London seminar on Xi Jinping Thought

Liu Xiaoming opens the symposium

By Han Baoyi

The Chinese embassy in London held a symposium on President Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy last week, with Ambassador Liu Xiaoming delivering a keynote speech entitled Learn the Oriental Wisdom and Understand the Future of China.

Other guest speakers included Stephen Perry, chairman of Britain's 48 Group Club, Professor Martin Albrow, the honorary vice-president of the British Sociological Association, Martin Jacques, and Fang Wenjian, chair of the China Chamber of Commerce in the UK.

Liu explained how the Thought has provided the best answer for how a richer and stronger China will behave and how it will influence the world.

The core is that "it inherits and develops China's cultural and diplomatic tradition; it encapsulates the concepts and practice of China's diplomacy; and it provides an assessment and definition on the development of the world and the role of China.

"In the past 70 years, we have formed the diplomatic tradition with unique Chinese features, namely, independence, peaceful development and win-win cooperation," he added.

But China's hard work over the past decades has not only brought about a better life for its more than 1.3 billion people. It is also an important contribution to peace and prosperity in the world and the common interests and benefits of people of all countries.

For the whole world, Liu believed that the Thought draws a new blueprint for human progress and explores a new thinking on international relations, as well as providing a new guideline for global governance.

"The Thought is aimed at safeguarding and improving the international order rather than replacing the existing system. It is also aimed at common development, rather than interfering in the affairs of other countries. Last but not least," he added,"it is aimed at shouldering responsibility rather than 'flexing muscles'.

"Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy is the 'compass' for China's foreign policy," Liu concluded. "It demonstrates China's sincerity to join hands with other countries to create a better future for humankind. It will ensure that China takes the right side of history and its interactions with the world heads in the right direction."

Xinhua

A great Korean revolutionary

Kim Song Gi, Andy Brooks and Michael Chant

By New Worker correspondent

London communists met last week to celebrate the life of Kim Il Sung, who led the mighty movement that freed Korea from Japanese colonialism and established the people’s government in the north that was to become the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Comrades gathered at the John Buckle Centre in south London for the commemoration called to honour the 107th anniversary of the birthday of President Kim Il Sung, the father of modern Korea, and to hear a report on the current situation by a diplomat from the DPRK embassy in London.

Kim Il Sung not only grasped Marxism-Leninism but he applied it to the concrete conditions of the Korean people. He knew that once the masses realised their own strength they would become unstoppable. He knew that serving the people was the be-all and end-all for Korean communists and for the Workers’ Party of Korea that he launched in 1945. He developed Korean-style socialism and the Juché idea – which elevates the philosophical principles of Marxism-Leninism as well as its economic theories and focuses on the development of each individual worker, who can only be truly free as part of the collective will of the masses.

In the western world Juché is often described as “self-reliance” but it is much more than that. Kim Il Sung said that working people could only become genuinely emancipated if they stood on their own feet – but the Juché idea doesn’t negate proletarian internationalism. The Soviet Union, People’s China and the people’s democracies of eastern Europe all closed ranks behind Democratic Korea during the Korean war.

The Korean people responded with their trade and assistance whenever they could, whilst Korean experts and advisers helped the Vietnamese, the Arabs and the Africans struggling to break the chains of colonialism, and they continue to do so today. And Kim Il Sung’s successors, dear leader Kim Jong Il and leader Kim Jong Un have followed his footsteps to build a modern socialist republic, where every individual worker is master of his or her own life.

New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks opened the formal part of the meeting, which began with a tribute to the life of Kim Il Sung by Michael Chant from the RCPB (ML). That was followed by a talk by Kim Song Gi from the Democratic Korean embassy on Kim Il Sung’s immense contribution to the world communist movement. The Korean comrade also spoke about the current status of negotiations with US imperialism following the collapse of talks between Donald Trump and Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi in February.

The Q&A session soon led into a lively discussion with the Korean comrade on the efforts of the people’s government to ease tension on the Korean peninsula, and the need to put Korea back on the peace and anti-war movement agenda in Britain and build solidarity with the Korean people on both sides of the divided peninsula.

Finally the comrades sent a solidarity message to Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and called on everyone to support the right of the Korean people to self-determination and independence in the context of taking up the cause of global peace.

The Co-ordinating Committee of the Friends of Korea brings together all the major movements active in Korean friendship and solidarity work in Britain today. It is chaired by Andy Brooks and the secretary is Michael Chant. The committee organises meetings throughout the year, which are publicised by the supporting movements and on the Friends of Korea website.

Down the Tube

By New Worker correspondent

Two rail unions have rejected a pay offer for London Underground staff. First the Transport Salaried Staff Association (older readers will remember it as the Railway Clerks’ Association) described a one-year pay offer of 2.5 per cent as “derisory and well short of members aspirations”. The offer was conditional on the unions dropping claims relating to leave, meal breaks, maternity and paternity, working hours and annual leave entitlement.

General Secretary Manuel Cortes said: “I made it crystal clear to management at talks last week that this offer is nowhere near good enough. Sadly, we are now in dispute with London Underground and an industrial action ballot looks almost inevitable. This means strikes could take place as early as next month,” before saying the union is “available for further direct talks and are also prepared to go to ACAS, provided there are no pre-conditions and London Underground is able to make a substantial improvement to what’s on the table.”

RMT also said it had rejected the offer and was beginning preparations for a ballot of all tube members for both strike action and action short of a strike.

RMT’s Regional reps described the offer as “an insult to our tube members and makes it crystal clear that London Underground have no respect for us or the work that we do”. Mick Cash, RMT’s General Secretary, said the union is preparing for a ballot of members and added: “The union has made it clear that we are looking for substantial improvements in pay and the working conditions for our members who work round the clock to keep London moving and that we are prepared to fight to secure those objectives.”

Spooks Corner

by New Worker correspondent

The secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has for 66 years operated right in the heart of Westminster.

"For the first time, we are able to reveal the role our Palmer Street office has played in keeping the capital and the country safe," said GCHQ in a statement, speaking about a drab, anonymous office block opposite St James's Park Tube station in central London.

The intelligence agency that specialises in phone-tapping and electronic eavesdropping has now left the building for a new secure facility in Manchester as part of its network extension project. Last year the agency’s ‘Tempora’ programme, an operation that allows it to tap into and store large volumes of data, including phone calls, messages and internet communication, was exposed in the media.

GCHQ was originally established in November 1919 as a code-breaking unit. During the Second World War, GCHQ personnel moved to Bletchley Park where they decrypted German messages and cracked the Nazi’s Enigma machine code.

The service moved its headquarters from the London suburb of Eastcote to Cheltenham in the early 1950s, whilst retaining a covert centre in the capital to liaise with the Government and provide a convenient seat for its director. GCHQ has other offices in Bude, Scarborough and Harrogate. The agency's National Cyber Security Centre was opened in 2017 near Victoria in London.

"As we depart our Palmer Street site after 66 years, we look back on a history full of amazing intelligence, world-leading innovation, and the ingenious people who passed through those secret doors. Then, as now, it's a history defined by the belief that with the right mix of minds, anything is possible," Director of GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, said.

In the 1980s the agency hit the headlines when the Thatcher government banned all unions at GCHQ on alleged ‘security’ grounds. Over 100 GCHQ staff refused to take the £1,000 inducement or to join a bogus ‘staff federation’ set up to replace the civil service unions that had represented their grades. Fourteen of them were sacked in a long-standing dispute that only ended when union rights were restored by the incoming Labour government in 1997.