I don’t consider China to be a dictatorship. Free speech is not more threatened there than in France.

If we are to believe the LFI deputy Sophia Chikirou [1], questioned by the programme “Quotidien” [2] on the sidelines of La France insoumise’s (LFI) summer universities [3], China is not a dictatorship.

These controversial remarks were made at the end of a conference session. Entitled “What is the USA-China conflict?”, it also brought together a journalist from Le Monde diplomatique [4], Renaud Lambert, and an economist, Benjamin Bürbaumer, author of the book China/United States, capitalism against globalisation (La Découverte, 2024), an original analysis of the direct confrontation, within the capitalist system, between the two superpowers.

Whilst Sophia Chikirou’s statements took place on 23 August, they were only broadcast on Wednesday 3 September, a few hours after the military parade organised in Beijing for the 80^th anniversary of victory against Japan marking the end of the Second World War, a parade during which Xi Jinping [5] was notably accompanied by Vladimir Putin [6] and Kim Jong-un [7]. This unfortunate coincidence, even if it is the fault of the television channel TMC, can only reinforce the confusion. Even without this, her assertions appear more than doubtful.

Firstly, on dictatorship. The ’rebel’ deputy is so quick to take up the talking points of the People’s Republic of China – particularly in the information report on relations between the European Union (EU) and China submitted in June and which Le Monde [8] put in the spotlight in July. We recommend that she simply reads the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, whose latest version was amended in 2018.

It is striking to observe that the text assumes the term “dictatorship”, stating that in the country’s “socialist system”, “the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants, essentially the dictatorship of the proletariat, has been consolidated and developed”. But it is above all obvious that the “democratic” nature of this dictatorship, which could have meaning from a communist point of view, has never materialised. The domination of the capitalist class has been replaced by that of the bureaucratic class of the party-state, which has moreover not hesitated to throw the exploited masses into the whirlwind of neoliberal globalisation.

But for Sophia Chikirou and, she says, “according to the rules” – which ones? – China is not to be classified in the infamous political category of autocracies. The Asian power, she states in the video, has a “political system with a party...” We then hear clearly that she is about to pronounce the expression “single party”, but she corrects herself by explaining: “There are eight parties, so it’s not a single party, but a dominant party which is the Chinese Communist Party”. The rebellious deputy is actually reciting the fable of Chinese power regarding political plurality, supposedly ensured by a central party and “eight democratic parties” consulted in the conduct of public affairs.

Permanent surveillance

During the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong’s aim was to present the image of a “new democracy” with, in a “patriotic united front of the Chinese people”, the inclusion of eight existing political formations, considered minor, supposedly showing that the CCP [9] did not reign supreme. But this myth quickly shattered: the representatives of these parties ended up being persecuted, even liquidated during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) [10].

Since his arrival at the head of the party-state at the end of 2012, Xi Jinping has moreover reinforced the cult of personality and the CCP’s grip on society. The regime’s security organs, which benefit from substantial budgets, have the most modern technological tools to monitor the population. What some China specialists describe as a perfect dictatorship.

In this regard, one cannot recommend too highly to Sophia Chikirou to also read Thinking in Resistance in Today’s China, published on Thursday 4 September by Gallimard editions, under the direction of two eminent experts on the Asian country, Anne Cheng [11] and Chloé Froissart [12].

In her foreword, the former, holder of the “Intellectual History of China” chair at the Collège de France [13], emphasises that “after the implicit pact that prevailed in previous decades with a state power encouraging citizens to get rich provided they did not meddle in politics, the current ’trust’ pact is that of a power guaranteeing citizens’ internal security, on condition of keeping them under permanent surveillance”.

Regarding Taiwan [14], Sophia Chikirou takes up Beijing’s denunciations of Washington’s provocations without nuance.

Sophia Chikirou travelled to China, to Beijing, Shanghai and Canton [15], and drew from this the report presented in June. Over nearly a hundred pages, she reveals a vision likely to fit into a democratic debate on how Europe should deal with China. Except that instead of truly charting an independent path – “non-aligned”, according to the rebellious vocabulary – she proposes a vision de facto compatible with that of the CCP.

Thus, regarding Taiwan, she takes up Beijing’s denunciations of Washington’s provocations with hardly any nuance. Whilst carefully avoiding saying how much a majority of Taiwanese refuse to live under the political regime “dominated” by the CCP, which the election results in the archipelago have clearly shown for years.

There exists in this archipelago a Chinese culture that is not purely Han [16], mixed, open, which the rebellious leaders never talk about. The first country in Asia to have legalised marriage for all, whilst China imprisons leading feminist activists; the one whose president, in 2016, apologised to indigenous peoples “for the suffering and injustices [...] endured over the past four hundred years”, whilst China fiercely represses the Uyghurs [17], a Muslim ethnic group in the northwest of the country, obviously does not interest the heralds of the citizens’ revolution.

A “citizens’ revolution” with variable geometry

The bibliography of her report is very short but it speaks volumes: seven titles, a few books by specialists certainly, but also a collection of Xi Jinping’s speeches, a work by Jean-Pierre Raffarin [18], known for his unwavering support for Beijing, and that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Do Better! Towards the Citizens’ Revolution.

With Sophia Chikirou’s latest statements, the masks finally fall. What strikes one about her positions is seeing how much peoples hardly have a right to exist. Like the former politician and writer Alain Peyrefitte [19], author in 1976 of the bestseller When China Awakens, she joins the ranks of personalities fascinated by the “dominants”, even if they are of tomorrow, at the cost of forgetting the mass of the “dominated”. A pinnacle for a female politician who claims to represent a left that carries the concerns of the popular masses.

We know Mao’s famous phrase: “It is right to rebel.” But not everywhere, Sophia Chikirou hastens to add, who, if one may say so, makes her case worse by calmly explaining that “freedom of expression in China is as threatened [...] as the one we have in France”.

Until proven otherwise, however, we have not yet seen, despite all the legitimate criticisms that can be addressed to the French government, despite the degradation of public debate due to the control of a large part of the media by businessmen, and despite the criminalisation of solidarity with Gaza [20], we have not seen human rights defenders end their days in prison, like the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo [21]. Sentenced in 2009 to eleven years in prison for having drafted Charter 08 [22], a manifesto for human rights in China, he died of liver cancer on conditional release in 2017.

Behind the outrage, we find the simplism of a left-wing “campism” [23] that would want those who oppose American imperialism to show leniency towards its declared opponents. As if Chinese or Russian imperialism did not exist, and had not taken care to annihilate any space from which they could be criticised and challenged from within.

A double standard in reverse

For the disinformation and relativism that Chikirou demonstrates are not reserved for the Chinese regime alone. They fit into LFI’s recurring international positions, defined above all by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which readily fall into a “geopoliticism” forgetful of peoples and complacent with the narrative of authoritarian regimes surfing on anti-Western demagogy. His writings and statements on Syria or the war in Ukraine, old and recent, illustrate this well.

If the double standard of the United States and the EU towards Netanyahu’s [24] genocidal policy is rightly denounced by the Rebellious (as by Mediapart [25], here or there), Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his close guard readily practise it in reverse. The clinical coldness with which Ukraine’s fate is evoked, the recycling of a reading grid of this war forged by the Kremlin [26], the absence of strong analysis on the largest neofascist offensive on the European continent contrast with his empathy and alerts regarding the Palestinian people.

From the main component of the left, one could expect better. These recurring outings consisting of absolving, in whole or in part, revisionist capitalist states of the international order do not only betray the blindness of their authors. They spread, among an entire militant base that politicises itself with these leaders and grants them credit, distorted benchmarks of reality and guilty arrangements with the principles supposed to animate the defenders of human progress.

It is disheartening that many rebellious cadres, bearers of more subtle visions of international questions, take refuge in silence. Anxious to advance just struggles in the organisation that seems to them the most dynamic and in resonance with mobilised society, they let pass useless aberrations, which cast doubt on the sincerity of the “new humanism” promoted by the rebellious leaders.

There is no need, however, to sow confusion about the most closed autocracies on the planet. It is possible to seek to avoid warmongering escalation without falling into this pitfall. And to always keep in mind that formal rights and freedoms, even fragile, even imperfectly respected, are a precious legacy of popular struggles “from below”, and an indispensable foundation for defending an alternative social order.

François Bougon and Fabien Escalona