25 years ago:  Chinese security officials sequester strike leader in psychiatric hospital

Fearing the potential of massive worker unrest, Chinese authorities moved to crush a month-long strike at the Fuming County Silk Factory and block the creation of an independent workers’ organization there. On December 15, 2000—just one day after strike leader Cao Maobing spoke publicly to international media—management and police in Jiangsu Province seized the 47-year-old electrician and rank-and-file leader, committing him to a psychiatric hospital. 

Without producing a shred of evidence, factory management and the police cited an alleged prior mental health diagnosis to justify Cao’s detention. His coworkers, however, denounced the confinement as blatant political persecution for his leadership role in the strike and for his growing authority among them.

Cao vocalized rank-and-file anger toward both management and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which nominally “represented” workers at the silk mill. When silk workers had first appealed their grievance to the official trade union for support, they received only empty promises. In response, workers launched a wildcat strike over unpaid wages, pensions, and food subsidies, and drafted a petition declaring their intent to form an independent organization at the plant. After ACFTU officials denied this request, the workers picketed the local headquarters, proclaiming the slogans, “We demand the right to elect our own leaders,” and “The official trade union of China has not spoken for workers.”  

The bureaucracy’s fear of the working class was well-founded. Even during the government-approved strike-breaking operation at Fuming County Silk Factory, over 1,000 workers at a fertilizer plant surrounded local government buildings to obtain pay and pension benefits after being laid off. Brewery and paper mill employees threatened to organize similar protests if their demands were refused. Cao warned, “If the workers’ real problems are not dealt with, the situation will explode.”

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) restoration of capitalism over the preceding years had wreaked havoc on workers’ living standards, turning them into a source of cheap labor for international capital. The closure and privatization of state-owned enterprises destroyed millions of jobs and resulted in the theft of wages, pensions and other benefits. 

Chinese workers responded by mounting a wave of militant protests, leading to over 120,000 recorded labor disputes in 2000. Any working class leaders, like Cao, who threatened to upend the pro-CCP ACFTU and its labor peace with management, were inevitably targeted for defending the interests of the rank-and-file.  

50 years ago: Algeria deports 350,000 Moroccans

On December 18, 1975, the Algerian military government of President Houari Boumédiène ordered the mass expulsion of Moroccan nationals from Algeria. Around 350,000 people were forced from their homes and deported across the border.

The move came in response to Morocco’s recent annexation of Western Sahara. In November, King Hassan II had staged the “Green March,” sending 350,000 unarmed civilians into the disputed Spanish colony to assert sovereignty after Spain’s withdrawal. The annexation was formalized through the Madrid Accords, signed amid Spain’s internal turmoil following the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Eager to avoid an expensive colonial war, Spain hastily ceded control to Morocco.

The Madrid Accords excluded both Algeria and the indigenous Sahrawi population. In retaliation, Algeria began political and military support for the Sahrawi independence movement, the Polisario Front. Algeria’s mass expulsion of Moroccans marked a major escalation, timed to coincide with the Eid al-Adha holiday. 

Up to 45,000 families—men, women, and children—were rounded up, given minutes to gather belongings, and stripped of property and livelihood. Families were divided as Moroccan husbands or children were expelled while Algerian spouses were forced to remain behind. Many deportees had lived in Algeria for generations, integrated into its economy and culture but denied citizenship and political rights. Most were not political activists but ordinary workers and small business owners who suddenly became refugees. Driven to the border in successive waves over two months, they were left on the Moroccan side with no shelter or resources, often in a country they barely knew.

The crisis deepened regional hostility. Algeria intensified its aid to the Polisario Front, and tensions persisted for years. Free movement across the border and family reunifications did not resume until 1983.

75 years ago: Truman announces US national emergency

On December 16, 1950, President Harry S. Truman signed Presidential Proclamation 2914, formally declaring a state of national emergency and directing “that the military, naval, air, and civilian defenses of this country be strengthened as speedily as possible.” Truman had announced the measure on the radio the night before, invoking the “great danger” he claimed flowed from the Soviet Union. The proclamation further attempted to justify the invocation of national emergency with the “grave threat to the peace of the world” posed by the Korean War and so-called “communist imperialism.”

In reality, it was principally the United States—along with its imperialist allies—that were relentlessly pursuing ambitions in East Asia through an increasingly aggressive war effort. Truman had approved the National Security Report 68 in September, which resulted in a massive expansion of US military capabilities, including a tripling of the defense budget and doubling of military personnel.

But the defeats suffered by US forces in Korea during November and December prompted an even sharper use of wartime measures, including on the domestic front. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the US-led forces in Korea, stated a few weeks before that there now existed a “state of undeclared war between the Chinese Communists and the United States forces.” Truman’s response to the US defeats in North Korea caused by China’s involvement was to begin “active consideration” for the use of the atomic bomb against both countries.

The declaration was aimed at consolidating emergency powers to prosecute the war effort in anticipation of widespread anti-war sentiment. Proclamation 2914 contained numerous passages of Truman “summoning” citizens, farmers, workers, and the entire population to make “whatever sacrifices are necessary for the welfare of the Nation.” But public support for America’s involvement with the Korean War had dropped substantially in the months since it began, with particularly strong opposition to the proposal of dropping an atomic bomb on Korea.

The official state of national emergency remained in force until September 1978, when the US Congress passed the National Emergencies Act to terminate all previous national emergencies.

100 years: Fourteenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party formally adopts “socialism in one country”  

At the 14th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, which opened in Moscow on December 18, 1925, the Stalin-Bukharin leadership formally embraced the anti-Marxist theory of “socialism in one country,” proclaiming the USSR a “self-sufficient economic unit building socialism.” In practice, this orientation sanctioned a deeper adaptation to market forces and to the wealthier strata of the peasantry.

The shift found its clearest expression in Stalin’s economic program, developed with Nikolai Bukharin, which called for allowing the wealthier layers of the peasantry—the kulaks—to enrich themselves. This was justified as a means of creating demand for industrial goods and thereby, supposedly, stimulating a protracted, market-led development of Soviet industry. From the standpoint of class relations, the strengthening of the kulaks provided a useful social buffer for the growing party-state bureaucracy against the urban working class.

Trotsky and the Left Opposition had warned that the New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced in 1921 as a temporary necessity to revive the economy after war, revolution and civil war, carried inherent dangers by permitting the resurgence of capitalist tendencies in the countryside. Trotsky counterposed a program of rapid industrialization, the strengthening of the proletariat, and an international revolutionary strategy aimed at mobilizing the global working class to assist the embattled Soviet workers’ state.

Trotsky’s warnings were vindicated. The policies adopted by the 14th Congress would soon have disastrous consequences. As the kulaks consolidated their position, they came to dominate grain markets, depriving the Soviet state of the grain necessary to feed the cities and to export abroad. Faced with this deepening crisis, Stalin abruptly reversed course in 1928, initiating repression and the catastrophic policy of forced collectivization.

The congress itself was a contentious and embittered gathering, and it marked the first time that a majority of a Bolshevik congress gave open adulation to Stalin. It was also the first congress at which Stalin delivered the main political report. Trotsky, though reelected to the Politburo, was ill and unable to attend, and his position had already been marginalized. Meanwhile, Stalin’s faction opened an offensive against the “New Opposition” of Grigorii Zinoviev, who had previously allied with Stalin against Trotsky and the Left Opposition.