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For this week’s piece, I interview an American currently living in China to learn more about the inner-workings of what is quickly becoming the largest economic power in the world. An increased understanding of China is critical to ending US hostilities toward the People’s Republic. People in the US have an obligation to fight US wars, yet this obligation has been virtually forgotten in the era of Obama. Many Americans know little more about China than what they have heard or read from the corporate media and education system. It is my hopes that this interview can serve as a tool for those who want to know more about conditions in China.

Stephen C. McClure was formerly a visual merchandiser working for May Company and latter Federated Department stores in the Washington DC area. Technological change and consolidation of retail chains de-skilled visual merchandizing and eliminated careers in that field. After twenty years, he returned to higher education to learn cartography, Geographic Information Systems, and human geography. While studying at George Mason University, Stephen met many Chinese students and visiting professors and discovered he had a knack for editing technical and scientific papers, and in 2010 was invited to work at an international geospatial laboratory based at a University in central China.

Daniel Haiphong: Few people in the US know much about China's political system other than the corporate media's portrayal of the country as thoroughly corrupt and undemocratic. In your time in China, what have you learned about its political system?

Stephen C. McClure: This is a big question and would take a book to fully answer; you can find those books in every university library in the USA, shelves and shelves of them. In China, this question is a matter for lively discussion and debate with many points of view. It depends on what is meant by the term democratic and what exactly constitutes corruption. Those are both ideologically loaded terms whose meanings shift in relation to political standpoint and political agenda. In the interests of reflexivity and full disclosure, my agenda is a full belly and doing emotionally satisfying work that contributes to social development while paying the bills.

My standpoint is from a “declassed” and marginalized worker left behind by the US economy. I was visual merchandiser who dressed mannequins, rigged forms, designed and installed department store display for many years. As a DC resident, I was often involved in efforts to build mass national demonstrations in my hometown as well as being engaged with ongoing organizing efforts like the Rainbow Coalition, Tenants and Workers United, and Virginia New Majority.

My work and the community-based organizing I was involved with stimulated my interest in space, human geography, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as well as my interest in thematic cartography, map making, and spatial statistics. After my work disappeared down the neoliberal memory hole, I enrolled at George Mason University to study these fields along with feminist methodologies and critical spatial theory with the hope of linking these studies to create a new sit-down career in an office cubicle instead of hanging off cherry pickers putting up Christmas trim. Unfortunately, I had to go all the way to China to achieve my American Dream.

I am therefore, not a student of China. My responses to your questions are more or less anecdotal, starting from my everyday lived experience, what I see on CCTV English news, and what I read in the press. I will start by discussing democracy, move on to civil society and governance and then try and tackle the question of corruption.

If democracy means a multi-party electoral system of parliamentary bodies and a separation of the economy, civil society, and politics, under rule of law, then China is undemocratic. If what is meant is representative governance reflecting the will of prime producers, then China is democratic, using mass line techniques and information gathering to assess scientifically what the will of the masses is, and responding positively to those concerns. I find China extremely democratic at the everyday scale. I tell new friends that China is the land of freedom and opportunity where everything is possible. It is a place where a lowly window dresser like me can be a scientist and respected member of an academic community. I am happy I could trade in my tool bag for a cushy chair and computer screen.

What I find most dramatically different from my life in the USA and my life in a Chinese megacity is the vibrant, dynamic, and raucous civil society of the sidewalks and parks where anything and everything gets done and talked about. When the city government implements plans like home demolitions or banning open BBQ fires, it must contend with the street, people will not hesitate to throw up a street blockade or resist what they feel are inappropriate actions by the state. These problems are resolved by negotiations and an application of mass line techniques; riot police would in many cases be outnumbered.

I miss that anarchistic street life when I go home for visits in the USA, where the streets are sterilized enactments of constrained cosmopolitanism. In America, there are no children defecating and young drunken teenagers vomiting on the sidewalks, but that also means no chess games, acrobats, or night markets, either. This civil society is what might be called a concrete embodiment of the “oversight of the masses”; acting as a localized corrective balance to the state and state institutions.

The People’s Republic of China is a multi-national State with a unitary political system, unlike the US which is a federated republic with powers separated horizontally and vertically between municipalities, states, and the federal government and between three branches. The Communist party of China (CPC) is constitutionally recognized as the leading party, but there are other legally recognized parties that participate in governance. Some of my closest friends are members of these alternative parties. In my opinion, they serve an essential watchdog role, checking the power of the CPC.

I usually think of the PR of China as alternatively, a consultative democracy or consultative authoritarian system, depending on how it affects my daily life that day, and on what kind of mood I am in. If I have had an unpleasant encounter with bureaucracy then my opinion is very negative. The reality is that I only experience a slice of life in one particular place. That place is no utopia but a work in progress with about 5000 construction projects currently underway. As a Westerner, I am a magnet for dissidents that assume all Americans are Christian, anti-communist, and pro-capitalist, so I hear an earful of complaints about lack of freedom and repression. So far, these examples have sounded pretty tame relative to the arbitrary state violence directed at Blacks, other people of color and working class folks more generally back home.

The official Chinese government Xinhua news agency provides a handy guide to thestructure of the People’s Republicand information about the policies and structure of the Communist party of China can be found in Englishon their website here. Also, a new series of five books have been released by the CPCdescribing how the party functions.

In actuality, I pay little attention to any of this material, or to the learned discourse of China scholars in the Western Academy. What I really pay attention to is the degree of fit between what I see in official pronouncements and what happens on my street, in my city, and at work. Talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words.

The three big things that really piss people off are the pollution, the corruption, and glaring social inequality related to the thirty years of breakneck neoliberal development and reforms. My experience in China suggests that personal relationships and connections are critical if anyone wants to get anything done. All too easily those legitimate personal relationships can cross the line into payoffs, kickbacks, and insider deals that undermined the authority of the Party and state institutions.

That problem is being dealt with. After the 18thParty congress and the seating of the new leadership team, President Xi initiated a bold anti-corruption campaign, and an ideological mass line campaign to address corruption. Now, I no longer get paid in cash, all my payments are made electronically. There are no more elaborate toasting parties on my employer’s dime, and periodically a team from the disciplinary commission comes in surprise visits to go over the books. Dealing with corruption is critical to any solution of the pollution or inequality problems.

The CPC has also taken comprehensive steps to mitigate and abate the pollution, while at the same time, addressing income inequality under the rubric of the Chinese Dream. These actions were not just pretty words in speeches like those spoken by Obama, but they have had real and tangible impact on me, my workplace, and my community. Open BBQ fires and fireworks were banned, massive numbers of urban trees were installed, and water trucks now spray down to streets to manage construction dust and localized sources of particulate pollution.

It will take more expensive long term efforts to control pollution from the factories in my city, but the key step in effective regulation of those sources of pollution starts with controlling corruption. Those steps are being taken; I see them out my window, at work, and on TV when corrupt officials get taken down. Dealing with income and social disparities means extending development into rural areas left behind during the reform period.

Infrastructure investments and the creation of new towns mean better services and opportunities for people in the countryside. I worked on writing up technical papers on two targeted programs for soil erosion mitigation and livelihood improvement in key watersheds have reduced poverty. At the same time, in these programs, new communications technologies are being deployed to create more transparency and oversight on development funds, reducing the opportunities for corrupt officials to skim off the top. President Xi has announced a plan to eliminate poverty in China altogether, following up on the successful efforts to realize the millennium two thousand goals.

The media in the US often takes an unbalanced approach to China, to characterize it nicely. Usually corruption, environmental pollution, and low wage manufacturing are staples of the anti-China narrative. As an American in China, what have you encountered that Americans may not know that dispels any one these narratives?

It is almost impossible for me to comment on the Big Picture stuff except as it intersects with my daily life. Those media reports are true in so far as they go, however, those reports are partial one-sided and fail to clearly spell out the challenges facing a developing country emerging out of a semi-feudal, semi-colonial past. Since I am not a China scholar or expert on the Big Picture, I can only comment tangentially on this question.

Several years ago, I spent Spring Festival in a village along the coastal province just south of Shanghai. It was the hometown of one of my close friends. This village was one of the first to respond to Deng`s call for reform and opening up. Before the reform period, the village economy was based on subsistence agriculture, farmer’s markets were banned, water came from two wells, and there were communal outhouses.

During the Cultural Revolution, a dam was built on a nearby stream by sent down to the country youth that eventually was used as a reservoir for indoor plumbing and irrigation. The village was famous for its woodworkers, so during the early reform period, the ancestral halls became woodworking factories to produce furniture and carved handicraft items for export. Over time village land was leased to factories, and the village became independent of agriculture.

The young people got educations and left, working in the big cities and around the world, coming home only for Spring Festival. Today, villagers buy rice and manufactured goods and have comfortable lives, but there was a cost. Before the reforms, there was no need for solid waste management because everything was biodegradable. Water pollution was not an issue because there were no factories or cars. Elders were taken care of by families, who now are gone.

The infrastructure, both social and physical, needs to be built to attend to these issues as the primary concerns of eating and shelter; medical care and education have been met. These problems are everywhere; every coin has two sides, Marxists usually refer to these as internal contradictions and are what I would argue the driving force behind Chinese policy-making at the highest level.

Any reading of the history of modern China must consider the collective will of the Chinese peoples in these transformations and the constraints the masses place on the state, and the CPC in the historical and geographical context of colonialism, revolution, civil war, invasion, occupation, civil war, revolution, and social upheaval that characterized the entire 20thcentury in China. Millions upon millions died.

Today, urban people have the freedom to be a-political, they have the freedom to wear what they want, they can choose their own career, choose to a certain degree where they live, and what they eat. That was not always the case and given the uneven level of development that is still not the case for many people. For those of us coming from the developed West, these freedoms are taken for granted, what is invisible is the massive infrastructure that enables us to enjoy those privileges, an infrastructure that I suspect has something to do with centuries of colonialism and Imperialism that enabled an accumulation of wealth in the West. China like much of the world is struggling with that legacy and the shadow of the Opium wars and Concession period. The old missionary quarter, the old concessions, and even the American YMCA built to serve US Navy personnel patrolling the Yangtze River one hundred years ago still are evident in the old city, attesting to the history of Western encroachment.

Most of my friends came from the village and are less than one generation removed from the peasantry. Every one of the professionals I know has relatives who still farm, or who work in factories either close to home, or as migrants living in factory dormitories far from their hometowns. Villages are self managed, land is allocated to families based on their ability to farm it, and the right to legal residency in the cities is strictly controlled, migrants are in general not being forced off the land in many instances but are being lured to the bright lights and big city to earn cash money.

A cash economy is not fully realized and the workforce laboring in those factories might more rightly be called a semi-proletariat. From the numbers I have seen, about 50-60% of the population is still engaged in agriculture to some extent. Connecting villages into the national economy, providing better services, and raising living standards in the deep country and in the west is a long term goal, but dependent in my opinion on the overall development of an industrial economy and the productive forces.

Dealing with those contradictions is one of the central goals of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) strategy and the 13thFive Year Plan (13.5) as well as the focus of directives from the plenary meetings of the Central Committee of the CPC. These decisions and directives set funding priorities and translate into initiatives that I see cross my desk at work, captured in the slogans about the “new normal”, “deepening reforms”, and “catching tigers and flies”. There might be a growing private sector, but ultimately the entire economy of China is directed by the 13.5 and central planning and it is ultimately state funding rather than private capital that funds initiatives, based on social needs.

Chinese President Xi Jinping often makes references to "socialism with Chinese characteristics" when describing China's development model. Many leftists in the West have determined that China is not worthy of the label of socialist at all. Could you describe what you have seen in terms of how this model is carried out in practice? What are some of the achievements and challenges of China's current development trajectory? Is it socialism or something else?

This follows directly upon my answer to question 2. In my humble opinion, Western leftists might be more properly concerned with problems of party building and socialism in the West rather than troubling themselves with parsing socialism in China.

I have no idea of what China is other than a social formation with a multiplicity of modes of production, articulated together in over-determination with lots of contradictions both antagonistic and non-antagonistic, just like every other social formation. And, just like in every other social formation, class struggle is the motor force, even if at the current moment developing the productive forces to lay the foundation for socialism is the central task.

The fundamental bottom line is that China is not the hegemonic power; the USA is, with military bases and aircraft carriers making the world safe for transnational capital mostly based in the West. The debate about whether “the red flag is flying in China or not” among Western leftist intellectuals and trade unionists, is really more of a debate amongst themselves and their relationship to their own states.

Judging from the crisis of socialism in the West, the collapse of communist parties like the old PCI in Italy, or the shrinkage of the CPUSA and the old New Left and New Communist movements in the USA, and the alignment of much of the Western left with the goals and objectives of their own respective states, it appears there is a lot of work that needs to be done to become the organic expression of the masses of workers in the West.

In my vulgar reductionist thinking, socialism is a means to an end not an end in itself. Socialism in my view is constituted by a progressive abolition of private property relations, through implementation of Marx`s ten point program as outlined in the Communist Manifesto in relation to local culture, history, and conditions.

A key element is state control of the commanding heights of the economy with scientifically planned development under the leadership of a Communist party that represents the interests and is based in the working class and peasantry.

The State itself is reorganized to achieve the tasks of the working class and serves as an instrument to exercise class rule and a dictatorship of the proletariat.

In my vulgar view, the Party must be organized along democratic centralist lines reflecting the Marxist theory of knowledge and firmly rooted in the working class, the Party being the highest expression of working class politics.

Being a literalist and very vulgar materialist, I think I will leave it up to the scholars to debate how many proletarians dance on the head of a pin and take measure of socialism in China. Every summer for the last five years an army of sociologists, anthropologists, and China scholars descends on my city to study things here. Instead of thinking about “wither socialism in China”, I find it much more compelling to go to work everyday and contribute in my own little way to the program defined by the 13,5 plan. There are plenty of other people counting proletarians on the heads of pins and they get ample funding and tenure too! I hope activists can focus on what is really important for Americans and the world, building an effective movement for peace, and economic and social justice at home.

The US has intensified hostilities toward China, especially during the Obama Administration's "pivot to Asia" leading to a massive increase of US military installations in countries surrounding the People's Republic. What are the conversations like in China regarding this development? Where do you see relations between the US and China going as the era of Trump begins?

US internal politics are a matter for us Americans to ponder. What I noticed from my vantage point in central China is that the fancy words coming out of the mouths of Secretary of State Clinton and Kerry as well as President Obama had little relation to actions on the ground.

I noticed in the recent election campaigns not even the social democrat put the question of war and militarism at the top of his platform, nor does the question of militarism and military spending seem to be a priority of US social movements, despite hundreds of US military bases abroad and massive military expenditures, ongoing involvements in the middle east, all paid for out of our pockets. Flotillas of US warships routinely move through the sea lanes of the South China Seas representing an existential threat to China, but back home these activities are accepted and remain unquestioned.

Americans seem totally unaware of the potential danger of an accidental military conflict between two nuclear armed powers; the USA and China. Americans are also blissfully unaware of how China bankrolled the US economy by buying US debt, and how the US and Chinese economies are intimately intertwined.

Obama appeared incompetent from here. My experience has been that our chief executive had little control over policy with two or three contending policies being implemented simultaneously; that created a very dangerous situation as US actions were unpredictable when nobody was in charge, during his administration. .

Actions speak louder than words and aircraft carriers in the South China Seas, the TPP, and NED funding for so-called civil society groups in China created a great deal of animosity when these actions were and inconsistent with the pretty words flowing from President Obama’s mouth. From here US policy looks like containment and encirclement from the outside and subversion and destabilization from the inside, masked by pretty talk about a “new kind of superpower relationship”.

On the positive side, President Xi is less of a politician than a career administrator with an extensive background in theory and policy, treating tensions as one side of the coin when shared common interests are more extensive. Each of these US actions was countered with balanced and proportionate responses. President Xi went on the road developing bilateral ties with other countries in the region, initiating the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), extending and deepening security arrangements through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and proposing the OBOR program. Cooperation was extended to Russia and Iran. In terms of the South China Seas, China has expanded its military presence in the region, while domestically stricter oversight and regulation of foreign funded NGOs and civil society groups has been initiated. We see the results. China has a stronger regional position, the TPP is in shambles, and the OBOR program is now an attractive alternative to US backed programs.

I have no idea of where US-China relations are going, but the people on TV say that we can expect more challenges regardless of who is in the White House. Donald Trump is an unknown quantity and at least if he is in the White House, plenty of liberals and progressives would be out in the streets opposing war drives and militarism. If Hillary were the new commander in chief, I would hardly expect that to be the case.

Russia and China have become increasingly close as the US has escalated hostilities with both countries. What is the basis for such cooperation? What do you expect stronger China-Russia relations to achieve in the coming years?

The basis for cooperation between China and Russia is the same as cooperation between China and the USA and any other country, namely mutual benefits and win-win cooperation based on national priorities and needs, managing conflict in relation to cooperation, just like China’s relationship to the USA. I see the Russian Eurasian integration project and China’s OBOR strategy as being complementary and vital toward addressing pressing problems like instability along the borderlands between the Western world and the world of China and Russia.

I firmly believe the future of humanity (over 50% of us live in Asia) depends on balanced and sustainable development on the Eurasian “World Island”. The most significant challenge we all face is human induced climate change, but the developed world has to lead the way as current trade and development regimes favor the West. I hope at some point Americans realize that the world is now multi-polar and that the USA can no longer dictate terms.

Xinua News Agency released a report in 2015 that detailed US human rights violations, both domestically and abroad. What do you think are the tasks of US activists and movements when it comes to China? How can people in the US begin to change the dominant discourse about what is quickly becoming the largest economy in the world?

I believe US activists have their work cut out for them.

When it comes to China like any place else, the important thing is to stand for peace, oppose war, and work to unite all who can be united to push for meaningful reforms at home in a revolutionary way through organized working class action. Without an end to the dominance of the military economy in the USA it is hard to see progress on things like reparations or dealing with climate change.

Reforms must begin and end with the necessity to deal once and for all with the legacy of slavery and white supremacy, situated as they are in the context of global capitalism and Imperialism. Orientalism as discussed by Edward Said is one thread within the ideological superstructure that legitimates colonialism and Imperialism. A discussion about China that only selectively includes Chinese voices reproduces orientalist discourse, regardless of political orientation.

That means respecting the autonomous development of other social formations and their parties without taking sides in internal matters of principal interest and concern of the inhabitants of those places. This might be a-historical, but given the preponderance of US military power, keeping the focus on America and the US role in creating chaos might be appropriate in the current conjuncture.

They need to oppose populism in all its variants and speak directly and frankly about our color-coded class structure and class struggle, unapologetically, drawing clear and principled lines of demarcation between liberalism and the left. To be successful, there must be ideological and political leadership from within the social movements that seeks truth from facts, attracting the interest of natural leaders emerging from those movements so that more people will be armed with a scientific approach to organizing. There is a pressing need to develop the capacity to understand and change the world using the tools of dialectical and historical materialism and focus on Party building rooted firmly in our multi-national multi-gendered working class.

US activists need to keep the focus on the USA rather than playing armchair quarterbacks to other people’s struggles; recognizing the privileged position they occupy as residents of the Empire in the global scheme of things.