Charter 80 calls aims to

“create conditions for the development of privately-owned banking.”

This really is the crux of the matter : China may have privatized large areas of the economy but they have kept control of the credit system and of capital flows. This is the key to China’s success as we have seen in their counter-crisis investment programme directing capital into infrastructure and the real economy. The conflict today, as for the last three hundred years, is between real wealth creation in sovereign nations and  parasitic, extractive, imperialist exploitation.

For more on the CIA and Tiananmen Square see Thierry Meyssan’s excellent article.

what’s left

12th October, 2010

By Stephen Gowans

Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, has been hailed as a champion of human rights and democracy. His jailing by Chinese authorities for inciting subversion of the state is widely regarded as an unjust stifling of advocacy rights by a Chinese state intolerant of dissent and hostile to ”universal values”. But what Western accounts have failed to mention is that Charter 08, the manifesto Liu had a hand in writing and whose signing led to his arrest, is more than a demand for political and civil liberties. It is a blueprint for making over China into a replica of US society and eliminating the last vestiges of the country’s socialism. If Liu had his druthers, China would: become a free market, free enterprise paradise; welcome domination by foreign banks; hold taxes to a minimum; and allow the Chinese version of the Democrats and Republicans to keep the country safe for corporations, bankers and wealthy investors. Liu’s problem with the Communist Party isn’t that it has travelled the capitalist road, but that it hasn’t traveled it far enough, and has failed to put in place a politically pluralist republican system to facilitate the smooth and efficient operation of an unrestrained capitalist economy. Read the rest of this entry »