The War Against the Working Class

by Will Podmore

  Speculation grew bubbles in shares, real estate and unregulated shadow banking. Capitalism brought privatisation, which brought corruption, as officials, cadres and managers stole and sold public goods. Private entrepreneurs got their start-up capital by seizing control of collective fixed assets. Village governments sold their enterprises at extremely low prices.

  Mao’s successors discriminated against people from poor rural backgrounds, even though devoting resources to rural education was the best way to promote development.102 The government ended free health care and education, imposing fees for both. In 1994, it shifted responsibility for health care, education and welfare to cash-strapped local government.103 There were fewer rural primary schools and medical facilities. So, under the new regime, health, productivity, rural incomes and education all worsened. Regional, gender and ethnic inequalities in health and education grew. Between 1980 and 2000, life expectancy rose by only 3.5 years, one of the smallest improvements in the world. Even so, by 2003, it was 71.8 years for men and 73 for women, compared to 64 years in India in 2002.

  In the 1990s, China spent only 3 per cent of GDP on education, in 2000, only 2.5 per cent; low-income countries averaged 3.4 per cent. Many schools charged for textbooks and other services.104 More than twice as many girls as boys did not go to school. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of illiterate adults grew by 30 million, to 113.9 million.

  In the 1970s, community medical schemes had covered 90 per cent of the rural population, but by 2003, only 20 per cent. Only 15 per cent of health spending went to rural China, where 70 per cent of people lived. In 1998, 37 per cent of sick rural residents were not treated, because they could not afford the costs of health care. Some local governments charged for immunisation. By 2000, the World Health Organisation ranked China’s health care system 144th in the world and ranked it as 188th in ‘fairness in financial contributions’.

  The UN World Development Report said that China was one of the world’s most unequal societies. In particular, women’s status worsened dramatically.105 Many employers openly discriminated against women in hiring. In the large-scale lay-offs in the state-owned industries, women were usually the first to be sacked. The notion that men were more able than women was widely expressed, despite the many years of Maoist education to the contrary. The media and adverts treated women as sex objects or showed them only in domestic roles. Local governments sponsored beauty competitions. Prostitution returned. Young women from poor rural regions were trafficked into sex work.106

  Capitalism brought layoffs, land thefts, non-payment of wages and pensions, and longer hours. At the end of the 1990s, the state-owned enterprises laid off 30-40 million workers: employment in the public sector was cut from 24 per cent of the labour force in 1996 to 7 per cent in 2003. There were 27 million unemployed in 2002, up from 7 million in 1993. In 2006, fewer than 30 per cent of unemployed men and 25 per cent of unemployed women got unemployment benefits. In 2000, 14 million workers in China’s state and collective enterprises were owed wages, up from 2.6 million in 1993. In 1996-2001, in Shenyang, 26.4 per cent of retired workers were owed pensions. 100 million (internal) migrant workers made up 57.5 per cent of China’s industrial working class: 75 per cent of them had been owed wages. In Guangdong in 2001, 80 per cent of migrant workers worked more than 10 hours a day, most for between 12 and 14 hours. The change in welfare from a work-unit-based entitlement to a universal human right worsened workers’ conditions.107

  Between 1978 and 2005, labour’s share of GDP was cut from 57 per cent to 37 per cent. There were growing divides between rich and poor, between city and countryside and between the east and the west of the country. Household consumption’s share of GDP was cut from 45 per cent in 2001 to 34 per cent in 2010, the smallest share in any large economy.108 The rural tax burden grew. Peasants lost land. Land grabs increased. For example, in 2000, the state seized the land of 40 million villagers, leaving them without land, jobs or social security. Industrial accidents killed an estimated 20,000 workers a year in the early 1990s and injured many more.109 In 2003, there were 130,000 work-related deaths, in 2010, 79,552.

  Poverty grew: in 2002, 45 per cent of people got less than $2 a day. The government declared managing to be legitimate work (which was never in dispute), but did not distinguish between return on capital invested and payment for work done. So the concepts of exploitation and class vanished. China’s public ethic in Mao’s time was ‘serve the people’, under Deng it was ‘to get rich is glorious’. In 2012, seven billionaires attended the 18th Party Congress.

  Exploitation was rife. Wages and working conditions were appalling. In 2004, in a Puma shoe factory run by a Taiwan businessman employing 30,000 workers in Guangdong, the average hourly wage rate was 31 US cents, while the company made $12.24 per worker per hour. Working hours were 7.30 am to 9 pm, sometimes till 12 pm, at the same hourly rate at best. Workers slept in the factory compound, 12 to a room, one bathroom for 100 people. They were not allowed to talk at work and could not leave the compound without permission. There were no health and safety regulations.

  Workers making Microsoft mice worked 80-plus hour weeks for 52 cents an hour. Workers making Microsoft keyboards worked 74-hour weeks for 41 cents an hour. Foxconn, which produced iPhones and iPads for Apple, paid its workers 83 cents an hour. Apple had a 64 per cent gross profit margin on its iPhones.110 But in 2010, there were strikes across China’s high-tech export sector, in which workers won 30 per cent wage rises at Foxconn’s iPod production centre in Shenzhen and at Honda’s factory in Foshan, and 25 per cent wage rises at the Hyundai supplier in Beijing.

  China’s exploitation of its natural resources caused huge losses of farmland, soil and forest. It cut down half its forests between 1970 and 2010. Air pollution soared. Every year 650,000 to 700,000 people died early because of air pollution. In the most polluted cities, people breathed the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day. The World Health Organisation said that 25 micrograms or less of particles of dangerous air pollutants per cubic metre was safe and that 250 micrograms was the danger level. Beijing in January 2014 had 671 micrograms. China had 20 of the world’s 30 worst-polluted cities.

  Water pollution also increased. Three quarters of China’s river water were unfit for drinking or fishing. 700 million people drank water contaminated with human and animal waste. Capitalism had been restored in China, but it was failing China’s people.

  Chapter 9

  Korea

  The war against Korea

  Korea, like Vietnam, was a single country until 1945. The USA, Britain and the Soviet Union recognised Korea’s unity and independence at the Cairo and Moscow conferences.

  In 1945, Soviet forces entered the north of Korea to create a defensive barrier against any renewed Japanese aggression. They could have occupied the whole country, but Stalin wanted not territorial gain but an end to Japanese power over the region. So when the US government proposed a temporary division of Korea at the 38th parallel, Stalin accepted, because the USA could help to neutralise Japan.1 US forces occupied the south.

  The three allies agreed that the country would be divided for only a short time and pledged that no foreign troops would stay in Korea. In the north, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was founded in 1948. American historian Melvyn Leffler wrote, “With the help of Soviet occupation forces and with considerable indigenous support, Kim assumed power in North Korea …”2 Many of its leading figures had been guerrilla fighters against the Japanese Empire. The DPRK asked all occupying forces to leave. The Soviet Union withdrew its forces in late 1948. The DPRK gave equal rights to women and land to the peasants, nationalised basic industries and set about rebuilding the country. GNP doubled between 1946 and 1949.

  The south had most of the country’s good farmland (only 18-20 per cent of the north was arable land) and most of its industry. To run the south, the US occupiers appointed wealthy landlords and businessmen who had co
llaborated with the Japanese occupiers. Some had even been officers in the Japanese Imperial Army. Leffler noted, “In 1948 they formed a government in South Korea under Syngman Rhee, a conservative authoritarian nationalist who aspired to unite all of Korea under his own auspices.”3 In the late 1940s, US aid to the Republic of Korea [ROK] was $220 million a year - more than its aid to Greece and Turkey combined. An American journalist wrote, “only American money, weapons, and technical assistance enable [the ROK] to exist more than a few hours.”4 The ROK was a disaster: even the British Foreign Office admitted its ‘black reaction, brutality and extreme incompetence’.5

  The US and British governments claimed that the Korean War started in June 1950, but war started well before then. In April 1947, Ryu, the US-appointed governor of the South Korean island of Cheju-do, ‘initiated a yearlong reign of terror’ against the island’s civilian population.6 American historian Sheila Miyoshi Jager pointed out, “[W]hole villages became targets, innocent suspects were beaten and hanged, and women and children massacred. A reign of terror largely perpetrated by government forces, the police, and the Republic of Korea Army … gripped the island. … By the end of June 1949, an estimated thirty thousand had been killed in Cheju-do, many of them innocent civilians massacred by government forces. … Some of the worst atrocities were committed by South Koreans against South Koreans. … Caught in the roundup of suspected leftists and communists were innocent civilians, including women and children who were summarily executed in the thousands in the name of fighting the communists. It is estimated that at least a hundred thousand South Koreans were killed in the summer of 1950.”7 The US Military Mission to Korea organised and armed these forces, gave them their best intelligence materials, planned their actions and sometimes commanded them.8

  Fighting at the 38th parallel started in January 1949 and flared up in the summer. US Army staff stated that ROK forces started most of the skirmishes.9 The ROK army tried to occupy Haeju, attacking across the 38th parallel from Ongjin.10 In October 1949, General William Roberts, Head of the US Military Mission, said, “Certainly there have been many attacks on the territory north of the 38th parallel on my orders … From now on, the invasion by the land forces of the territory north of the 38th parallel is to be carried out only on the basis of orders of the American military mission.” In March 1950, the US government voted an extra $11 million military aid to the ROK. In early May, fighting along the 38th parallel grew into battles between thousands of soldiers with hundreds of casualties.11

  In the ROK’s May 1950 elections, President Rhee’s party got just 18 seats in an Assembly of 218, which voted overwhelmingly for peaceful reunification. UN Resolutions obliged the US government to end its military support for Rhee by June 1950. Rhee publicly proposed invading the North and incited raids across the 38th parallel.12 In early June, ROK forces crossed the parallel.

  Bruce Cumings, the leading American historian of Korea, noted, “Then there was John Burton, mild-mannered professor of Political Science at George Mason University, who had been the very young head of the Australian Foreign Office in 1950. He told us of telegrams coming from South Korea to the Foreign Office just before the war broke out, reporting South Korea patrols crossing the border, trying to provoke the North Koreans. Dr Burton took these straight to the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister, ‘and we sent a very strongly worded telegram to the State Department’, asking them to curb South Korea adventurism. Before a reply came back from Washington, the war began. … Thereafter the telegrams, according to Dr Burton, disappeared from Australian Foreign Office files.”13

  The Korean War was far from being a simple matter of the ‘North’ invading the ‘South’. Even on this account, it would be a war of Koreans against Koreans, a civil war, in which no other country had any right to interfere. The notion that a country called Korea was ‘invading’ another country, also called Korea, surely raised questions in people’s minds. As Richard Stokes, Britain’s Minister of Works, commented in 1950, “In the American Civil War the Americans would never have tolerated for a single moment the setting up of an imaginary line between the forces of North and South, and there can be no doubt as to what would have been their reaction if the British had intervened in force on behalf of the South. This parallel is a close one because in America the conflict was not merely between two groups of Americans, but was between two conflicting economic systems as is the case in Korea.”14

  Or imagine that in 1861 Korea had sent troops to the USA to attack Union forces fighting against the Confederate states and that after three years of war, and killing two million US citizens, they held the Mason-Dixon Line and kept the country divided, allowing the South to keep its slaves. That would be the equivalent of what US forces did in 1950-53.

  In the UN Security Council, the US government, to secure the enabling Resolution, claimed that the Soviet Union was involved in starting the war. But when a US State Department team combed the archives of the occupied DPRK, later in 1950, for evidence of Soviet complicity, it found none.15 Further, the Resolution which supposedly authorised the UN intervention was invalid, since Article 27(3) of the UN Charter stated that substantive Resolutions must receive the ‘concurring votes’ of all the Security Council’s permanent members, yet the Soviet representative was absent.

  President Truman ordered US armed forces into war in Korea. He ordered the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait between the mainland of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan - an undeclared act of war, which saved Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime in Taiwan. Truman sent a Military Mission and more aid to the French forces fighting against Vietnam and started secretly to supply Tibetan rebels (even though the USA recognised Tibet as part of China). Britain’s Labour government at once sent British forces into Korea.

  The British armed forces yearbook for 1951 reported, “the war was fought without regard for the South Koreans, and their unfortunate country was regarded as an arena rather than a country to be liberated. As a consequence, fighting was quite ruthless, and it is no exaggeration to state that South Korea no longer exists as a country. Its towns have been destroyed, much of its means of livelihood eradicated, and its people reduced to a sullen mass dependent upon charity. The South Korean, unfortunately, was regarded as a ‘gook’, like his cousins north of the 38th parallel.”16

  The US Army banned all fraternisation with Koreans. It ‘treated the South Koreans like untouchables’, as First Lieutenant Robert Shackleton, an American advisor to the Korean Constabulary, complained.17 Private Mario Scarselleta of the 35th Infantry admitted, “I couldn’t get over how cruel we were to the prisoners we captured.”18 Millett observed, “[T]he Commonwealth Brigade, especially the Australians, shot first and asked questions later.”19 In the 1950 No Gun Ri massacre, in South Korea, as Robin Andersen noted, “Roughly three hundred civilians, many of them women and children, were bombed and strafed from the air by U.S. gunner pilots under direct military command to do so.”20

  On 7 October 1950, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution proposed by Britain’s Labour government, “1.a) All appropriate steps be taken to ensure conditions of stability throughout Korea; b) all constituent acts be taken, including the holding of elections, under the auspices of the U.N., for the establishing of a united, independent and democratic government in the sovereign state of Korea.” That same day, US troops first invaded the DPRK, crossing the 38th Parallel. This threatened China’s north-east. The next day, Chinese forces entered the war. As Warren Cohen later judged, “prudence required China to intervene in Korea.”21

  In October 1950, the USAF bombed targets in China. On 9 October, two USAF jets raided ‘by mistake’ a Soviet airfield 60 miles inside the Soviet border, near Vladivostok. In July 1952 and May 1953, the USAF again bombed towns in China.

  In the war against Korea, the USAF dropped more bombs on Korea than it had on Europe in World War Two. It dropped more than a million gallons of napalm. The US Army joined
in the destruction. US Colonel Harry Summers wrote of “the horrors of the ‘scorched earth’ policy during our retreat from North Korea in the winter of 1950. On the explicit orders of the Eighth U.S. Army commander [General Walton Walker], all houses were burnt, all livestock killed, and all food supplies destroyed.”22 MacArthur ordered his forces to “destroy every means of communication, every installation, factory, city and village from the front line to the Yalu River.”23 He later admitted that his scorched earth policy had created ‘a wasteland’ in the DPRK.24 Dean Rusk, then Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, said that the USAF bombed ‘everything that moved, every brick standing on top of another brick’.25 An official communiqué said, “It’s hard to find good targets, for we have burned out almost everything.”26 General Curtis LeMay, who ran the bombing war, said, “over a period of three years or so … we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too.”27 President Eisenhower ordered the bombing of all the dams in the DPRK - a war crime.

  It was, as Cumings summed up, “three years of genocidal bombing by the US Air Force which killed perhaps two million civilians (one-quarter of the population), dropped oceans of napalm, left barely a modern building standing, opened large dams to flood nearby rice valleys and kill thousands of peasants by denying them food, and went far beyond anything done in Vietnam in a conscious program of using air power to destroy a society …”28 He rightly called it ‘one of the most appalling, unrestrained, genocidal bombing campaigns in our genocidal twentieth century …’29 The war caused three million military casualties. A tenth of Korea’s people were killed, wounded or missing.