Yesterday, July 29th, Sun Dawu, the Chinese agribusiness billionaire from Hebei province, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for publicly contradicting CPC’s policy, illegally occupying land, promoting riots and obstructing government work. Where would a bourgeois imperialist state imprison a billionaire?

Not that it would be unprecedented for bourgeois justice to condemn the bourgeoisie itself. The Brazilian billionaire Deusmar Queirós, owner of Pague Menos, was arrested in Brazil in 2018 for “crimes against the financial market.” But in the case of Brazil, this is more revealing of the dependent character of our bourgeois state, subservient to imperialism.

The “financial market,” as everyone knows, is a sector where US imperialism as is hegemonic. But the businessmen of the financial sector who were behind the 2008 crisis that produced unemployment, hunger and misery among the American people did not even generate one prisoner among the billionaires. Instead, they received trillion-dollar government subsidies. They committed terrible crimes, but went unpunished.

But in China, it is different. After Mao’s death, there was not a break against the socialist state of the 1949 revolution. There was a continuity, unlike what happened with the Soviet Union in 1991, which at the end of the capitalist restoration process there was an institutional break. Moreover, in China, unprecedented in any capitalist state is the execution of billionaires and big businessmen, as was the case of Liu Han in 2015. Liu Han had been arrested in 2013, months after Xi Jinping was elected to the post of general secretary.

These are events that make me doubt the theory of the bourgeois character of the Chinese state, and the “restoration of capitalism” in China. The bourgeoisie does not have control of the state, but it certainly struggles to have it. The class struggle in China is still alive, but the Chinese workers since 1949 have proved victorious in the battles.