Title: Tibet in the grip of Chinese imperialism
Subtitle: For workers’ autonomy in Tibet and in China!
Topics: China, imperialism, Tibet
Date: 17 March 2008
Source: Retrieved on 29th October 2021 from www.anarkismo.net

The Tibetan people’s revolt against the Chinese occupation has once more brought to the attention of the world the state of subjection in which the territory has been held for decades by the military presence of China’s “People’s Liberation Army”. Tibet is geographically strategic. After the discovery and consequent ransacking of raw materials that are essential to China’s economy (uranium in prime position), reducing the country to little more than a nuclear dump, Tibet has also had to put up with the Beijing regime’s demographic policies of Sinization, part of a general plan for the entire Far East that China has been pushing since the 1960s, with no qualms about the use of fiercely repressive measures to do so.

Tibet is thus another area of strategic importance to China, along with Burma or Darfur, where Chinese interests are protected and defended by local regimes with the use of systematic repression of all forms of struggle. Indeed, for years now China has had its eyes on Africa.

Its huge financial resources have now enabled China to become an international-level investor, supporting industrial projects in such places as South Africa, Venezuela, Sudan and Indochina. It can make agreements to manage corridors for raw materials from the Caspian Sea to its industrial areas in South-East Asia, an equal competitor with the likes of Russia, the USA and local potentates such as Iran or India. And thanks to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, it is also the region’s anti-Islamic policeman.

China’s gigantic financial surplus is the result of decades of accumulation thanks to the second way of “parallel development” (the profits from agriculture invested in industrialization) that China’s leaders followed from the late ‘60s to the early ‘70s, which consisted in the exploitation of Chinese workers, and also to the establishment, appropriation and management of the surplus by the Chinese State, which never feared to use — and still freely uses — open repression in order to impose its plans.

In fact, there never was a transition to communism in China. No technocracy ever took power. What we have seen over the last 60 years is State-capitalist management of the country by a rigidly-centralized bureaucracy, that is now running the transition to the wildest form of capitalism without first passing through the Western democratic system.

The tragedy of Tibet and its people is one and the same as the tragedy of Chinese workers, victims of the State dominion of the People’s Republic of China, in the name... of the people!

For the liberation of Tibet, for the self-determination of the Tibetan people, for workers’ autonomy in Tibet and in China!