At around 6:56 a.m. on July 7, 33 forestry workers from the Minjiang Forestry General Farm in Longnan, Gansu Province, were walking to Renzang Village, Nanhe Town, Dangchang County, when they were trapped by a sudden landslide at Baxian Gully. On the morning of July 8, Longnan held a press conference. Executive Vice Mayor Ma Guokai said that the landslide at the Minjiang Forestry General Farm had trapped 33 people. All of them have now been rescued: 21 died, 7 suffered minor injuries, and 5 were unharmed. According to nearby villagers, all the dead were residents of Renzang, Rushu, and Gaoqiao villages. They were temporary workers at the forestry farm, recruited by a contracted third party to do „part-time forest-clearing work,“ earning 120 yuan a day. The official website of the Longnan municipal government says that the Minjiang Forestry General Farm is one of the city’s two state-owned forestry farms. Established in October 1964, it is a public institution with county-level administrative status. Located in Dangchang County, it manages a total area of 57,820 hectares, with 4.69 million cubic meters of standing timber and a forest coverage rate of 70.5%. After the incident, the Chinese revisionist authorities claimed that they had allocated 30 million yuan to support the emergency restoration of infrastructure and public-service facilities in the disaster area, and had dispatched medical experts to assist with the rescue. News reports also mentioned the local weather and the soil conditions at the site. In the face of the landslide, the Chinese fascist government acted as though it had done everything humanly possible but was powerless against fate.
First, people from different classes have different views of landslides, and therefore adopt different ways of responding to them. In their news reports, for example, the Chinese government makes grandiose claims about 30 million yuan in disaster-relief funds, experts and doctors being sent to treat the injured, and multiple departments mobilizing personnel for rescue operations. The comments are likewise full of talk about „natural disasters“ and pity. Yet fascist China’s measures for avoiding landslide risks do not consist of actively managing landslides. Instead, it uses another method: relocating villagers. For example, [the first phase of the ecological and geological-disaster relocation project implemented by the Gansu provincial government since 2022 reportedly moved 130,700 households—460,000 people—away from danger while simultaneously addressing 2,549 geological-disaster hazard sites. Disaster-related casualties and direct economic losses in the relevant areas fell by more than 90% year on year, largely achieving the expected goals.] But does relocation really solve the survival problems of working people? After relocating, these workers face unemployment and lose the land on which they depend for their livelihood. Water that was originally free or relatively cheap becomes a major living expense at the relocation site—unaffordable for workers whose median monthly income is 877.08 yuan. For China’s bureaucratic monopoly capitalist class, this arrangement has several advantages: first, it can use the opportunity to seize the peasants’ land, force them to leave, transfer it to land contractors, and collect large land-transfer fees; second, it can absolve itself of responsibility for disasters; and third, it makes it easier for the bourgeoisie to exploit workers who were previously difficult to exploit directly in the countryside. They even boast: [„Ecological protection has shifted from passive ‘end-of-pipe restoration’ to active ‘source reduction’; 301,900 people have been guided to gather orderly in towns and cities, raising Gansu’s urbanization rate by 1.23 percentage points.“] Their „active source reduction“ means doing nothing to prevent or manage disasters and forcing the population to relocate. In the face of natural disasters, fascist China seeks profit from them while neglecting them in normal times. It also claims that relocation solves the problem by protecting the environment. In reality, fascist China is not protecting an environment intended to secure the lives and livelihoods of the broad masses of workers, but one intended for the parasitic enjoyment of a small clique of bureaucratic monopoly capitalists.
In Chairman Mao’s era, workers and peasants in socialist China, as masters of society, believed that the conditions of production could be changed through human effort. They therefore responded actively to landslides. Dazhai Village in Xiyang County, Shanxi, for example, used environmental transformation as a way of reducing disaster risks: [„Dazhai’s land was either suspended on mountain ridges or squeezed along ravines. Its so-called 700 mu of farmland was scattered across a hillside in more than 4,700 separate patches—here a palm-sized piece, there a dustpan-sized one—the ‘seven gullies, eight ridges, and one slope’ people often describe. Long-term soil erosion had weakened fertility, and yields were as low as they could be, only 70 or 80 jin per mu. Chen Yonggui led everyone in carrying out a ten-year plan to transform Dazhai. The goal was to turn every barren gully into fertile land and every sloping plot into a terrace. The key was to turn the ‘three losses’ into the ‘three protections.’ Because Dazhai’s land lacked boundaries and retaining walls and had steep slopes, rain caused water, fertilizer, and soil to run off. The plots became smaller, the soil layer thinner, fertility weaker, and yields lower. To turn the ‘three losses’ into the ‘three protections,’ Chen Yonggui proposed specific measures for the ten-year plan: build dams in sections along the gullies, drive stakes and build embankments on the slopes and ridges, carry soil to fill plots with thin soil layers, and raise low areas and lower high areas on steep plots. The steps were to begin with the easy before tackling the difficult, the small before the large, with comprehensive planning and concentrated management. Each autumn after the harvest, labor would be concentrated on treating the gullies; from the Spring Festival until spring plowing, on leveling the land; and in summer and autumn, spare time would be used to build embankments and maintain existing projects. By 1962, Dazhai had successfully completed its ten-year land-building plan. Over the decade, 180 stone dams were built and 130,000 cubic meters of rock excavated; each worker carried an average of more than 880 loads of stone per year. In basic land construction, more than 210,000 work shifts were invested, averaging over 120 per worker annually. Every cultivated plot on the seven gullies, eight ridges, and one slope was treated, and more than 4,700 small sloping plots were gradually combined into over 1,700 level terraces that produced reliable harvests in both droughts and floods.“] Dazhai’s victory over landslide-related problems shows that landslides are not impossible to address; they can even be transformed into terraces, turning disaster-stricken land into productive farmland. This was an achievement of socialist China. Socialist China also relied on observation posts staffed by commune members, militia members, and grassroots geological workers, who inspected dangerous sites during the rainy season. Once cracks, abnormal springs, or small collapses were discovered, villagers were immediately organized for evacuation and repairs. This was completely different from fascist China, which ignored dangers before disasters occurred. Because the broad working people of socialist China were members of people’s communes, and because they had the right to democratic management—the commune was the peasants’ home—they were able to exercise their initiative and overcome natural disasters in many areas. Even after disasters, many communes upheld the spirit of the „three no’s,“ refusing to depend on state financial relief and advocating that difficulties be absorbed collectively. After the famous Dazhai Brigade in Shanxi suffered severe mudslides and flooding, for instance, it proclaimed: „No relief grain, no relief funds, and no relief supplies,“ relying on collective strength to rebuild its home.
Even if fascist China genuinely undertakes disaster prevention, the difference from socialist China is as vast as heaven and earth. Fascist China relies on construction contractors in capitalist society, while socialist China relied on the broad working masses. The former merely covets disaster-prevention funds and has no concern for the workers living in the area. Under layers of subcontracting and embezzlement by the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, it can produce only shoddy projects, whose true nature is often exposed by even minor disasters. The latter relied on the working people, who grew up on the land and built facilities genuinely beneficial to local production, with their own interests directly involved. That is why they could build the Liulan Reservoir, which lasted for 60 years, and create one miracle after another. Although fascist China boasts about itself and denigrates the achievements of the socialist period, spreading the lie that working people lacked knowledge and that traditional methods without high technology or experts were backward and unsustainable, one must ask: does the bourgeoisie’s vaunted high-tech disaster prevention really reach the countryside in today’s fascist China? How many natural disasters could the working people of China overcome, but have instead been deliberately stifled by the bureaucratic bourgeoisie? Probably countless numbers.
Second, regarding the victims of the landslide, we must recognize that they were forestry workers from nearby villages who died while preparing to travel to work. These workers worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.—a full 12 hours—but earned only 120 yuan a day, or just 10 yuan per hour. They were not transported to work and usually brought their own food. The work was also seasonal, concentrated mainly in spring (afforestation), autumn (forest tending and clearing), and winter (building firebreaks). The effective working season was normally only three to six months per year. Once the season ended, these workers became unemployed, making their lives even harder to sustain. „Capital can destroy every regularity of employment and, entirely according to its own convenience, arbitrariness, and momentary interest, make the most extreme overwork alternate with relative or total unemployment.“ (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 1963 edition, p. 593.) Workers entering forest areas often face numerous dangers: steep mountains, sharp slopes, and dense thorny vegetation. Long-term physical overexertion commonly causes serious occupational illnesses such as arthritis and herniated lumbar discs. In addition, using sharp machinery such as chainsaws and brush cutters, or carrying saplings on steep slopes, can easily lead to cutting injuries, landslides, falls, and other workplace accidents. Under these dangerous conditions, forestry farms commonly use a labor-contractor system. When a worker is injured or wages are due at the end of a job, the contractors often disappear. To obtain proof of a workplace injury, workers must sue the forestry farm with which they have an employment relationship. But the forestry farms are themselves part of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie and use every means to prevent workers from proving their employment relationship in the courts of the monopoly bourgeoisie. Workers often cannot obtain compensation for workplace injuries or the wages they earned. These workers are generally middle-aged or elderly, around 50 or 60 years old, living in villages near the forestry farm. When young, they were forced to go to cities as migrant workers. For decades, the large cities were built through their labor, yet when capitalism entered crisis, migrant workers were forced to return home. „Under these circumstances, competition among workers for the sale of their labor power becomes more intense, while competition among capitalists for the purchase of labor power correspondingly weakens. This places workers at a frequent disadvantage in the labor market and capitalists at a frequent advantage. In order to survive, workers have no choice but to sell their labor power under the harsh conditions of wages driven down by capitalists. The price of labor power is therefore often pushed below its value.“ (Xu He, An Introduction to Political Economy, People’s Publishing House, 1975, p. 156.) For forestry workers, landslides are only one of many dangers; their hardships go far beyond this. After these workers died, their families were either migrant workers elsewhere or children. Their deaths cut off the children’s sources of income and plunged them into desperation. Even when family support prevents children from reaching that point, the burden on the workers’ relatives becomes much heavier.
The situation of forestry workers in China is not isolated or exceptional. Blueberry pickers in Dandong, Liaoning, and sugarcane workers in Guangxi, for example, generally face extremely long hours, cycles of high-intensity labor and unemployment, terrible working conditions, and frequent workplace injuries. After workers are injured, the bourgeoisie can often evade responsibility by blaming intermediaries; sometimes they even refuse to pay wages. Why? Because since revisionists seized power, China has become not only a capitalist country but also the most savage, reactionary, and frenzied form of capitalism—fascism. The Chinese fascist government uses its supposedly „impartial“ laws in administrative and judicial practice to protect capitalists’ interests as far as possible, and directly uses force when large-scale workers’ movements occur. Many events in recent years have revealed the class character of the state machinery. In 2019, a deputy governor of Gansu brazenly declared at the China Entrepreneur Club: „Anyone who opposes private enterprises, we will oppose.“ That same year, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate proposed that, for private entrepreneurs involved in criminal cases, prosecutors should „not arrest when arrest is unnecessary, not prosecute when prosecution is unnecessary, and recommend suspended sentences when actual imprisonment is unnecessary“—putting the notion that „the law does not punish the great“ on open display. If the Nazi government dares to be so brazen publicly, the judiciary’s double standards in tolerating capitalists’ hiring of gangsters to attack workers and suppress the 2018 Jasic workers’ movement are even more numerous. During the 2022 Henan rural-bank depositors’ rights-defense incident, the Henan government sent plainclothes police into the crowd to spy, disrupt, and inflame the situation, then directly instructed gang members to brutally beat the depositors. ( The Revolutionary Road of China’s Future, p. 18, note 2.) This is why workers’ conditions in China are so poor. To understand this, we must first know that wage levels depend on the value of the means of subsistence necessary to reproduce labor power… Because the value of labor power can change, the physiological and social factors determining it are constantly changing; and there is considerable flexibility between these physiological and social factors. Therefore, so long as the working class wages a determined struggle to raise wages, it is possible to temporarily improve its living conditions. (An Introduction to Political Economy, People’s Publishing House, 1975 edition, p. 156.) In reality, China’s bourgeoisie openly uses the weapons of bourgeois dictatorship to repress the working masses, allowing capitalists to employ workers at a cost barely sufficient to reproduce their labor power. Under this fascist dictatorship, workers are in an extremely unfavorable position. Their wages often merely sustain their own reproduction as labor power; sometimes, because capitalists deliberately withhold wages, workers are forced to borrow in order to survive. Even when workers are injured or killed at work, families seeking compensation are directly suppressed by the Chinese fascist government. Whether dead or alive, the workers affected by the landslide continue to suffer the ravages and oppression of the Chinese fascist government.
As noted earlier, Chinese fascism has abandoned the management of landslides and simply lets them take their course. Why? Because China’s monopoly bourgeoisie operates through capitalist production relations and depends on large coastal cities for its rule and development. Its demand from rural areas in inland Gansu is merely for cheap labor. How does fascist China achieve this? In practice, it exploits the urban-rural divide. Under capitalist production relations, capitalists favor coastal cities, where commodity circulation and the concentration of capital accumulation are advantageous. After restoring capitalist relations, fascist China deliberately concentrated capital in the coastal cities of the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta to obtain more surplus value. In the countryside, it dissolved the people’s communes and forced households to farm separately. This produced polarization and drove large numbers of rural workers into cities as a reserve labor force for capitalist enterprises. Thus, news reports about the village where the dead forestry workers lived show that young workers had gone to the cities as migrant workers, leaving mainly middle-aged and elderly people in the villages. Cities, meanwhile, concentrated large quantities of means of production and labor for large-scale machine production. The Yangtze and Pearl River Deltas’ coastal and river transport greatly facilitated imports and exports, enabling the monopoly bourgeoisie to turn over capital and expand accumulation. After restoring capitalism, the Chinese revisionist authorities hastily announced measures such as special economic zones, using political means to forcibly concentrate the means of production and exploiting the urban-rural divide to drive peasants forced back into small-scale production into cities as an industrial reserve army. The bourgeoisie could then continuously expand capitalist production in these cities. Under these conditions, cities developed ever further and accumulated ever more capital, producing more bourgeoisie and proletariat. Capitalism develops unevenly: the growing bourgeoisie places capital first in coastal and riverside cities favorable to capitalist production, while peasants in the countryside continue to go bankrupt in small-scale production and more move to the cities. Inland industrial sectors, apart from supplying raw materials for coastal capitalism, shrink as labor leaves inland villages and small cities and as they compete with coastal industries. The contraction of inland markets drives still more workers to the large coastal cities as an industrial reserve army. This produces China’s extreme urban-rural divide. [„Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Fujian account for more than one-third of China’s total economic output and nearly 40% of fiscal revenue; they contribute nearly 80% of local net fiscal transfers to the central government. Fifty-one percent of listed companies, and 60% of the market capitalization of the STAR and ChiNext markets, come from these five provinces and municipalities. Their market entities absorb 70% of the country’s interprovincial migrant-worker employment. The Yangtze and Pearl River Deltas account for nearly 60% of China’s imports and exports.“] China Economic Weekly, August 15, 2022, issue 1. Capitalist production relations make urban development dependent on the relative subordination of the countryside and agricultural workers. Thus, the more developed these capital-concentrated coastal cities become, the more it means that migrant workers like the affected forestry workers and their children will suffer. The more capitalism develops, the more places such as Longnan, Gansu, decay; disasters such as landslides become increasingly impossible to address, and the bourgeoisie is unwilling to address them. When capitalism weakens because of economic crisis, migrant workers can only be laid off by capitalists and become unemployed, returning to agriculture as a last resort. Whether landslides, being driven from one’s home to become a migrant worker, or the brutal treatment of agricultural workers, all of this tells us: capitalism is the greatest disaster facing working people! Only socialism can save China. Only then can working people in inland provinces such as Gansu fully develop their initiative and reduce landslides and the likelihood that working people will face such events. Let us remember the deaths of these 21 workers. We must remember the working people in inland areas such as Gansu, sacrificed and neglected by capitalism; remember the disasters capitalism has caused throughout China; and never forget the suffering inflicted on working people by the monopoly bourgeoisie.
