 Well, in 40 minutes, it's a big task to deal with such a vast subject, but I will try and touch on the basic points. If anybody wants to do any historical reading on this, I would suggest Trotsky's writings on China in the 1930s. I would suggest Ted Grant's material after the Second World War, what he wrote in 1948 and in the 60s. And then, of course, more recent material, our document, the Long March to Capitalism, and other articles on China, available on Marxist.com. Now, what is the Chinese regime? It's a good question, and we have to be able to answer it concretely. Because you see, when you're struggling to change society, and you present yourself as Marxist or Communist or Socialist, you're inevitably going to get the question, do you want to create a regime like the one we had in Russia under Stalin? Do you want to create a regime like the one we have in China? If the answer to that is yes, I'm telling you, a lot of workers can say, I'm sorry, not interested. It would not enhance the cause of socialism, it would stifle it. And yet, we have to answer the question, what were these regimes and what is China? Now, recent little bit of news that came out was that the number of billionaires in China this year increased by 257. Now China has 878 billionaires. The United States has 626. There are something like 2000 individuals in China now who have a total wealth in their hands of $4 trillion. And this year, they earned more than ever before. Now, if we were to believe some of today's Stalinists, apologists, let's say for these regimes, we'd have to believe that they're building socialism in China. But what I just said seems somewhat to contradict that. And yet, I've actually heard Chinese Stalinists arguing that we're building socialism through capitalism, you see, which is an interesting way of building socialism, i.e., by allowing the profit motive to be unleashed. Another question is a genuine socialist regime oppressing nations, national groups such as the Uyghurs, or unleashing the brutal oppression of the movement in Hong Kong. Is that socialism? Is that what socialism is about? If you argue that, you're welcome to go and try and... I haven't got time to go into the details of it, but what is socialism? Well, let's put it this way. What is... It must be based, one, public ownership with the means of production, planned economy, but that's not enough. It also must be based on democratic workers' control and management of those means of production. It must be based on the workers' rights to assemble, to debate, to criticize, to elect their leaders. It must be based on the principle that the people who are elected can be recalled by the workers who elected them at any moment. And, furthermore, they must not earn more than the average wage of a worker. Question, do we have that in China today? I don't think you need to worry too much about looking this up on the internet to get the right answer. You don't have to do a Google on that one. I think it's abundantly clear that that is not what we have in China today. We actually have not just these billionaires, they're members of the Communist Party. They use the Communist Party to promote their interests. They're tightly connected with the bureaucracy of the Communist Party. Now, in 1949 there was a revolution which abolished capitalism, and landlordism, feudalism established the economic, let's say the economic premises for the creation of a worker state. But never, since day one, were there the elements of workers' democracy. Right from the beginning, that regime modeled itself on the Soviet Union, but not the Soviet Union of 1920 or 22 or 23, the Soviet Union of 1949, i.e. a Stalinist dictatorship. So, right from the beginning, it was already what we would define as a deformed worker state, i.e. you have the economic base for a worker state, i.e. you have the nationalisation, you have the public ownership, you have planning, but it's not under the control of the working class. And if it's not under the control of the working class, somebody else obviously is running society, and that somebody else is a bureaucracy standing above society, above the working class. Now, I haven't got time here to go and quote Trotsky, but Trotsky pointed out that once you have such a deformation, in the case of the Soviet Union, a degeneration of the revolution and the rise of a bureaucracy, a privileged bureaucracy earning above the average wage of the workers standing above society, implicit in that is the danger of capitalist restoration, because the bureaucracy would not be satisfied simply with being a privileged bureaucrat who's coming off some of the wealth produced in the plan, but would want to become owners of the wealth, direct owners, direct owners of the means of production, and to pass it on to their heirs, to their offspring. Trotsky makes that point. And when Trotsky made that point, he was attacked by the Stalinists, had you attacking socialism, communism, all the rest of it. History now has come full circle was Trotsky correct to raise that point. Where did capitalism come from in Russia? Who promoted capitalism in the Soviet Union when it collapsed? It came from within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. You look at even Putin used to have a Communist Party card in his pocket. And in China, what we have is a process whereby from within the bureaucracy, you've had the promotion of capitalism. Now, after 1949, there was a development of the Chinese economy. Between 1957, 1970, it was growing by something like eight, nine percent a year. Just to give you an example, in 1952, China was producing 1000 tractors in this huge country. 1970, 690,000. So there was development. There was a step forward for society. China was actually on average growing faster than the capitalist West in in that period. Of course, that was starting from a very, very low level of economic development. And therefore it had a lot to do in terms of catching up with the advanced economies of countries like the United States or Western Europe, Japan, etc. But nonetheless, there was a development. For example, what I was talking about privilege in 1976, an industrial worker working at about 48 hours a week was earning about $12 a month. Professionals, on the other hand, were earning $120 a month. That's already a difference of 10 to one. So we have the danger of the capitalist restoration, i.e. that privileged layer has an interest in first maintaining that position, i.e. privilege, and then finding ways of guaranteeing that privilege is preserved. Now, I haven't got time to deal with a lot of the questions which I'd like to deal with, but we cover a lot of this in our written material. Let's look back a little bit at the history. In the 1970s, it was clear the Soviet Union was in severe crisis. Its rate of economic growth had slowed first down to two or three percent, i.e. slower than the capitalist West. And then eventually it hit zero growth, and that's where you had all the scenes of shops that were empty, lack of goods, etc. In the meantime, in China, you had the conflict within the bureaucracy, which is basically between the Mao wing, you could say, and what was to become the Deng wing of the party. The gang of four after the death of Mao were trying actually to launch a second cultural revolution, but with the Mao gone, the bureaucracy felt far more confident and stopped them, arrested them. And then by 1978 you have Deng Xiaoping at the top of the party, who begins the process which led us to where we are today. That process was opening up China to foreign capitalist investment. He began by promoting four special economic zones, not by chance they were around Hong Kong and Macau, which were pockets of capitalism, let's say, in China, in Guangdong and Fujian. We would argue that when they started on this road, there was no preconceived plan. It's not as if Deng said, right, we're going to launch this plan, and in 40 years time, China has gone to be capitalist. That wasn't the way things developed. It would be too much to think that that was how far ahead he could see. We would argue there was a logic in what they were doing in the sense that there's a certain similarity here with the NEP, the new economic policy that was launched in the 20s in the Soviet Union, i.e. In the backwardness of the economy, in order to attract foreign investment, foreign technique and technology, you can open up to these private investors in an attempt to advance further your own economy. Also, allowing sectors, such as the small farmers, etc., to sell their goods in the market. Now, it started off as a way of trying to stimulate growth and develop the economy, but step by step it moved closer and closer to a moment where the economy actually was transformed. For instance, in 1983, the state-owned enterprises were allowed to hire workers on a contract basis for a temporary period. Thus, the old guaranteed for life jobs began to go. More and more, the profit motive was introduced as a criteria for the functioning of the economy. In the mid-1980s, however, was still within the sphere of using market stimuli, but within the plan, where the plan still dominated and the state sector still dominated. But already you see how the terminology begins to change. In 1984, for instance, at the 12th Congress of the Party, they started talking about a planned commodity economy. In 1987 at the 13th Party Congress, they developed the idea of an export-orientated economy. You see if you have an export-orientated economy, that means you're orientating your economy to sell goods in the world market. So you start to begin to function according to the needs of the world market. And capitalism was still the dominant mode of production on a global scale, which is an important factor in determining the way things turned out. Now, this led to a big increase in the importation of machinery in order to develop the industry and a sharp rise in China's balance of trade deficit in that period. And in 88-89, we had the emergence of inflation, 18% a year, for example. And we had what in a planned economy is an anomaly, is the first recession in 1989, which comes at the same time, not by chance. This is what is the background to the movement of Tiananmen, student protests, but also, very importantly, the working class began to intervene in 1989. We published something interesting recently written by some Chinese lefts who written some very interesting material about what happened at that time and about the role of the working class. IE, the working class began to move independently in an attempt also to build its own organizations. That's why the bureaucracy clamped down so hard on Tiananmen. They could not tolerate an independent movement of the working class. Ten minutes ago? Put yourselves in the shoes of the bureaucrats in China. You have Tiananmen. You have the potential, the potential for a political revolution in China at that time. You look across the border in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. And in 1989, you have the movement beginning in one country and then spreading right across the whole of Eastern Europe, finally with the collapse of the regime in Romania in a very violent way. The whole of Eastern Europe, the regimes collapsed and began to revert to capitalism. Within a short period of time, 1991, the Soviet Union collapses with a huge collapse in production. Just the collapse of the Soviet Union as a default workers state, the collapse of the plan, the Soviet Union breaks up into its component parts into the 15 republics who become independent. And the power of the old Soviet bureaucracy enormously weakened. The Chinese bureaucracy observing this before it happened, the crisis and the slowdown of the Soviet Union. And what we see is the bureaucracy clumps down in 1989, 1989 slows down the process of reform for a short while to try and restabilize a situation. And then out from 1992 onwards, the process starts to accelerate again. And for instance, for instance, at the 14th Party Congress, they came up with the term a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics. What is a socialist market economy, the two things are in complete contradiction. And it is they began a process of privatization. 2500 local smaller state on enterprises were prepared for privatization and about 100 century run state on enterprises. By 1998, all of these had been privatized. In time, the Chinese bureaucracy were not going down this road to open up China completely to multinational corporations and to imperialist domination by the US, Europe, Germany, Japan etc. They held on to about 1000 of the major corporations. They kept them as state owned, they closed the less productive sectors, they've used companies together, they invested huge amounts of public money. The plan of course is to create competitive Chinese corporations that can hold their position in the world market. Now, by the end of the 1990s, the state owned enterprises were employing something like 83 million people, which was about 12% of total unemployment. We're still talking about a kind of economy with a large rural sector. In the cities, around 30% of the workers were now working in the state sector. But compare this to 1978, when 78% of urban employment was in the state sector, you see the shift that's already taken place. And I have quotes here from some sources. This is from a book called The Exit the Dragon privatization estate controlled in China by Stephen Green and Guy S. Liu. It says we see how around by this period, around 40% of industrial output was privatized. Together with this, we have the private sector that developed outside the state sector, both front and indigenous, i.e. you have privatization of some of the state owned enterprises. The promotion of homegrown capitalist companies and the coming in foreign companies, which at one point represented something like 20, 25% of GDP in China. So we see a gradual decline in the percentage of the economy, which is in the hands of the state sector. And then in September 1999, we have what they call the let go of policy. I was adopted, which is further loosening up in the medium and small state owned enterprises. Between 1990 and 2000, between 30 and 40 million state jobs are destroyed. The so-called rust belt of the Northeast where households of industry were closed. And the growing capitalist sector within the economy. This eventually led to a situation where something like 60% of GDP was being produced by private companies. The fact that 450 of the top 500 multinationals were operating in China is an indication of how far the process had gone. Now, the calculations of how big the private sector is depend on who's making the calculations. But all of them indicate that a majority of GDP is produced by private companies. The Chinese trade unions and the Chamber of Commerce in China even say that something like 60% of the economy is in private hands, if not more. However, we still have the big state sector, state owned companies, which are being promoted and defended by the state. And now it's because of this big state sector that there's confusion on the left, i.e. Because there's so many state-run companies, China must still be somehow communist. Well, you know, it's not just the number of state-owned companies which determine the nature of an economy or a regime. In 1934, for example, how many of you know that 70% of the economy was in state hands? That wouldn't you say, well, it must have been a worker state, but it was fascist Italy. It wasn't obviously a worker state, it was the state intervening to save capitalism, taking over companies and running them with public money. Even in the 70s, Italy, 50% of the economy was in state hands. And countries like Britain, France, Germany in the 1970s, 30 to 35% of the economy was in the hands of the state. You know, in Britain, British Leyland, cars were being produced by the state, coals, gas, electricity, water, all of these sectors and others. The railways, they were all state-run. Italy had five-year plans for decades. It didn't make it a worker state or socialist economy. It's not the first time that we've seen capitalism being developed from the state, you know, the backbone of the economy was actually the state itself. We had it in Japan in the 1800s and in Germany under Bismarck. What I'm trying to say is state enterprises alone does not equal socialism and even a degree of planning by itself is not socialism. We have to look at the overall functioning of the economy. So what we have is the building of a market economy through the state. We reached a point where at its peak, I think foreign investment represented something like 28%, 25% depending on the sources you look at. And the indigenous private enterprises were something like 22% about 20 years ago. Now, this growing private sector is something you need to look at as Marxist. We don't limit ourselves to saying, yes, it's capitalist, no, it's socialist. You look at a process and you see what direction it's going in. Now it's 40 years that they've been on the capitalist road or building socialism through capitalism. As someone would say, if you continue on that road, you're going to get from A to B, you're no longer going to be at A. Eventually you're going to be at B and you're going to go beyond it. At a certain point, there's a qualitative change that takes place. And what we saw was at a certain point in the 2000s, when you start looking at the figures, looking at the facts of what's been going on, you find that the bulk of the economy is being produced privately. The state-owned enterprises are not functioning as companies within a planned economy, but have been given the right to hold on to the profits. They run according to the profit motive. And you have a greater and greater connection with the rising capitalist class. 20 minutes. Yeah. I don't want to quote Trotsky here because I've already said what he was the famous quote about how the bureaucracy would eventually, he says here, he says the victory of the bureaucracy in this decisive sphere, i.e. this growing privatisation, would mean its conversion into a new possessing class, i.e. the bureaucracy itself begins to transform itself into a property class. And that's what we're seeing in China, I have seen in China today. I'm going to have to skip a lot of the stuff I have here because of the time. Now, the question of the direction. Trotsky in 1938 wrote a text called, Does the Soviet government still follow the principles adopted 20 years ago? Because the question was being posed. Are they moving towards capitalism? This is how he posed it. Of decisive importance in evaluating the nature of society is the following question. Is the society evolving in the direction of equality or in the direction of privileges? The answer to this question does not leave room for any doubts, whatever. And then Trotsky added, 20 years after the revolution, the Soviet state has become the most centralised despotic and bloodthirsty apparatus of coercion and compulsion. The evolution of the Soviet, therefore proceeds in complete contradiction to the principles of the Bolshevik program. The reason for it is to be found in this, that society, as has already been said, is evolving not towards socialism, but towards the regeneration of social contradictions. That was the process. Hadn't completed yet, it remained still a planned economy. But the direction it was moving in was the point that we have to stress. And Trotsky reiterated the point. He said, in 1937, he said, nobody has ever denied the possibility, especially in case of prolonged world decay, of the restoration of a new possessing class springing from the bureaucracy. Well, this was a brilliant analysis on the part of Trotsky. And I think that what has happened in China, particularly confirms what he was saying. The fact that we have all these billionaires now is is a confirmation of a process indicates where we have reached on the question of growing inequality. In China, it's abundantly clear to anybody that looks at the facts and figures that China is more and more unequal, not more equal. Inequality means privilege and means the tendency towards class differentiation. A report in 2008 by the Boston Consulting Group concludes, thus, wealth in China is highly concentrated. Less than 1% of households in China hold more than 70% of the nation's personal wealth. Even amongst these households, the richest 0.1% of the nation, with financial assets of more than $1 million, control approximately 45.2% of China's wealth. How more unequal do you need to get before you start to think and realize this is not the commonest paradise that some people try and approach. The fact that the flag is still red and has a hammer and sick and it means nothing in terms of the nature of the regime in terms of the inequality that exists. There's lots and lots of facts which I haven't got time to go into or lots of them about the degree of inequality and the poor getting poorer, etc. Although, obviously, there's a layer that's got richer and there's a middle layer which has risen up with economic development, obviously. Right. Sorry, I'm trying to skip forward. Now you see, we, as an IMT, looked at all these facts and figures after 2000, and it was becoming clear that this was no longer a transitional regime from the previous deformed worker state, how your planned economy still, let's say this is the economic base of a worker state, albeit without the worker's democracy. It was in transition. And sometimes you have to maintain the position that it's in transition. It hasn't completed the process yet. It's still fundamentally of a particular nature, i.e. it's still a planned economy. But we know in which direction it's going. At a certain point, Marxists have to look at a process and say, has the process stopped? Has it reversed? Has it moved on? It was clear by the 2000s that from a whole number of statistics, facts and figures, the process had moved further. Now you can never actually say exactly when something changes into something else. You know, night is night and day is day. The dawn is a moment of transition between the two. When exactly is it daytime and when exactly does nighttime cease? I don't think anybody can actually say it's that precise second, but they can say the night was the night and the day is the day. And we've gone from one to the other. And you have to acknowledge the fact at a certain point that that transition has taken place. And that is what we have in China. It's a peculiar regime because it's still the old bureaucracy. You'd say, oh, still the same people in power. There was no revolution. There was no counter-revolution. There was no violent overthrow of one or the other. But even Lenin accepted the idea that the danger of a capitalist restoration could come from within the Bolshevik Party itself. He quoted a professor who was boasting about that possibility. And he could see it. And yet today's so-called Marxist Leninist can't see what Lenin could see as a possibility. And even spite of everything that's happened, in spite of the return to capitalism and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the building of capitalist market economy in China in the hands of the old bureaucracy, of course still in power and still have the leaves of the state in their hands, but they have consciously guided a process towards the development of a market economy. Now I'm going to jump forward because of lack of time. There is one positive aspect in all of this from Marxist point of view. From the point of view of the regression to a market economy, it's a step backwards, in spite of all the propaganda that the market is the best thing since sliced bread. Look around the world today and you'll see that's no longer true. Look at the situation in America. Look at Europe, the growing unemployment, the growing levels of poverty, the wars, the barbarism across the whole planet. This is capitalism, not the capitalism which gives everybody a nice standard of living and peace and tranquility and you can get on and enjoy your lives. We're in a very critical moment, but in them to go back to China, it's a regressive step and it will be abundantly clear in the near future how regressive that step has been for China. But the one positive aspect of it is this, the enormous industrialization of China and the enormous transformation has taken place, something like 20 million people a year moving into the cities from the rural areas. It's an unfinished process of course that because there's still large areas of rural China, which is still pretty backward, a large section of the population is still rural. It's not at the level of the United States or a Europe where the overwhelming majority of the economy now is industrial and the peasantry has been reduced to a tiny or they've actually disappeared. It's now industrial farming in the West. In China, it's gone a long way, but not completed. But because of the size of the country and the size of the areas that have been developed, you have a massive proletariat. Working class, far stronger, numerically speaking than it was in 1949. Very powerful working class, in fact, the biggest industrial proletariat in the world, in fact, something like 200 million workers. Now, that is where the danger for the bureaucracy lies. And it going back to Karl Marx, they have created their own grave diggers, this massive proletariat. And in the period in the last decade, the last 10 years, the early part of this decade, 2011, 2015, 16, we saw a massive increase in strikes. Protests, etc. Year on year on year on year. And we published material on this in over the years. If you look at the statistics, you see this growing level of militancy of the working class. Now that partially was cut across by the bureaucracy, forcing some companies to make concessions, pay back wages. They needed to calm this situation down because it was getting out of control. It also explains another aspect of Chinese society today. There was a time when you had this so-called collective leadership at the top of the Chinese Communist Party. And the idea that every secretary would be, for one term, and then would concede to the collective leadership at the top, and somebody else would come in as the secretary. You notice that Xi Jinping has changed that. He's centralising power in his hands, actually. He's emerging as the strongman at the top, the bonaparte. This is combined with greater and greater repression. For instance, what they're doing to the Uighurs, the level of surveillance and the methods they use there are in effect experimental and practicing methods which they use more widely. They've massively increased control of the internet in an attempt to stifle discussion, stifle debate, stop young people and workers in China from looking for ideas outside China. And in spite of that, the other day we published an article which showed that there's a mass radicalisation taking place amongst the youth, a questioning of the regime. And in spite of all the measures they take, the young people find ways of getting around that and making news circulate and discussion take place. But this increased centralisation of power is an indication that the bureaucracy at the top are conscious of the dangers implanted in the situation. Their legitimacy is guaranteed by the ability to develop the economy to be able to say, look, we've created a powerful China, we've modernised, we've increased the standard of living for a significant layer of the population. All of this is what they need to legitimise their own regime. But a crisis of capitalism means a crisis also of China. China has been slowing down in the recent years. Over the last 10, 15 years we've seen China going from extremely high levels of growth, over 10%, 13%, 14% in some years. Before the coronavirus crisis hit, they were hovering around the 6% mark, which would be amazing for Italy or Britain. For China, because of the ongoing process of urbanisation, they always said they required 7%, 8% growth just to maintain stability, i.e. to create the jobs necessary to absorb the migrant labour coming in. They've reached a point where they're now facing crisis and instability. So what we have is a Chinese economy tightly connected to the world market, a large of the majority of the GDP produced in private hands. The economy functioning according to the laws of the market, the profit motive, although it's distorted clearly by the state, promoting certain companies, forcing the banks to lend and to support certain companies, because they're building Chinese capitalist companies. They have no intention of giving up on that. But we have all the statistics about the growing levels of debt. China had no public debt in 1978. Now the combined total of public debt, private sector debt, corporate debt, local administration debt and household debt, the figure is something like 250% of GDP. The growing levels of bad debt in China, they've sustained it by constantly pumping in more and more money to sustain the economy, probably the biggest Keynesian package we've ever seen in history of public stimulation of the economy. But that cannot continue forever. In 2019, here's the figure, 245% of GDP, the total debt, and it grew by 6% year on year. But the predictions are that it's going up further. And the latest figures show they've gone over 300%. And a large jump in the public debt took place earlier this year as they spent massive amounts of money to buy themselves out of the crisis. Now they, they, everybody's boasting about China now is managed to manage the COVID crisis. They did that through stringent lockdown and tracking mechanisms. Hundreds of billions of dollars in major infrastructure projects were spent to fuel growth. The problem is that's contributing more and more to rising debt and bad loans. And this inevitably is preparing another crisis. And China is going to be a contributing factor to the world crisis capitalism. Back in 2008 2009, China provided an outlet for the capital, Germany, for instance, was growing on the back of exports to China. Now China has slowed down, even though it's recovered from the worst of the crisis earlier this year. But it's a capitalist economy. Now, to go. I don't want to repeat things I've already said. As I said, it's integrated into the world economy. It depends a large degree on the world market. It must export. It's behaving in a way, which is like that of an imperialist country, building the road network, rail network, sea routes, et cetera, to guarantee the export of goods and the import of raw materials. Massively investing in continents like Africa, building roads and railways, but grabbing mineral resources. And it's emerged as a major power on a global scale. But you would think that that would be good for world capitalism. The problem is, when you have massive overproduction on a global scale and massive over capacity, and China has contributed to that, building massive capacity on a global scale. This must mean conflict on a global scale. You know, it's not just the Cold War that produces conflict between Russia and the West as it was then. The First World War erupted at a time where there were no worker states or any kind of planned economy. The war was a war between powerful capitalist economies who had reached the limit of how far they could settle accounts on economic terms, i.e. through competition. They reached a point where the only way they could decide who was going to dominate was by going to war. Now we have a conflict between China, the United States, China, Europe, Russia and Europe, Russia and the United States. And these are conflicts of powers in a period of overall crisis of world capitalism, which explains the conflicts which are taking place. It explains the measures that Trump, for instance, is taking, although even the American ruling class is in conflict with itself on that one. Because measures you take to curb imports from one country inevitably lead to tit-for-tat measures, and you risk pushing the whole world economy into a global trade war, which has already begun. But we're only in the early days of that. So to conclude, what began as a process of stimulating the planned economy with market measures? Because it was done by a privileged bureaucracy and not a revolutionary communist regime with the workers in power, which would have been a very different thing, you have already a privileged bureaucracy. Take me into account what I said about Trotsky's analysis of that and what that would entail in terms of consequences. We ended up with a peculiar capitalist regime created by the bureaucracy of a deformed worker state. Now from Marx's point of view, the fact that capitalism has been created in China, not by a rising bourgeoisie like the French or the British, but by basically another caste of people in society shouldn't be too surprising. Because if you look at the way capitalism was created in Japan or Germany, you see elements of one class. Because of the global developments, and i.e. if a country is to remain powerful and to defend its national interests, where capitalism dominates, you must go down the capitalist road. That's what the feudal aristocracy did in Germany and that's what a section of the Japanese feudal aristocracy did in Japan. In China, a different version of that is the bureaucracy of China, seeing the collapse of Eastern Europe, seeing the crisis of the Soviet Union and the dangers that the alarm bells ringing there for their own system. They were determined that they were going to maintain themselves as a privileged elite and this could be done by adopting capitalist methods. Once you go from a certain quantity, you produce a qualitative change. What we've seen in China is the quantitative changes of a capitalist type over a period of decades has produced a qualitative change in the nature of the economy and even in the nature of the bureaucracy itself and the way it's running society. But the positive aspect of this is now we have, as I said earlier on, the biggest proletariat you ever seen in history, an educated, skilled working class, an educated youth and expectations, obviously. And this system that they've created inevitably will enter into crisis because it now has the contradictions of capitalism grafted on, let's say, to the old bureaucratic system. And the answer to the question, what is China is? It's an ex-deform worker state, an ex-planned economy where the bureaucracy, in order to maintain its privileges, has adopted more and more capitalist methods to the point where the nature of the economy itself has been transformed. It's a peculiar development, but history knows all kinds of mutations, as we know. There's no pure, clean development, you know, feudalism and capitalism, etc., etc. But what we have now is a modern industrialized China, powerful proletariat, massive means of productions at that disposal, but the contradictions of capitalism which have now been brought into that economy. And as the world crisis of capitalism develops, China will be impacted and China in turn will impact on that. And the working class of China will play a key role in the future struggle for socialism. They will, in the process, rediscover their own history and they will seek out an answer to many of the questions posed by the crisis that's developing. And it's not by chance that the ideas of socialism are beginning to become popular amongst a layer of the youth in China. It's inevitable because the huge inequalities and injustices, the censorship, the youth can't tolerate that and they will fight and they will resist and they will react against it. And the crisis will produce class struggle in China on a scale that we've never seen before in history. At the moment there's a repressive regime trying to hold society down. You cannot do that forever, no matter how many cameras you put on the streets, no matter how big the internet police is, no matter how much resources you dedicate to controlling society. If you fail to guarantee growing living standards and progress in society as a whole and you slow down and you enter into crisis, inevitably that is going to unleash the class struggle. And the problem with a dictatorial regime like this is that sometimes you can see it, an eruption of class struggle can come seemingly from nowhere. And yet it's borrowing away under the surface, preparing to come to the surface at some point, and then we will see a huge transformation in society. Now we have to have the correct analysis of what China is because it determines your program. It determines your attitude towards such a system. And it's clear that the program in China has to be nationalize all the multinational corporations operating in China under workers control. Renationalize what's being privatized under democratic workers control and integrate those together with what's left of the state sector, which is still sizable, but introduce genuine democratic workers control over the whole economy and the concept of electing the officials. The right of recall, i.e. the workers who elect their delegates to a higher body have the right to recall them if they don't carry out the policies or if they're dissatisfied with them. And the concept of no bureaucrat, no official must earn more than the average wage of a skilled worker in China. That's something this bureaucracy could never ever accept, but it's a necessity to guarantee the genuine communist future of China and not all we have today. I leave it there because my time has expired. I have a lot more I would like to say, but this is the basic outline of the position that we've developed over the past decades, I would say. And there is more material written material available if companies obviously want to deepen their understanding of this process. And I leave it there.