The working class in China carries on its backs a great part of the labour of the whole world. For that reason, it is generally assumed that the Chinese capitalist class (or the Chinese state) will soon hold in its hands the fate of the whole world.

In the previous article in this series it was argued that China is not imperialist in the Marxist sense because its capitalist class is not able to capture, in a widespread way, value that is produced by workers in other countries. That privilege is held only by the capitalist classes of the rich countries such as Australia, the United States, Japan, South Korea and the countries of Western Europe. It is also the reason these countries are rich and China is not.

According to the mainstream definition, China perhaps is imperialist. For example, Beijing claims territory in the South China Sea that is closer to the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam than it is to China. It is also increasing military expenditure. On these facts alone, China might be “imperialist” in the dictionary sense.

For more than a hundred years – since the First World War – revolutionary socialists have used the concept of “imperialism” to analyse the relations between different countries. In that whole period, or at least since the Second World War, there has been no major example of a non-imperialist country (i.e. a poor, colonial, “semi-colonial”, “underdeveloped” or “Third World” country) breaking free of domination and forcing an entry into the small club of rich nations.

The direct war by the United States and its allies, including Australia, against the people of Vietnam lasted for 10 years, beginning with US air strikes against North Vietnam in February 1965 and the landing in South Vietnam in March 1965 of 3500 US combat troops. Over the next seven years US warplanes dropped a total of 7mn tonnes of bombs on Vietnam, 3½ times the amount dropped by US warplanes during all of World War II. Despite this, by the end of the war on April 30, 1975, the Vietnamese people had defeated the mightiest military power in human history. But this victory came at the cost of at least 3 million Vietnamese dead.

Sydney – Fairfield City Council has caved in to pressure from the right-wing Vietnamese Community in Australia (VCA) and agreed to the group hoisting the defunct flag of the old Saigon regime on council land on three occasions each year.

Comrades, I bring warm greetings of solidarity from Australia on behalf of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, our youth organisation Resistance, and our newspaper Green Left Weekly. We warmly salute the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, when Comrade Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam’s independence to hundreds of thousands gathered in Hanoi on September 2, 1945. After years of fighting the French colonialists, and then five years of Japanese occupation, Vietnam was free. But full liberation was to take another 30 years of suffering and sacrifice, and fierce fighting.

The anti-communist Vietnamese group calling itself the Vietnamese Community in Australia (VCA) has been rebuffed in its scheme to have the flag of the US-imposed Saigon regime – overthrown by the Vietnamese national liberation movement in 1975 – officially recognised in Australia.

A major diplomatic incident could be triggered by a diehard right-wing Vietnamese group in Sydney, with the naive complicity of the Fairfield City Council.

Since 1993 our party has held the position that the ruling Chinese bureaucracy has been presiding over the restoration of capitalism in China. However, our policy toward China has been ambiguous: while taking an oppositional stance in our public press toward the ruling bureaucracy’s restorationist course, we have left it unclear as to whether we continued to believe that China is still a bureaucratically ruled socialist state.