China's rise.....

Monday 12 November

7.30 pm

Friends Meeting House

Ship Street

Brighton

China’s rise – Strength and Fragili­ty is the first book being joint­ly pub­lished by Resis­tance Books, the IIRE and Mer­lin Press. Author Au Loong Yu will be vis­it­ing Britain from 12 to 22 Novem­ber to launch the book at meet­ings around the coun­try.

The book looks at the dra­mat­ic polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic devel­op­ments in China from a Marx­ist per­spec­tive. It argues that to under­stand China today it is also nec­es­sary to study the Chi­nese rev­o­lu­tion and it describes the unique social for­ma­tion that exists today in China as bureau­crat­ic cap­i­tal­ism.

By exam­in­ing the speci­fici­ties of Chi­nese soci­ety, and the strug­gles for democ­ra­cy and for improved con­di­tions, the authors show that Chi­nese bureau­crat­ic and repres­sive cap­i­tal­ism is begin­ning to exhaust its strength. China is increas­ing­ly rely­ing on rapid­ly expand­ing pub­lic debt. Strug­gles by Chi­nese work­ers sug­gest that they are begin­ning to over­come the demor­al­iza­tion inflict­ed by the crush­ing of the democ­ra­cy move­ment of 1989 and that they are build­ing up their con­fi­dence to fight against this unjust sys­tem.

It is not just the 1.3 bil­lion peo­ple who live in China whose futures will be at the very least pro­found­ly affect­ed by the future of such strug­gles – but all of those who live on this increas­ing­ly inter­de­pen­dent plan­et. If China seems to be every­where in the media at the minute, this speak­ing tour offers a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to find out more.