deepened by the Great Recession of 2008-2009. For many years now, the Chinese state has been dealing with declining growth rates and the proliferation of social conflicts, despite its rapid rebound in the pandemic period.

We posit that Chinese capitalism has entered a new age of monopoly capital. It is not only supported by new developments in high technology, but more importantly, by an increasing populist or authoritarian state power. State power has been instrumental in constructing infrastructures (Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Lin et al. 2017), especially building projects and new economic zones overseas covering regions in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and others in order to reproduce expanded capitalism, leading to fierce intra-imperialist battles. We strive to understand the features of this new Chinese capitalism as part of the deepening process of global capitalism.

With “infrastructural capitalism”, we conceptualise a form of capitalism built fundamentally on the production of physical and digital infrastructures, either spearheaded by or aided significantly by the Chinese state (Pun and Chen 2022). This concept encompasses both the concrete infrastructures of road, cities, high-speed rail, and logistics transportation – itself linked to extractive capital in China and overseas — and their intersections with digital infrastructures of e-commerce and the platform economy that increasingly take advantage of built as well as human infrastructures (Larkin 2013).

Often condemned as distorting state spending and antithetic to the functioning of a market economy, infrastructure is foundational to the deepening of China’s capitalist development. At stake in infrastructural capitalism is the material base underlying all other forms of capitalist materiality, namely extractive capitalism (Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, 2019), industrial capitalism (Braverman, 1998), and digital capitalism (Fuchs and Mosco, 2015). Metaphorically, infrastructural capitalism also provides symbolic power capable of exhibiting spectacular landscapes and prophesizing a nationalistic or imperialistic future of humanity. Increasingly, Chinese infrastructural capitalism takes on an international dimension. The One Belt One Road initiatives are a broad umbrella under which Chinese private and state capital export excessive productive capacity and build up infrastructures in other developing economies to secure resource extraction. In the process, those economies and their labour relations are reconfigured.

The recent process of intensifying infrastructural development also accentuated a series of social contradictions and class conflicts in China. First and foremost, infrastructural development is dependent on land dispossession. For much of the last three decades, land disputes over dispossession (and the corrupted processes associated with them) have been among the most widespread and violent cause and type of struggle in China. Second, infrastructural construction has consistently led to labour abuse through subcontracting and wage theft, sparking recurring construction worker protests. Third, a high level of government debt has accumulated in financing infrastructural development, including high-speed rail construction and others – this is a ticking bomb for the future Chinese economy. These contradictions have not been resolved and are likely to be amplified in the coming period as Chinese capitalism continues to rely on similar methods and mechanisms for infrastructural development.

This new Chinese and global configuration of infrastructural capitalism serves to produce the dispossession, extraction and exploitation of the working class and the peasantry in the service of capital valorisation and concentration in the age of monopoly capitalism. As monopoly capitalism is sustained through global infrastructural projects, the new modernity it creates is far from “all that is solid melts into air;” rather it is as solid as a rock and it will undergird the explosions from the working class in the future.

RECURRING CLASS CONFLICTS

We are not simply interested in conceptualising the form of Chinese capitalism from the standpoint of power from above. We are fundamentally concerned with understanding the infrastructural base of labour struggles under a new form of Chinese capitalism – the very base of capitalism in its deepening phase since the 2000s. The questions of working-class formation and re-formation, and of labour organising, cannot be answered in the abstract but have to be understood in the context of the rapid configuration of Chinese infrastructural capitalism.

Our project is not anchored with a contemporary or linear temporality. We link up not simply with the classic Marxist theories which work tenaciously to transgress the chains of capitalism, but also with the history of the Chinese Revolution, in which blood and tears were shed to break the chains that were fettering the working class and the peasantry. As the current resistance against infrastructural capitalism is embedded firmly in the legacy of China’s Revolution, any understanding of the Chinese working class needs also to be rooted in China’s revolutionary past. That past provides not only the possibility and the opportunity to imagine transgressing the capitalist mode of life, but it also offers historical examples in which the working masses fought against capitalism and imperialism (Lin 2013; Karl 2020). Igniting this revolutionary past might enrich the theoretical development of a new movement to analyse contemporary capitalism and its crises. The past and future are connected through this rewriting in the present, with the rewriting firmly re-rooted in global Marxism. Reworking Chinese Marxism, by stripping away its parochial and nationalistic understandings of revolution, and by reconnecting it to the circuit of global Marxism, could reintegrate contemporary Chinese Marxism back into a global anti-capitalist project.

In this project, we suggest a tripartite infrastructural organizing base: worker-controlled trade unions at the workplace, workers’ centres in the industrial community, and solidarity networks at vocational training colleges. Needless to say, like the Jasic struggle, the formation of trade unions, based on workers’ power but with students’ support, might withstand efforts to strike them down because capital-labour conflicts continue to be centred in the workplace. We perceive that worker centres in the industrial zones and communities continue to have radical potential, organising issues around social reproduction as well as forming mutual support groups among working class families. Vocational training colleges – the major sites for reproducing new worker-subjects for almost half of China’s youth population – will emerge as new experimentation platforms for “learning to labour.” These will contain the potential for formations of radical solidarity, education, and networks. Female attendants on the high-speed train, digital laborers at Alibaba web-stores, and logistics workers in packaging and shipment companies such as Cainiao all come from vocational training colleges. Workplace, community, and vocational training colleges are thus three pillars for the combination of workers’ power, and all three pillars are rooted and re-territorialized in infrastructural capitalism and can therefore produce and foreground working class struggles in the sphere of production and social reproduction.

A new epoch of Chinese infrastructural capitalism has signified a new dynamic of capitalist crisis, state repression, and grassroots resistance. As a new force of Chinese Marxist leftists – committed to engaging in the labour movement – emerged, they immediately faced an onslaught, and suffered a brave but tragic fate. It is in this context that we are compelled to embark on this project on labour and infrastructural capitalism, aiming to provide the praxis of a newly emerged and emergent leftist force with theoretical interpellation and critical analysis. Propelled by the desires and the necessities of working-class struggles, we are not alone; we stand with you, the Chinese working class – as part of the global left and global working class.

PUN Ngai, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University

References:

Andreas, J. (2008). “Changing colours in China.” New Left Review, 54(Nov–Dec), 123-142.

Braverman, H. (1998). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. NYU Press.

Fuchs, C., & Mosco, V. (2015). Marx in the age of digital capitalism. Brill.

Karl, R. E. (2020). China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History. Verso.

Larkin, B. (2013). The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (1):327–43.

Lin, Chun. (2013). China and global capitalism: Reflections on Marxism, history, and contemporary politics. Springer.

Lin, W., Lindquist, J., Xiang, B., & Yeoh, B. S. (2017). “Migration infrastructures and the production of migrant mobilities.” Mobilities, 12(2), 167-174.

Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2019). The politics of operations: Excavating contemporary capitalism. Duke University Press.

Pun, N. (2021). “Turning left: student-worker alliance in labour struggles in China.” Globalizations, 18(8), 1392-1405.

Pun, N., & Chen, P. (2022). “Confronting global infrastructural capitalism: the triple logic of the ‘vanguard’ and its inevitable spatial and class contradictions in China’s high-speed rail program.” Cultural Studies, 1-22. Online first.

Xiang, B., & Lindquist, J. (2014). Migration infrastructure. International Migration Review, 48(1), 122-148.

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