Teng courts Japan

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Like the visit of Hua Kuo-feng to the Shah of Iran and the forthcoming welcome of General Pinochet in Peking, the visit by Chinese deputy premier Teng Hsiao-ping to Tokyo represents the opportunism of Chinese Stalinist diplomacy in full cry.

Teng's official purpose is to ratify the Sino-Japanese peace treaty, putting a formal end to the war which began in 1937.

But in signing the peace treaty China has dropped all opposition to the US-Japanese 'security' treaty of 1951 and the unconstitutional 'self-defencé' forces through which the military power of Japan in theory disarmed by the allies at the end of the Second World War) is organised.

Chinese diplomacy thus rides roughshod over even the policies of the large Japanese social democratic and . Communist parties.

They have for decades opposed Japan's being an outpost of US militarism in the Pacific, which strengthens US power by acting as a counterweight to the Soviet Union.

The Japanese peace treaty also clears the way for perhaps the most important segment of the huge foreign trade and investment deals Peking has announced in recent weeks.

Japanese firms will undertake an oil exploration and extraction programme in the Pohai gulf worth $10 billion, construct a $2 billion steel works near Peking and undertake major projects in coal mining and electrical power.

A trade agreement provides for 580 billions worth of contracts during the 1980s.

The scale of these exchanges explains the sudden switch of Chinese policy to accepting foreign government loans: few capitalist banks would be able to provide the sums neaded.

Capitalism's attempts to regain a foothold on the vast markets and labour force represented by. mainland China must now be underwritten and organised by the states-such as Japan, West Germany and the US-that have sufficient foreign resources to deploy. but whose main interest is in a national compromise with the bourgeoisie.

These parties all supported, last weekend, an 'anti-violence' demonstration called against ETA, and implicitly in support of the Francoist police.

• Dissolution While these bourgeois nationalists and fake socialists call for a few reforms' to the Francoist state apparatus, the masses of workers in Eusakdi are increasingly in favour of the complete dissolution of repressive institutions like the armed police and civil guard.

For the leaders of the Basque Nationalist Party, and th Socialist and Communist parties-like • the police themselves- the dissolut in of the armed police force is. a terrifying demand.

It means dissolution of the apparatus for protection of capitalist property relations which it is their life's work to preserve.