SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
China’s ‘common prosperity’ agenda
China’s rich apparently don’t like it, Western commentators call it suicidal — so what exactly is this ‘common prosperity’ that Xi Jinping is promoting in his third term as leader? In part two of three-part series, JENNY CLEGG explains
China’s immediate priority is to upgrade its technology. Escaping the dead end of trading cheap labour exports for high-end imports means pouring investment into skills and science, innovating new technologies to drive the industrialisation of the future.
Morning Star international editor ROGER McKENZIE says Trump’s ceaseless belligerence is a desperate effort to prevent the emergence of a multilateral world
Don’t dismiss Lebanon as a side theatre of this war, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN — there are signs Israel has expansion in mind, and it has demonstrated its willingness to expel and kill whole populations
The media present Starmer as staying out of Trump’s war — but we’re already deeply involved in a conflict that sees the US and Israel kill civilians on a huge scale, argues IAN SINCLAIR
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER reports on this week’s conference unveiling the findings of the Gaza Tribunal established by Jeremy Corbyn
CHRISTOPHE IMMER of the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt reports on a Berlin conference on the politics of art and the legacy of Marxist critic Hans Hess
FIRST mentioned by Mao Zedong in 1953 in China’s transition to socialism, the phrase “common prosperity” was also used by Deng Xiaoping — his call for some to “get rich first” always qualified with the phrase “so that they can help others to catch up.”
Now Xi is taking “common prosperity” as a defining feature of China’s socialist modernisation — at the core of the two-stage plan, laying a basic socialist foundation by 2035 to then advance to modern socialism by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
The gap between rich and poor is to be reduced, but what common prosperity is not is an equalisation of incomes or a radical redistribution from the rich to the poor. Xi talks rather of increasing the incomes of low-income earners and expanding the size of the middle-income group.
Similar stories
In Part 4 of her look at the Chinese revolution JENNY CLEGG addresses the relationship between the Peasant Movement and the National Movement
BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
JENNY CLEGG reports from a Chinese peace conference bringing together defence ministers, US think tanks and global South leaders, where speakers warned that the erosion of multilateralism risks regional hotspots exploding into wider war