Socialist Appeal - International Marxist Tendency
Marxism. Socialism. Revolution.
Less than a quarter of an hour after opening, the Chinese stock market was closed by an automatic shutdown. This "circuit-breaker" mechanism was imposed by the government only five months ago after equally dramatic losses. This reveals how nervous the Chinese government is of the underlying economic instability.
To add to the turmoil of Greece and the Euro Crisis, there is now the sudden collapse of the Chinese stock market, which has been so vast that even the mighty Chinese government is incapable of controlling it. The world economy is tottering, and these latest events in China are yet another sign of the diseased economic system that is capitalism.
Newly released figures show that the Chinese economy in 2014 experienced its lowest economic growth since 1990. Such figures illustrate the beginning of the end for China’s 'miraculous' boom, as the reality of capitalist crisis is seeping through to the world’s largest exporting economy.
Despite all the Keynesian experiments and the monetary stimulus, China has failed to escape the global economic crisis. Chinese workers are experiencing the economic slowdown in terms of the closures of factories and non-payment of wages. The result has been a surge in the number of strikes and the organisation of the working class in China.
Twenty-five years ago, on 4th June 1989, the Tian’anmen square movement was brutally smashed by the rifles and tanks of the Chinese troops. It was a heroic movement of the Chinese people in a struggle against the bureaucracy. Class struggle is again on the rise in China today; but unlike the movement of 1989, the workers and students in China today are a qualitatively and quantitatively more powerful and revolutionary force.