the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
January 10, 2026
The following article was translated from an article appearing in Lutte de Classe #253, February 2026, the political journal of Lutte Ouvrière, the French Trotskyist organization.
In forty years, by allowing Western trusts to return to its control and injecting trillions of yuan (one yuan = 14 cents) into the economy, the Chinese regime has indeed lifted a portion of the country out of underdevelopment. However, ultimately, the contradictions within Chinese society have not diminished but, on the contrary, multiplied.
The economic reforms that began in the late 1970s allowed for the regeneration of a wealthy bourgeoisie, closely linked to, if not indistinguishable from, the upper echelons of the bureaucracy and the Chinese Communist Party, and which made its fortune by plundering the capital accumulated by the state since 1949. But, as has happened everywhere and in every era, the development and enrichment of the bourgeoisie went hand in hand with the strengthening of the working class. By transforming hundreds of millions of peasants into proletarians, concentrating them in modern factories or small workshops in the suburbs of major cities, the Chinese regime has considerably strengthened this social class, which also represents a mortal danger to it. Its leaders know they are sitting on a social time bomb, which threatens to explode all the more as the contradictions within society accumulate. All of its policies are imbued with this fear.
In the early 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set itself the goal of proletarian revolution. Founded in 1921, it followed in the footsteps of the Bolshevik Party and the 1917 revolution, which had established workers’ power. The Chinese working class was then advancing by leaps and bounds. It had initially organized itself into trade unions, which quickly amassed hundreds of thousands of members—500,000 in Hong Kong and Guangzhou alone by 1925. Through these unions, the first communist militants rapidly gained influence. But this Communist Party was itself under the influence of the Communist International, which, in the second half of the 1920s, became a tool in the hands of the rising Stalinist bureaucracy. The Communist Party concluded an agreement with the nationalist bourgeoisie of the Kuomintang, and when the latter turned against the working class in 1926 and 1927, the party was crushed. Rejected from the cities, and pursuing its policy toward the Chinese bourgeoisie under Moscow’s orders, the CCP became a petty-bourgeois nationalist party in the 1930s.
When it seized power in 1949, it did so by relying on the rebellious countryside and keeping the working class at arm’s length. Mao’s armies conquered the cities from the outside, and, as Trotsky had foreseen as early as 1932, the communist commanders were “above all inclined to look down on the workers.” The workers were passive witnesses to this nationalist revolution.
In the years that followed, from the American embargo of the 1950s to the early 1970s, and even more so because of the economic reforms of the 1980s, the CCP’s distrust of workers remained constant. According to official propaganda, the working class has been the ruling class of the regime, but in reality, it was exploited under close surveillance, controlled by the CCP apparatus and the official trade union, the ACFTU (All-China Federation of Trade Unions), whose branches were created at the behest of company or party leaders, and where workers, the union members, had no control over their representatives or over what they negotiated. In 1989, and again in the 2000s and 2010s, some workers’ struggles therefore aimed to establish autonomous organizations, controlled by the rank and file, independent of the government and the party.
The last nationwide movement dates back more than 35 years. In May and June 1989, in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but also throughout the country, several million Chinese protested against the regime. Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the early 1980s had led to inflation and the enrichment of the leaders, putting an end to the relative egalitarianism that had prevailed until then. Outraged by the corruption of the upper echelons of the party and the state, the protesters—first students, then increasingly large segments of the working class—denounced the system ruled by the most senior leaders and their families. They demanded greater democracy and transparency.
As long as the mobilization involved only students, the regime turned a blind eye. But workers began to get involved, first in the demonstrations, and then, in some cases, with the aim of imposing workers’ organizations independent of the regime. The Workers’ Autonomous Federation, founded by young workers in Beijing, claimed 20,000 members in May 1989. Its program emphasized worker independence and voluntary participation, not as a charitable organization but as a platform to represent the views of the majority of workers in political and economic matters, to act as a watchdog for the Communist Party, and to monitor legal representatives in factories to ensure that workers were the true masters of those enterprises.
These perspectives, even if they did not directly confront the authorities, were perceived by the regime as a mortal danger. Such workers’ groups existed in more than fifteen cities. Their existence was one of the reasons that led the regime to put an end to the unrest through a crackdown that resulted in thousands of deaths. The students in Tiananmen Square were dispersed on June 4, 1989, and the working-class neighborhoods that had resisted the army’s advance were crushed. The first people arrested and executed were young workers.
The crushing of the 1989 protests gave the regime the political means to deepen and expand economic reforms. Initially, it strengthened its dictatorship, suppressed dissent within the party and the state by eliminating rival factions, and reintroduced party control into businesses. To create a diversion, it staged the trial of a few blatantly corrupt bureaucrats. Then, in 1992, the “reforms” resumed with renewed vigor.
These were difficult years for the working class. The regime dismantled state-owned enterprises and handed them over to the bureaucrats who had managed them, thus creating from scratch a layer of petty and grand bourgeoisie intimately linked to it, indebted to it, and even indistinguishable from it.
During the summer of 2025, amidst a dispute between his children over his inheritance, the press reported the story of Zong Qinghou, a municipal employee in the late 1980s who became China’s richest billionaire in 2010. He made his fortune by acquiring control of the school beverage distribution system. He transformed this public service into a company, naming it Wahaha, the Laughing Child, a so-called “red hat” company—state-owned but privately managed by its director, which granted it access to public funding. The Chinese state supported Wahaha by building factories and helping it partner with the French group Danone. Zong Qinghou used the negotiations for this joint venture to officially become the owner of Wahaha. Throughout all these years, he was a member of the Communist Party, and even a delegate from 2002 to 2018 to the National People’s Congress (the Chinese Parliament).
While the regime enriched its own people by dismantling the state, it orchestrated the dismissal of 60 million workers between 1995 and 2002 alone. This also marked the end of the so-called “iron rice bowl” system, which guaranteed housing, employment, and access to healthcare for all. From then on, access to health, retirement, and unemployment insurance was only possible through contributions paid by employers. Many families were evicted from their homes.
During this period, despite the repression of 1989, worker reactions were numerous but remained local and isolated. Some, however, were quite significant: between 1997 and 2002, in the “Rust Belt” of the northeast, when heavy industry stopped paying wages and pensions and laid off workers en masse, tens of thousands of workers demonstrated for months, blocking roads and bridges, forcing the state to cover part of the companies’ arrears. Where workers organized, the police arrested labor leaders and had them sentenced to long prison terms for “subversion”: worker protest was tolerated only if it remained very localized and strictly focused on economic issues.
In the 2000s, continuing the movement that began in the late 1980s, China became the “workshop of the world.” American, Japanese, Korean, and European foreign companies established themselves in even greater numbers in special economic zones to exploit, alongside Chinese companies, young urban workers and migrant workers (mingongs), who by the tens of millions were leaving their rural homes in search of wages. Workers’ wages were poverty wages, paid by the piece, and the hours were endless. After the strictly defensive struggles of the late 1990s, a wave of struggles developed for wages, demanding that these wages be paid in full, including overtime, as well as for raises. The first notable struggles took place in Shenzhen and Dongguan between 2004 and 2006, in the rapidly developing electronics and textile industries. These struggles were sometimes repressed but often successful.
Among the strikes that resonated in the West was the 2010 strike by 1,800 Honda workers in Foshan, near Guangzhou. Their demands included a significant increase in base wages, greater respect and dignity at work, and improved safety conditions. As is often the case, the ACFTU, the official trade union federation, opposed the strike. However, at Honda, the ACFTU sent a commando unit to physically assault the strikers, leading them to add to their demands the right to have worker-elected union representatives. Honda eventually conceded, and this success sparked a wave of victorious strikes throughout the Pearl River Delta region and around Shanghai. Wage demands were sometimes combined with demands for the recognition of democratically elected worker representatives or for unions independent of the official federation.
From 2015 onward, repression became systematic whenever there was any talk of worker organization. For example, in July 2018, Shenzhen police arrested thirty protesters, including twenty-nine workers from the Jasic Technology company and a student who supported their struggle to create an independent union. In response, a vast student solidarity movement emerged across China, accompanied by petitions and online campaigns demanding the release of the arrested workers. The most active students were arrested, placed under house arrest, or disappeared.
In the 2010s, while the global economy was only slowly recovering from the 2008 crisis, China continued to develop, fueled by massive state investment in infrastructure and rampant real estate speculation. Despite this, China’s official GDP growth rate, which had been increasing year after year in the 2000s, reversed course and has since declined steadily, falling from 10% to less than 5% today. The repression of strikes deemed too political, coupled with a more aggressive approach from employers to maintain profit margins, succeeded in reducing the number of strikes by the end of the 2010s.
A few months after the start of the COVID epidemic, the Chinese regime imposed a strict lockdown on the entire population, the “zero COVID” policy, while simultaneously trying to keep businesses producing. While the global economy ground to a halt, Chinese factories operated at increased capacity, with workers confined to their workplaces, day and night, crammed together on assembly lines or in dormitories, sick or not, but unable to leave the premises. This policy began to unravel when, in October and November 2022, thousands of workers at Foxconn, an Apple subcontractor in Zhengzhou, in central China, revolted, fleeing the factory by scaling and destroying the fences. These demonstrations forced the government to abandon its lockdown policy at the end of 2022. But, in the aftermath, as the global economy restarted and Chinese factories became less essential, the Chinese working class had to face a wave of factory closures and relocations within the country, where wages are lower.
Since then, the pressure on the working class has intensified. Struggles have become more difficult, less frequent, and primarily defensive, aimed at securing unpaid wages or severance pay. Unemployment is a significant burden, one of the direct causes of its rise being the bursting of the housing bubble in 2022. The housing crisis seems endless, with investments, prices, and construction starts continuing to decline three years later. According to the business daily Caixin, Chinese employers laid off 13 million migrant workers between 2021 and 2024 in their construction projects alone.
But real estate is not the only sector in crisis. The Western press has reported on the speculation by Chinese capitalists in photovoltaic panels, and its consequences. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of companies attracted by the profits in this sector jumped from 150 to 300, leading to a fierce trade war and a sharp drop in its profit margin. Forty companies have closed their doors since 2024, laying off 87,000 workers. The government is announcing the “consolidation” of the sector, meaning the closure of smaller companies to allow larger ones to raise prices and restore their profits.
In the automotive industry, the situation hasn’t yet reached the point of layoffs, but it’s heading that way. Car production has benefitted from massive investments, largely supported by provincial and municipal governments. Caixin reports that many capitalists didn’t have to spend a penny to build factories capable of producing 200,000 vehicles per year. As a result, 129 companies began selling primarily electric vehicles, all more or less identical. It’s this competition that the largest Chinese and foreign manufacturers—Tesla, BYD, Geely—have been trying to stifle since 2023 by waging a veritable price war, even at the risk of seeing their profits plummet. But, to date, most manufacturers, backed by state agencies, municipalities, and provinces, are resisting. As in the photovoltaic sector, the government announced that it would take measures to “consolidate” the automotive sector, with the same threats to workers’ jobs.
In the tech sector, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and others are no longer hiring like they did during their growth phase in the 2010s. Alibaba even cut its workforce in half between 2022 and 2025. Within these companies, the pressure is intense, with management relying on younger employees to encourage the older generation, those in their thirties, to accept longer working hours and fewer holidays, or to leave altogether. A significant portion of young people have had to settle for jobs as delivery drivers or occasional waiters in restaurants, or have turned to the government and local authorities, for example, in security positions at subway stations or in newly constructed infrastructure. Even official statistics on youth unemployment in urban areas reflect this bleak future: between 2018 and 2022, the proportion of 16- to 34-year-olds with a job fell from 93% to 86%.
For the past 30 years, a segment of the workforce has enjoyed a lifestyle similar to that of Western workers: cars, homes purchased on credit, paid vacations, and travel, especially within China. In the tech sector, this category of workers can earn up to 10,000 renminbi (RMB) per month, the equivalent of $1,437.89 (per month). A Tesla factory worker in Shanghai’s industrial zone can earn between 5,000 and 7,000 RMB, depending on bonuses. But alongside this urban workforce, hundreds of millions of proletarians remain on the margins, even in the heart of major Chinese cities, earning between a third and half of these wages, sometimes less than 3,000 RMB. Three hundred million of them are migrant workers in construction or textiles, paid by the piece, often exploited by their employers who deduct rent for a miserable room from their wages.
In October, China Labor Watch, a U.S.-based organization, highlighted in an investigation some aspects of working conditions at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, which can employ up to 300,000 people. Half of the workers there are temporary employees, and there are many “students,” young people aged 16 or 17. The hourly wage for these workers can be as low as 12 RMB per hour, or about 18 cents, and without the benefit of employer contributions to social insurance systems. Often, bonuses that they can only receive at the end of their contract serve to keep them under constant pressure. Working hours vary from 60 to 75 hours per week. Surveillance is, of course, pervasive, and protective equipment is minimal.
In the heart of cities, a whole segment of the workforce, not necessarily internal migrants, is also left behind by development. These are all those who make ends meet: food delivery drivers, water carriers, cardboard and scrap metal collectors, bicycle and scooter repairers, workers in small shops and restaurants, or those considered “self-employed,” whose access to healthcare and retirement, which depend on employer contributions, is extremely precarious. The rise in unemployment in recent years and the lack of hiring in large companies mean that more and more workers, especially young people, are condemned to these jobs, with no prospects for the future.
For 30 years, the government has had to manage this considerable escalation of social antagonisms. Alongside the repression of any attempt at autonomous organization by the working class, it relied on economic development to at least appease workers, if not to try to win them over to its policies. The government message was that all you had to do was work to get ahead. A large segment of the petty bourgeois youth, who abandoned all political struggle under the effects of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, rushed into the business world. A significant portion of the population saw their standard of living surpass that of their elders. Thus, many young people from the petty bourgeoisie or tech workers are proud to have been able to take their parents out of the countryside to visit Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Beijing. This feeling that it was possible to improve one’s lot spread even within the working class. Infrastructure development and the opening up of underdeveloped regions may have reinforced the illusion that China’s capitalist development would benefit everyone. The slowdown of the past decade and the mounting economic difficulties since the COVID pandemic are undermining this idea.
The nationalism propagated by the Chinese bureaucracy is not simply used to prepare the population for the conflicts threatening the country. It is also a response to the regime’s economic difficulties, a policy more developed by Xi Jinping than by his predecessors. It must be said that in China, nationalism has no shortage of arguments to draw upon in the country’s past, when it was humiliated from the mid-19th century to the end of World War II by the British, French, German, American, and Japanese imperialisms that dismembered it. The Opium Wars, waged by the British, the foreign concessions—colonial strongholds established on the cities of the east coast as early as the 19th century—the bloody Japanese occupation from the 1930s until 1945, and the secession of Taiwan are all historical events used by the regime to legitimize its dictatorship.
In its references to the past, the CCP cannot help but return to its early years of struggle. Even if it does so in a distorted way, it honors the activists who founded it, the trade unions of the 1920s, and the 1925 revolution among younger generations. It thus highlights the first communist leader, Chen Duxiu, while remaining silent about his joining the Trotskyist opposition after 1927.
The Chinese regime has other nationalist strings to its bow. For example, in early September 2025, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, Xi Jinping presented himself to the press as the center of the world, hosting the leaders of Russia, India, Turkey, North Korea, and many others. While the United States is intensifying protectionism and the threat of war, and withdrawing from organizations such as the U.N. and the WTO, Xi Jinping proclaims himself a champion of peace, multilateralism, and cooperation between nations—all stances intended to demonstrate China’s power and inspire pride in its leaders. This sentiment is cultivated by the technological achievements of Chinese scientists: humanoid robots, expeditions to the moon, high-speed trains, and civil and military aviation are all sources of national pride that the government attributes to itself. But, because the crisis excludes tens of millions of young people from decent work and wages, the opposite feeling may emerge: the feeling that development is built on the shoulders of workers and whose fruits are actually monopolized by a thin layer of privileged people.
The anti-corruption policy relaunched by Xi Jinping in the mid-2010s, while contributing to the fight against rival clans and keeping a few extremely wealthy capitalists in check, also serves to counter the perception that development benefits only the elite. Xi Jinping is adapting Deng Xiaoping’s post-1989 policy in his own way: sacrificing a few big fish to lend credence to the fiction of a just state, serving the people.
The Chinese working class, numbering over 400 million, is the largest in the world. Despite the police state, it has always fought back. Since 1989, this struggle has been limited to the economic sphere, without challenging the government, and in a fragmented manner. However, for several years now, the reasons for fighting—economic hardship, unemployment, pressure from employers, and the lack of prospects for young people, all reflections of the global crisis of capitalism—have been piling up. If the crisis deepens further, nationalism and the fight against corruption will be ineffective distractions. The government likely fears a period of political and social uncertainty in this context. Its advantage, to date, lies in the fact that the Chinese working class remains unorganized, without a party defending its political interests. But every time its struggles have gained momentum, the question of organization has arisen for it. Besides its size, the Chinese working class has its past on its side, particularly that of the 1920s. From this past, revolutionary activists, though very few in number, have many lessons to learn.