Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the Communist Party of China and Celebrating our Common Struggle for Peace and Democracy
The world is at a historic turning point. The five-hundred-year dominance of Europe and the West over humanity is coming to its end. The darker races of humanity are rising, and we are moving from the Age of Europe to the Age of Humanity. At the center of this transition is China, which has for over seventy years recorded spectacular achievements in science, technology, eradicating poverty and building people’s democracy. These achievements would not be possible without the Communist Party of China, founded one hundred years ago in July 1921. We look upon this event as world historic on its own, but more so because of the events which have come in its wake.
The Chinese people’s contributions to world humanity are incalculable. We commemorate, with most of humanity, the founding of the Communist Party of China. We do this in the name of peace and international solidarity of peoples. We call upon the people of the United States, in the name of peace, democracy and peaceful coexistence, to join us.
On July 23, 1921 at the First National Congress, the Communist Party of China was founded. 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China, and we in Philadelphia commemorate this historic centenary in the spirit of solidarity with the world’s peoples in these times of war.
The great revolutionary Fidel Castro said in 2014,
“I feel a profound affection for the Chinese people, an undying admiration because of their millenary history, personal qualities, love of independence and freedom, their heroic struggles in the face of interventions and colonialism, and for the efforts they have made for over 100 years to attain liberation, for the work they are currently conducting, for the great economic successes they are reaching, for the activity, rather, the stability they have achieved. For that reason, I realize that China is the country of the 21st century, it is the country of the future because of its human potential, natural resources, scientific potential, the talent of its children, and the hard-working spirit of the people. I believe that in the 21st century, China will be the giant that arises.”
It is in this creative spirit of optimism for human freedom and progress that we celebrate the monumental human achievements of the Chinese people and the Communist Party of China. Through this commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China, we call on all people in Philadelphia and the world to renew our responsibility and commitment to our common struggle to build a world of peace and democracy.
We are part of a proud legacy of U.S. citizens who have fought for peace and democracy. In commemorating the founding of China’s Communist party we stand upon the shoulders of W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Huey P. Newton, Elaine Brown, Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs. In standing as we do we are saying we refuse to be blinded by the war makers and white supremacists, or to be distracted by anti-communism.
Emerging from over a hundred years of extreme poverty, exploitation at the hands of foreign imperialists and dynastic rule, and a twenty-year long civil war, the Communist Party of China led the world’s largest country to freedom. It successfully completed the strivings of hundreds of years of peasant uprisings, the Taiping Rebellions, and Sun Yat-Sen’s National Reform movement for self-determination and people’s livelihood. Over its one hundred years of life, the Communist Party of China has governed and improved the lives of 1.4 billion people.
This year also marks the 85th anniversary of the completion of the Long March. The Long March was an epic 6,000-mile strategic military retreat of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army from the Kuomintang that took up to possibly two years. Armed with class consciousness, ideals of new democracy, and the vision and leadership of Mao Zedong, workers and peasants marched through marshlands and snow-capped mountains for freedom. The Long March was an assertion of Chinese civilization, and it consolidated the leadership of the Communist Party of China and its relationship to the people. As American journalist Harrison Salisbury wrote, “No event in this century has so captured the world’s imagination and so profoundly affected its future.”
We study and celebrate Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, the Long Marchers, and the Party, for they are the ones who believed that it is the people who make history. We rely on and celebrate the work of American journalists such as Edgar Snow, Helen Foster Snow, Agnes Smedley, and Harrison Salisbury, whose firsthand accounts of the Long March and the people impacted, to this day, remain some of the most truthful testimonies of such an epic human achievement.
Our responsibility to pursue the Truth is more important than ever. We live in times of great economic, political, and civilizational crisis and of the real possibility of world war. The American ruling class uses ideology and culture to keep the working class nihilistic and divided. As China rises and offers a multipolar world, the American state increasingly threatens war against China and Russia under the veil of defending “democracy” and defeating “authoritarianism.”
In these times of crisis, we call on the people of Philadelphia and this nation to remember Martin Luther King’s proclamation that humanity is wrapped in a single garment of destiny. In the face of America’s current insistence on “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” it is the moral imperative of the American people to remember the legacies of W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro, Paul Robeson, and Huey P. Newton. Their legacies lead us to the analysis that the dividing line of the 21st century is that of war or humanity. We commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China not simply to celebrate their historic human achievements but to stand with the side of humanity.
The same ruling elite who promote “wokeness” in finance, big tech, state intelligence, and universities is ready for the destruction of China at the cost of the American working people. The Left has not shown a willingness to unite working people in the struggle for peace, democracy and peaceful co-existence. Despite how much the narrative today says the “anti-racists” are winning, the American working people live in an economic crisis unseen since the Great Depression.
America is a society driven mad by the evils of war, white supremacy, and poverty. We strive for the democracy Du Bois understood as opportunity — freedom from poverty and the opportunity to unleash peoples’ civilizational potentialities. Our fight today is for what King described as a revolution of values, one which will allow for a new human being to be born. We believe America can learn from China and her people’s hundred-year struggle for new democracy.
In such a crisis, the American people must choose the side of humanity. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967 against the American war in Vietnam, “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”
In the East, China already lives in the future. In just one hundred years, the Communist Party of China has lifted more than 800 million Chinese citizens out of extreme poverty. Its cadre, from the grassroots local workers to leadership, plans, builds, and executes for the livelihood of its 1.4 billion people, one fifth of humanity.
We live in times of great crisis and contradictions, but we also live in times of great opportunity with the rise of China and the darker nations. In Philadelphia, a city with a rich legacy of arts, culture, philosophy, and politics, we grasp hands with the Chinese people and celebrate our shared struggle for peace, democracy, and freedom.
Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the Communist Party of China: Celebrating Our Common Struggle for Peace and Democracy 