Inside China: Why they’re opening 1,000 new Schools of Marxism
In this wide-ranging conversation on The Socialist Program, historian and China scholar Professor Ken Hammond discusses recent developments in China following a visit in July 2025. He emphasises both the remarkable economic progress as well as the challenges China faces as it pursues further socialist development and modernisation.
Ken notes the absence of extreme poverty and homelessness in urban China, contrasting it with Western cities. Yet he also highlights discussions that are taking place in China as to how best to restrict the influence of big capital and to maintain the core role of the state in directing the economy.
One significant development mentioned is the establishment of over a thousand Schools of Marxism across Chinese universities, reflecting a reassertion of the importance of Marxist ideology and a renewed public discourse around socialism under Xi Jinping’s leadership.
Ken and host Brian Becker discuss the historical rationale behind China’s use of markets, viewing it as a pragmatic strategy to gain technology, expertise and capital from the advanced capitalist countries. Contrary to US expectations, this has not led to a capitalist counterrevolution. Instead, with a remarkable improvement in their living conditions, Chinese people have considerable confidence in their social system.
Ken and Brian also analyse China’s approach to international relations, based not on exporting its model but promoting multipolarity and cultural respect through initiatives like the Global Civilisation Initiative. As Ken puts it, socialism with Chinese characteristics is still very much a work in progress.
China is Just Fine Thank You!
Roger Boyd
Aug 10, 2025
What amounts to widespread “concern trolling” and misinformation by the Western media, state and social commentators about China is more a projection of their wishes for a weaker China rather than any reflection of reality. Let’s review some of the widespread and obviously coordinated tropes that are being spread by the so concentrated Western media, the paid propagandists of the state and the “sell my soul to the highest bidder” careerist social commentators.
“Slow” Chinese growth
“Low” Chinese domestic retail demand
“Huge” Chinese trade surplus
“Housing Crash” threatening a financial disaster
“Deflation” threatening a financial disaster
“Autocratic” state unable to compete with the flexible “democracies”
“Demographic Time Bomb”
Progress but “At What Cost”
“Slow” Chinese growth
Here is Chinese GDP growth for the past few years:
2020: 2.24% (US was -2.2%)
2021: 8.45% (US was 6.1%)
2022: 2.95% (US was 2.5%)
2023: 5.25% (US was 2.89%)
2024: 5% (US was 2.8%)
2025: forecast to be around 5% (US forecast to be 1.5% to 1.8%)
Cumulative: China 32.5%, US 14.5%. Between 2020 and 2025, the Chinese population actually shrank a tiny bit so all of that growth turned into GDP per capita growth. While the US population officially (i.e. not including illegal immigrants) grew by 3.2%. So, Chinese GDP per capita increased slightly more than 32.5% during these years, while US GDP per capita increased by 11% (1.145/1.032); that’s three times faster in China. If China maintains its “slow” 5% growth rate while its population slowly declines, Chinese GDP per capita and the size of its economy will double every 12.5 years!
“Low” Chinese domestic consumption
In May 2025, retail sales increased 6.4% year on year; about what would be expected with the growth in GDP per capita plus a little bit of inflation. But Western economists and commentators keep complaining that Chinese consumption levels are only half that of Mexico and only one third the level of Japan! I have already noted a number of times that using comparisons based upon market exchange rates can utterly misrepresent relative levels of GDP, GDP per capita and consumption.
That is why there is something called purchasing power parity (PPP). But as Zichen Wang points out, the official PPP numbers calculated by such bodies as the World Bank and IMF may also be highly inaccurate. To investigate this, the China Finance 40 Forum (CF40), which is a leading Chinese independent think tank, decided to carry out a quite extensive review of Chinese consumption levels using actual volumes of consumption, bypassing the issues of relative prices. As an aside, CF40 publishes quite a bit of interesting research in English, here.
And their resultant report found that even the official PPP figures were way off. It stated that:
China’s consumption levels are systematically underestimated
This primarily stems from price advantages and exchange rate deviation
There does remain considerable room for further expansion
Some rebalancing between domestic consumption and external trade would be possible
The gap between the developed nations (including the US, Germany, Japan, France and Mexico) and China across various consumption sectors is much less when measured by actual consumption volumes rather than by per capita consumption expenditure. That’s because the Chinese get more for their money, with an excellent example being the very low prices for good quality cars in China with respect to Western nations.
When it comes to food consumption, China has surpassed the levels of developed countries. The consumption of manufactured goods is on par with countries at the same stage of development. Consumption of healthcare and education services is on a par with developed nations, while there is a small gap in tourism. Instead of being half the level of Mexico, China’s consumption levels are in fact higher than Mexico’s. And at least half the levels seen in countries such as Japan, Germany and France.
In my own analysis of Chinese relative consumption levels I found that, taking into account the US statistical over-estimations (e.g. systematically misrepresenting inflation as being lower than it really is, over-estimating value added in such areas as healthcare, usage of implied amounts, counting rentier costs as value added activities), Chinese consumption levels were about two thirds the level of those in the US. Such a reality would cause a severe cognitive shock to the average American citizen, and cause them to question the legitimacy of American “free market democracy”. Exactly why the US state, oligarch-owned media, and bought and paid for influencers spend so much time attempting to show that the Chinese are still poor and their consumption is being kept low by the “autocratic” and “anti-democratic” Party-state.
Another bug bear that we must also deal with is the whole “China was as poor as sub-Saharan Africa in 1979” just before Deng’s reforms. No it bloody well wasn’t, China was far more developed than sub-Saharan Africa due to the three decades of huge progress made since the 1949 revolution. The years of Mao’s leadership were a great success for China, and provided the very strong and developed base from which Deng could launch his liberalizations. Deng was also helped massively of course by the lifting of the brutal economic and technology blockade upon China by the West, and did not need to redirect large amounts of resources to save the North Koreans and Vietnamese from Western aggression.
China does have some room to increase consumption, to offset any drop in export demand, but the Party-state also understands that the growth of the productive forces should precede the growth in consumption for sustainable long-term growth. The exact opposite of the assumptions of Western economists, politicians and commentators as the West has become much more indebted while the productive forces have waned.
“Excessive” Chinese trade surplus
China’s trade surplus in 2024 was 5.6% of GDP in 2024, rising from 4.6% in 2023, 2.6% in 2021, 1% in 2019, and 0.66% in 2018. In 2018, Germany’s trade surplus was 6.8% of GDP , in 2019 7.25%, 2020 7%, and in the post pandemic period 4.16% in 2023 and 5.7% in 2024. The greatest culprit of “excessive” trade surpluses is a Germany that has maintained such surpluses for two decades (in 2010 it was 5.75% of GDP, in 2005, 5.2%). So why have we not constantly been hearing about Germany “excessive” trade surpluses that must be dealt with for the past two decades?
As we can see from the above data, China’s trade surplus really took off from 2022 onwards and the large number of 2024 is a very recent phenomenon. China’s current account surplus, that also takes into account such things as the repatriation of profits by foreign companies, was only 2.2% of GDP in 2024. US corporations make a lot of profits selling in China’s domestic economy (e.g. Apple, McDonalds, Starbucks) and keep the majority of the profits made by exporting goods from China under their own brands. Of course, the Trump administration wants to talk about that 5.6% figure, not the 2.2% figure that may draw attention to the amount of profits that US corporations are making in China.
Another issue is that during and after COVID, the US government and Federal Reserve followed massively expansionary policies. First both fiscal and monetary, and then heavily fiscal (from late 2022 when the US economy looked as if was about to roll into recession). This massive expansionary boost, given the de-industrialized nature of the US economy, naturally sucked in a huge amount of imports; including those from China and from nations utilizing Chinese inputs. The correct thing would have been to remove the punchbowl, but the exact opposite was done. An extra spur was given by the politically driven interest rate cuts in the second half of 2024, and the US Treasury Secretary’s decision to fund the US government using short-term bills in 2024; every last demand lever was pulled in 2024 as I detailed here. The Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will just prime the pump even more, while Trump pushes the Federal Reserve for interest rate cuts.
With a Federal Government deficit of 7% stretching far out into the future, even with assumptions of continued economic growth, the US economy requires significant retrenchment not yet more pump priming. More taxes on the top 10% who provide 50% of the retail consumption within the US, heavily skewed toward imported goods, rather than yet more tax cuts for them. Tariffs will not fix this problem, unless Trump wants to see the US economy collapse into an inflationary slump that further decimates the living standards of the majority of Americans and threatens a financial crash. The problem is not Chinese under-consumption, it is US (and Western) top 10% over-consumption.
“Housing Crash” threatening a financial disaster
The Chinese government has extremely skillfully managed a controlled deflation of the domestic property bubble. A controlled deflation that may continue for a number of years, as Chinese nominal incomes keep increasing by perhaps 7% per year, to bring house prices into a reasonable level with respect to incomes. At the same time, there has been an astonishing reorientation of investment from property into the productive forces. A reorientation that is only just starting to play out in the technological upgrading and advancement of Chinese society. While the US and Western top 10% over consume and grant themselves more tax cuts, the Chinese Party-state drives an acceleration in the growth and development of the productive forces.
Below, from Ian Welsh’s web site, is a graph of Chinese house price inflation in which can be seen the 2012-2014 bubble and then the much bigger 2016-2018 bubble. The red line adjusts for inflation, but not growth in incomes that were very rapidly increasing during this period. Prices corrected in the 2018-2020 period but then bounced back somewhat from mid 2020 into early 2022. Then they stabilized and started to fall from late 2023 onwards. If the Party-state maintains nominally falling to flat house prices over the next decade they will have halved house prices in terms of average income multiples. A controlled relative deflation that will not threaten financial stability but will greatly benefit the younger generations.
Rents increased much more slowly than house prices, and have most recently started falling. This is great news for younger generations that tend to be the greatest renters and have lower incomes. With their propensity to spend the incremental Yuan much higher than more well off older generations, lower rents rapidly turn into higher consumption; as noted retail consumption is strongly increasing. Again, from Ian Welsh’s site:
100 square metres is about the same as 1,000 square feet, which means that in Beijing a 1,000 square foot apartment can be rented for the equivalent of USD 1,190 per month. That’s in the most expensive rental market in China, where the annual average salary is about US$26,100 per year at market exchange rates. The same sized apartment would be more than US$4,000 per month in New York City, where the average annual salary is about US$80,000. The average annual salary in NYC is 3.1 times higher than Beijing, but rents are at least 3.36 times higher; with rents falling and incomes rising much faster in Beijing. In Guangzhou, in the heart of the southern high tech conurbation, average annual salaries are close to US$22,000 per year while the average monthly rent is only US$690 per month for a 1,000 square foot apartment.
As Mr. Welsh succinctly puts it:
You can’t be an industrial power if rentiers: people who expect to make money thru time arbitrage and managed scarcity, are in charge of your society … Anyway, China needs to keep housing and rental prices down. At the very least they need to increase less than wage increases and for many years. All signs are, that as is most often the case, the CCP [sic] is succeeding at the policy goals it set out for itself.
“Deflation” threatening a financial disaster
Its called actual market competition and sustainable monetary and fiscal policies that align with the growth in the economy. The exact opposite of the pump-primed highly concentrated oligopolistic, corrupt, and financialized rentier economy of the US, where corporations took advantage of the COVID supply disruptions to massively increase their profit margins while in many cases shitifying their products and services. When the economy is growing at 5% year, mild deflation is not an issue and may in fact represent large leaps in productivity and highly competitive markets. That is what China is experiencing. For example in an EV market that is both growing at 30% per year and experiencing falling prices.
“Autocratic” state unable to compete with the flexible “democracies”
The Western nations are oligarchies, dominated by a small elite which utilizes utterly performative “democratic” processes to hide and obfuscate their power. As the most purely bourgeois elite dominated society, the US is the most advanced in this respect with even money defined as protected “free speech”. These oligarchies if anything have shown themselves to be both inflexible and incompetent. In contrast, the Chinese Party-state has shown a great deal of flexibility, and uses highly competitive domestic markets to drive a high level of corporate responsiveness, while engaging in extensive discussions with the citizenry before setting policies. In the West there is also little if any impact for state officials and politicians when they fail, with many seeming to “fail upwards”; such as Ursula von der Leyen. In China, officials are quite open to consequences from public criticism and policy failures. The legitimacy of the Chines Party-state among the domestic population is many times higher than that of the US state and politicians among the US population.
“Demographic Time Bomb”
Anyone who uses this type of concern trolling has not even looked at the Wikipedia Chinese demographics page. From that it can very clearly be seen that the Chinese working age demographic (18-60) will not be collapsing any time soon. In fact if we take the 2020 demographic chart below and move it on 15 years to 2035, we will see that one of the most productive age groups (45-50) will actually increase while the number of new recent entrants to the workforce (20-35) will have also increased. Only the 30-45 year old and 50-60 year old age groups will have decreased.
There is also still some room still left for the movement of workers from rural occupations to the big cities, with the Chinese urbanization rate of 67% compared to over 80% in the US and Western Europe. In addition, technologies such as exoskeletons and robotics can help older workers maintain their productivity. The Chinese younger generations are also very well educated, significantly better than their elders, and fit and healthy. Unlike in the West, where educational levels have declined and a significant share of the younger generations are either unfit, unhealthy, or both. Given also the redirection of resources away from property investment and towards the productive forces in China, ongoing GDP per capita increases of 5% are quite possible into the mid-2030s and beyond.
Unlike a Japan that faces a very real immediate demographics issue, combined with the Chinese and US assaults upon its productive forces.
And a South Korea which will face a major demographic issue in the 2030s.
Progress but “At What Cost”
When all else fails, Western mainstream journalists search for any negative that they can offset against Chinese progress. So that they can say “yes, China is being so successful but at what cost”. This is the end game of the failure of the Western propaganda.
Of course China is not perfect, no nation will ever be perfect; most especially one of 1.4 billion people. But it is lead by the Party-state in a far superior way to the leaderships of the West, especially from the point of view of the vast majority of the population. That is why the Party-state enjoys extremely high levels of social legitimacy, levels only dreamt of by Western leaderships. You would of course not know much about this watching, reading and listening to official Western media, state actors, and courtier commentators.
I was recently invited to a closed door consultation event at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa which of course I cannot write about. But there is one thing that struck me that I will mention, and that was the attitude of the extremely professional Chinese diplomatic staff. I would liken it to a “mild exasperation” covered expertly by a fastidious diplomatic approach. It struck me that diplomatic members of the Chinese Party-state sometimes must feel like they have come across some unfortunate person that they are happy to help out but are then regaled with the complaints of the hapless person about their own supposed shortcomings. The proposals of win-win solutions from the much bigger and stronger person to the much smaller and weaker unfortunate being met generally with a residual arrogance from the times when the roles were reversed. The reality is that China is just fine thank you, and it is the West that needs to learn a lot more humility and self-awareness for its own good and the good of humanity in general.
Instead, China being just fine thank you is what is driving Western oligarch aggression and dark propaganda against China. The Western oligarchy sees its global dominance slipping away in the face of a more successful state/society complex that does not allow for a bourgeois oligarchy. The Chinese Party-state may be fine with the Chinese saying of “to get rich is glorious” but only when the rich do not attempt to use their wealth to usurp the Party-state that serves the national good. Profit levels are significantly lower in China because the Party-state makes sure that there is real competition within markets, and that corporations orient themselves toward value creation rather than rent seeking behaviours. With the home of the greatest rent seeking, the financial sector, kept under very firm state control. China threatens both Western global hegemony through its continued economic growth, and provides the “threat of the good example” (as Chomsky put it) that is a direct threat to the legitimacy and sustainability of the Western domestic oligarch dominance. So instead, a constant stream of lies will be propagated by the corrupted officials and organic intellectuals of the Western states, the bought and paid for Western political actors, and the Western media that is controlled by an incredibly small group of oligarchs and their tools.
Humility and self-awareness do not come easily to those that have ruled for centuries, and see their civilizational primacy as a natural and unchangeable reality that has nothing to learn from the “lesser” civilizations. Such pride comes before a fall as the saying goes, just as the Qing rulers found out in the early nineteenth century.
Contrary to Mainstream Media, Journalist Sees a Different Side of China
By Aidan Jonah - August 12, 2025 0
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
As legislators across North America continue bashing the People’s Republic of China, some Canadians, including this author, were invited on a tour of three Chinese cities during the spring.
During our time in China, we saw beautiful nature and technological innovation in Hangzhou, the peaceful coastline in Qingdao, and a brief peek of the capital city, Beijing, focused on a visit to the Chinese Foreign Affairs ministry.
Our invitation came from the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA) and Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Canada, and saw our group—composed of journalists, artists, activists, business folk, a pastor and more—arrive in late April.
By no means was this tour the hallmark of investigative journalism. We were taken to lovely restaurants to eat, saw corporations and places of a high standard, and stayed in good hotels. The value of the trip was a chance for Canadians to see the good side of the People’s Republic of China (portrayed in the West as a country many people supposedly want to flee), as the country’s leadership and many cadres continue working hard every day to improve the nation. It is up to the Chinese people—as they have previously and continue, since the PRC’s establishment in 1949—to control the destiny of their own nation.
Beijing
Our visit was brief but memorable. For me, the time in Beijing began when I went down the wrong elevator at our hotel and got lost before the group’s first meal together. Luckily for all involved, I eventually found my way to the correct elevator, and then the hotel restaurant where everyone else was.
The next morning, the scheduled excitement began. We met with media staffers of huanqiu.com/Global Times Online and learned about their online operations and the kinds of events they hold.
[Source: Photo Courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
During the meeting, Alex Tyrrell, leader of the Green Party of Québec, “raised the issue of the divide between Canadian and Chinese societies, and how the use of different social media platforms contributes to that gap.” [Source: Photos courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
Tyrrell noted: “They responded that perhaps the next generation of social media—combined with the rise of AI translations—might help create a space where people across the world can connect more freely than we do now, given that we do not use the same social media platforms as the Chinese people.”
We were then driven through the Beijing downtown to the Forbidden City. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
[Source: Photos courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
Afterwards we had lunch at the CPIFA with Zou Xiaoli— its vice president and former Chinese Ambassador to Argentina. Tyrrell noted that the Taiwan area was among topics discussed.
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
After lunch, a picture of me was taken standing next to a statue of Zhou Enlai, former Premier of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
We then headed to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. There we met with Tang Zhiwen, Deputy Director of the Foreign Ministry’s Department of North American and Oceania Affairs. Tyrrell noted Zhiwen “emphasized that China seeks friendship, trade, and cooperation with Canada,” while the Two Michaels [Canadian citizens accused of espionage in China] and Canada’s foreign interference paranoia also came up.
Afterwards, we headed to the media room, where we met Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun, just after a press conference had concluded.
Hangzhou
The star of the show for my generation was the museum of the Nanshan Campus of the Chinese Academy of Art. The museum housed a “Black Myth: Wukong” art exhibition, on the characters and story around “Journey to the West,” a famous 16th century Chinese novel by Wu Cheng’en that was made into a well-known television series released in 1986, which eventually became a hit video game in 2024.
I was aware of the game before visiting the museum but, after visiting the Nanshan campus itself, I found the opportunity to even play it on the big screen to be an especially enjoyable one.
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
Just before, we saw the beautiful campus whose museum I enjoyed so much. We saw the dedication of art students and some of the beautiful art they had created.
Earlier, we visited Zhejiang Haikong Nanke Huatie Digital Intelligence and Technology Co., which Tyrrell noted “specializes in 50kg+ drones that are used in a wide variety of applications.”
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
[Source: Photo Courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
We continued to visit more companies including Geely Technology Group, which produced the eye-catching AE200 aircraft which the company says can carry up to six people while being useful for low-altitude tourism and transportation along with emergency rescue, with “green energy propulsion.”
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
The Zhejiang Intangible Cultural Heritage Museum was a treat to visit and contained replicas of many historical objects.
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
We would leave lively Hangzhou for a more laid-back destination, Qingdao.
Qingdao
Qingdao was formerly a German concession between 1898 to 1914 as the Qing Empire’s weakness led to multiple foreign countries having territory they managed within China’s borders. After the Republic of China was established in 1911, led by Sun Yat-sen, Qingdao fully returned to China’s government. After the PRC was established in 1949, and Chinese sovereignty over the mainland fully restored, Qingdao could grow into its current state over the following decades.
A fun start to our time in Qingdao was when we received a past-midnight food order (since work still needed to be completed while on the trip) from a cute little delivery robot.
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
Soon we were visiting the Qingdao Port Automation Terminal, where half of the terminal (blue side) is run by computers, while the other half (red side) is still fully managed by humans.
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
To get there, we crossed a bridge which, in 2011, was the longest one in the world at 31 kilometers.
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
After seeing the Olympic torch from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, we visited Haier, where I snapped a photo with a translation robot.
A glass display case with a tall brown object
Soon afterwards, we visited the famous Qingdao Beer Museum, where we learned about the history of the Tsingtao Brewery Company and saw some of the processes that lead to the beer’s production.
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
My favorite moment, however, may have been finding a statue of Colonel Sanders of the Kentucky Fried Chicken brand, and having some kind Chinese folks take a photo of the two of us.
A person pointing at a statue
Afterwards, we visited a truly hidden gem in Qingdao, the Qingdao/Cuba Cultural Exchange Center. While some members of the tour bought Cuban cigars, I enjoyed the beautiful area within the center.[1]
[Source: Photo courtesy of Aidan Jonah]
As the last night of the tour was winding down, I thought back to the many memories and fascinating Canadians who, except for Mr. Tyrrell, I was unaware of before we met in China.
I kept these memories in mind, even as the priority shifted back to day-to-day operations for The Canada Files and, as part of that, challenging the Canadian-state McCarthyism that prevents more Canadians from making vibrant China memories.
China does want win-win cooperation and increased trade with Canada; sadly, Canadian politicians (including those in government) have instead, in recent years:
Joined the anti-China “Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China,” designed to coordinate action against China
Voted unanimously in 2021 to claim a “Uyghur genocide” was occurring in China
Let a National Endowment for Democracy (NED)-funded group equate Xizang Autonomous Region (formerly known as the Tibet Autonomous Region) schools to Canadian residential schools, then unanimously voted “for a non-binding motion…that refers to Tibetans as ‘a people and a nation’ who should get self-determination”
Quietly supported Taiwan separatism
Supported Canada’s military joining in provocative naval missions in the South China Sea, along with the U.S.
Now, even in the mainstream media newspaper, Globe and Mail, there is a call for China relations that are in Canada’s interests, instead of kowtowing to the U.S.’s ongoing anti-China campaign.
May there be an end to Canadian government servility to the U.S. in the coming years (instead of spending hundreds of billions annually by 2035 to please the warmongering NATO alliance), enabling development of strong Canada-China cooperation in the future.
1.“It would violate U.S. law for U.S. residents to bring back Cuban cigars purchased at the center.” ↑
(Many other images at link. How many photos of the author do ya need? Geez...)
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Whose Workers, Whose Wages? A Revolutionary Intervention Against the Imperial Left’s China Syndrome
While China brings electricity, roads, and rail to the Global South, the imperial left brings its measuring tape—only to weep over wage gaps. But whose gap are they really mourning? And in whose name?
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | June 10, 2025
Bricks, Not Sermons: The Scale of Struggle in Concrete Terms
In the war for the future of the Global South, China is laying bricks while the West continues to drop bombs—and still, somehow, it’s China that gets scolded for not being charitable enough. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, has already funneled over $679 billion in infrastructure investment into Africa, Asia, and Latin America—compared to the United States’ paltry $76 billion in the same period. That is not a statistic; it is a revelation. It reveals who is building, who is breaking, and who is watching from a comfortable distance in the name of “solidarity.”
This explosion of Chinese investment, however, has stirred a curious response from some corners of the so‑called Western left. You won’t hear much about the thousands of miles of rail, the rural electrification projects extending power to communities long ignored by colonial grids, or the tens of thousands of local jobs created in construction, logistics, energy, and transport. What you’ll hear instead is a repetitive chorus: But what about the wage disparity? In Chinese-funded projects, they say, Chinese workers are often paid more than local laborers. This becomes their sticking point—not the IMF’s structural adjustment blackmail, not the French uranium extraction in Niger, not AFRICOM’s expansion. Just the fact that a Chinese welder might earn twice what a local worker earns on the same job.
Let’s be blunt: this is not anti-capitalist critique. This is imperial moralism in leftist drag. Because to focus on this disparity without context is to erase the entire structure of imperialist underdevelopment that these projects are beginning to overturn. It’s to weep over a symptom while ignoring the disease. It’s to cling to a fantasy of pure, abstract equality while the Global South claws its way out of centuries of looting and war.
This essay is an intervention. A scalpel against the smug, self-referential politics of the imperial left. We will dismantle the wage critique, reveal its ideological function, and re-center the only metric that matters: does the project empower the working class of the Global South? If it does, then let the critics scream. The bricks are still being laid.
On Whose Backs? The Material Realities Behind the Wage Gap
Let’s begin with the facts, because reality is always more grounded than ideology. In Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway project, a flagship BRI endeavor, protests emerged over disparities between Chinese and Kenyan workers. While precise monthly wage figures are inconsistent across sources, media reports indicate that Kenyan laborers were often paid between KES 400–700 per day (roughly $3–6), while Chinese workers—largely technical staff and engineers—earned significantly more. But what does this gap actually represent? Not racial hierarchy, not imperial disdain, but a layered combination of skill specialization, international relocation, and contractual negotiation—none of which is unique to China.
Chinese workers on overseas projects often fill roles that require years of technical training—rail engineers, tunneling specialists, energy grid architects. Their deployment comes with long-term contracts, typically lasting two to three years. These workers leave their families behind, live in isolated on-site dormitories, endure long hours, and navigate unfamiliar cultural terrains. Their contracts include relocation bonuses, per diems, risk pay, and housing allowances. In short: their higher wages reflect the cost of transnational labor deployment—just as it would for an American engineer posted to Afghanistan or a French technician working in Chad.
And here’s the kicker: despite this wage gap, the local workers on these projects are still earning more than they would in almost any other job in the domestic economy. While we lack consistently disaggregated wage data across all BRI projects, a SAIS-CARI study found that Chinese firms in Africa often paid better than local and other foreign firms in equivalent sectors. What the imperial left sees as inequality is, in the local material context, uplift. For millions of workers, these aren’t bad jobs. They’re the best jobs they’ve ever had.
Who Signs the Contracts? Sovereignty, Class, and the Local Bourgeoisie
One of the most dishonest elements in the wage disparity discourse is the implication that China unilaterally dictates pay scales. In reality, every infrastructure project—especially those under state-to-state BRI terms—is governed by a bilateral agreement. That means the wage structure is negotiated by the host government. If local workers are being underpaid relative to their needs, then the blame lies just as much with the national bourgeoisie as with the Chinese contractors.
Take Kenya again. The Kenyan state, eager to expedite financing and deliver visible progress, signed contracts that prioritized speed, cost, and capital inflows—often at the expense of stronger labor safeguards. According to researchers, labor protections for Kenyan workers on the Standard Gauge Railway were inconsistently enforced, with union representation limited and working conditions raising concern among local advocacy groups. But this was not imposed by China. It was a domestic ruling class decision made in service of capitalist priorities. If you want to fight for better wages on BRI projects, organize the working class to confront their own comprador elite, not to scapegoat China for the failures of postcolonial governance. Even European leaders have admitted that it wasn’t Chinese coercion—but domestic neoliberal policy—that transferred public assets into foreign hands. As Macron put it after meeting Xi in 2022: Europe must “reduce its dependence on the US and avoid being drawn into confrontation” to reclaim sovereignty and act as a “third power.”
And let’s be clear: the idea that Chinese firms should simply pay all workers the same, regardless of location, training, or negotiation, is not a revolutionary demand. It’s liberal utopianism—a dream of frictionless fairness without power struggle, without imperial history, and without sovereign differentiation. That dream dies the moment your shovel hits dirt.
Compared to What? Naming the Real Exploiters
Let’s turn the question back on the critics. If China is guilty of inequality because of a 2:1 wage ratio, what do we call the West’s 4:1, 6:1, even 10:1 wage disparities in the same regions?
During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, American contractors frequently earned hundreds of dollars per day for logistical and security support, while Iraqi workers performing similar work earned only a few dollars daily. In one documented case, a subcontractor charged the U.S. military $75 per bag of laundry while paying local workers as little as $12 per shift. The markup wasn’t just financial—it was colonial. Were the socialists in Brooklyn outraged then? Did they write op-eds about “wage apartheid” on Halliburton sites?
French uranium giant Areva (now Orano) has extracted massive wealth from Niger for decades. Independent sources confirm longstanding criticism that Nigerien miners have worked under unsafe conditions for wages far below a living standard, while the profits fueled France’s nuclear energy infrastructure. There’s no skill differential here. Just raw, racialized extraction. For instance, a ReliefWeb analysis highlights “unsafe working conditions and exposure to radioactive poisoning in the community” around Niger’s uranium mines. So where is the Western left’s fury? Where is their forensic investigation of European wage hierarchies? Silence is not neutrality—it’s complicity.
The reason these critics are louder about China is simple: China threatens to end Western monopoly over the Global South. That’s the real problem. The rest is ideological smoke.
Infrastructure as Class War: Who Builds, Who Bombs, and Who Complains
Infrastructure is not neutral. It is not apolitical, technocratic, or just another sector of economic development. It is a weapon—either of imperial domination or of sovereign defense. And that is precisely why China’s infrastructure projects attract such fury from the West. For the first time in modern history, nations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America are building without begging. They are laying roads, connecting ports, powering cities—and doing it without needing permission from the IMF, USAID, or the European Commission.
But if you listen to the imperial left, you’d think the problem isn’t that the West abandoned development—it’s that China didn’t do it nicely enough. That China’s engineers were paid too much. That the local workers didn’t get matching socks. That railroads built in four years should’ve taken ten.
This is where the real ideological function of the wage critique comes into focus. It doesn’t emerge from proletarian struggle. It emerges from the NGO-academic complex—a class formation fluent in moral posturing but allergic to material power. Many of the loudest critics of BRI projects aren’t workers, unions, or peasant associations. They’re Western-funded think tanks, university departments, and “civil society” monitors funded by the very governments that bombed Libya, starved Yemen, and sanctioned Venezuela.
These forces are not neutral observers. They are the ideological wing of imperialism. Their task is not to uplift—but to delegitimize. And their criticisms of Chinese projects mirror, almost verbatim, the talking points of the U.S. State Department: concerns about “unsustainable debt,” “neo-colonialism,” and “authoritarian development.” Yet none of these concerns are raised about the 78% of Global South debt held by Western financial institutions. None are aimed at the $100 billion in extractive infrastructure built by European oil companies. This is not critique. It’s counterinsurgency in academic form.
In fact, field research in Central Asia offers one of the sharpest rebukes to the anti-China hysteria peddled by both neoconservatives and the NGO-academic complex. A joint ethnographic project led by anthropologists Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi and Alessandro Rippa—published by Novastan—documents how many so-called BRI “debt traps” are mythical, and how Chinese projects often mirror or even outperform their Western counterparts. They emphasize that many of China’s flagship infrastructure developments, like the Karakoram Highway, predate the BRI by decades and were built on historic South-South solidarity—not extractive imperial design. These scholars dismantle the Orientalist myth that China is uniquely opaque or sinister, noting instead that Chinese firms often operate within—and alongside—global development frameworks, including international donors and co-financed infrastructure banks. The problem isn’t Chinese roads; it’s the fantasy that Western aid ever came without strings or bloodshed.
The Moral Optics of Empire: How Liberal Guilt Becomes Policy
Why does the Western left obsess over wage disparities in Chinese projects but say little about Areva’s uranium empire in Niger, or the EU’s agricultural subsidies that flood African markets with surplus corn and powdered milk, destroying local food systems and rural livelihoods? Why do they whisper about World Bank privatizations and shout about Chinese contractors paying too much to their own workers?
Because to confront Western exploitation would mean confronting their own governments, their own universities, their own careers. It would mean acknowledging that their lifestyle—every phone, every car, every Amazon order—is built on the backs of Global South labor. It’s easier to moralize from afar. To scold China for not being an ethical capitalist. To feign outrage over wage differences, all while paying taxes to fund NATO bombings.
This is what we call imperial moralism. It’s not grounded in solidarity, but in guilt. Guilt that gets transmuted into critique—but always aimed at the wrong target. Not at the empire they live in. But at the rival power challenging that empire’s dominance.
We must say it plainly: Western critiques of BRI labor practices that ignore the structural violence of Western imperialism are not leftist. They are a form of liberal colonialism—demanding that the Global South suffer ethically, develop slowly, and never use its alliances to escape imperial control.
From Moralism to Materialism: The Revolutionary Terrain of Multipolar Development
China’s development model is not perfect. It contains contradictions—wage hierarchies, environmental concerns, uneven bargaining between states and firms. But these are contradictions within the camp of anti-imperialist development, not between oppression and liberation. They are contradictions that arise from building under global capitalism while resisting its command center.
We are not moral arbiters. We are revolutionaries. Our task is not to grade China on a purity scale. It is to identify: where is imperialism dominant? And where is it being eroded? China’s infrastructure projects, despite their flaws, represent a rupture in the global system of dependency. They bring roads where the West brought drones. They build schools where the West built sweatshops. They offer finance without conditionality where the West offered debt traps—as noted in a Boston University analysis observing that China’s approach “lacks policy conditionality and fiscal austerity requirements of Western multilaterals.”
This broader multipolar shift is also reflected in the operations of the New Development Bank (NDB), the BRICS-led multilateral development bank headquartered in Shanghai. As documented by a Andrea Molinari and Rocío Ceballos, the NDB has expanded its mandate to support infrastructure, climate action, and sovereign development—though it still faces limitations in non-sovereign and local-currency financing. According to Reuters, the NDB has approved approximately $32.8 billion in loans and aims to increase local-currency lending from 22% to 30% by 2026. Its evolution signals a tectonic shift in the international financial architecture: not a rejection of multilateralism, but a reclamation of it by the Global South. The emergence of BRICS financial institutions like the NDB represents a concrete attempt to restructure global financing around Southern priorities—albeit unevenly, and with contradictions that must be resolved through class struggle, not abandonment.
And that is precisely why they are under attack. Not because they pay Chinese workers more—but because they pay anyone at all to build something that isn’t supervised by the empire.
So let us drop the measuring tape and pick up the shovel. Let us support development, even when it is uneven, so long as it points in the direction of sovereignty, dignity, and class power for the colonized.
Lines of Struggle: What a Revolutionary Position Actually Looks Like
To criticize without strategy is to serve the enemy. If we are to critique China’s overseas development model, it must not be on imperialism’s terms. It must come from the standpoint of internationalist class struggle—from the trenches of the Global South, not the seminar rooms of the Global North.
This means beginning with the fundamental question: Compared to what? Compared to IMF austerity? Compared to European multinationals paying pennies and dumping waste? Compared to decades of underdevelopment enforced by the very institutions now pretending to care about fair wages?
China’s infrastructure projects are not without contradictions. But these are contradictions against imperialism—not weapons of it. And in a world still ordered by colonial debt, imperial accumulation, and Western military domination, those contradictions must be resolved from within the camp of anti-imperialist sovereignty, not handed over to the NGO–World Bank axis to “audit.”
So what does a revolutionary position look like?
Build Sovereignty, Not Dependency: Strategic Demands for the South
First, we must defend the right of Global South governments to negotiate on their own terms. This includes pushing for:
Labor quota clauses in bilateral agreements—as part of Ethiopia’s strategy to maximize local participation in Chinese infrastructure projects, according to the Center for Global Development’s call for stronger local content in African BRI contracts.
Apprenticeship mandates requiring Chinese firms to transfer skills and technology to Indigenous engineers, architects, and trade workers.
Profit reinvestment guarantees—mechanisms ensuring a portion of revenues stay in-country to fund public infrastructure, not just private coffers.
These are not anti-China demands. These are anti-comprador demands. They are the demands of workers and peasants confronting their own domestic bourgeoisie—and leveraging China’s investment not to entrench dependency, but to build material independence.
Let it be said clearly: the contradictions within BRI are opportunities for class struggle. They are spaces where the Global South can press for more—more wages, more sovereignty, more control. But this struggle must be waged by the people of the South themselves—not outsourced to Western academics who never built a road or fought a loan shark in their lives.
The North’s Role Is Not to Police, But to Disarm the Empire
What, then, is the responsibility of the Western left? It is not to nitpick BRI contracts or wag fingers at Chinese labor hierarchies. It is to break the chokehold of their own imperial state.
Demand the U.S. and EU cancel the debts they imposed on BRI nations—and fully implement HIPC and MDRI debt relief, which has delivered 100% cancellation of eligible IMF, World Bank, and African Development Bank debts to 36–37 poor countries to date.
Expose and dismantle Western financial dominance in global bond markets—African governments now owe more to private Western creditors than to China (35% vs. 12% of external debt), and these loans carry significantly higher interest rates.
Organize class war at home: oppose military spending, shut down arms exports, and sabotage the engines of empire that profit from Global South collapse.
In other words: don’t tell China how to build a dam until you’ve stopped your own government from bombing one. Don’t talk about fair wages in Kenya until you’ve organized workers at Amazon and Raytheon. And don’t cry about Chinese construction sites when your own tax dollars pay for apartheid walls and surveillance drones.
From Solidarity to Strategy: Toward an Anti‑Imperialist Development Front
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The real task before us is to forge a global front of sovereign development. One that links:
Chinese infrastructure capacity
Latin American resource sovereignty
African industrial potential
The revolutionary traditions of peoples who have resisted empire for centuries
This means building **South‑South labour federations** to bargain collectively with Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, and even domestic firms. It means creating political alliances across Global South governments to demand coordinated development, not just bilateral deals. These ideas aren’t theoretical—they reflect the steadily growing decolonial and technical cooperation models underway between the Global South and China:
Examples include China’s BRI-linked support via the AIIB and New Development Bank, designed to fund infrastructure projects **without Western-style conditionality** 1. Similarly, UN and regional bodies now champion South‑South and triangular cooperation—encompassing exchanges in trade, health, education, and technology—building practical capacity across countries, from Latin America to Africa to Asia 2.
Because the NGO model is not the path to liberation. It is the velvet glove of imperialism. A slower suffocation. A prettier poverty.
Endnotes
1.Fudan University Green Finance & Development Center. “BRI Investment Report 2023.”
2.Oxford University, African Affairs. “Labor Practices on Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway.”
3.International Labour Organization (ILO). “Decent Work in Conflict Zones: Iraq Compensation Structures.” 2019.
4.SAIS-CARI Working Paper #26. “Chinese Firms and Employment Dynamics in Africa.”
5.Xinhua. “China’s BRI Rail Projects Link Africa and Asia.” October 2023.
6.IEA. “Africa Energy Outlook 2022.”
7.enter for Global Development. “Making Chinese Infrastructure Investments Work in Africa.”
8.Center for Global Development. “What Does China’s Development Finance Really Look Like?”
9.Vanity Fair. “Prisoners of Halliburton.” April 2007.
10.European Parliament. “Raw Materials and Colonialism: The Case of Niger.” 2022.
11.World Bank. “International Debt Statistics 2024.”
12.IEA. “World Energy Investment 2023.”
13.IMF. “Debt Relief Under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative.” (2023 factsheet confirming 36 countries have reached completion point)
14.Debt Justice UK. “African Governments Owe More to Private Lenders Than China.” (reports 35% vs. 12% debt share and double interest rates)
Foreign investors, including China, are exiting the US Treasury market. An expected outcome of launching a trade war against other nations that will reduce their US$ trade revenues. And also of course, a much bigger economic and financial war against a China that has such large US$ Treasury holdings.
The Chinese state can borrow for 10 years at 1.7%, setting the “riskless” rate above which all other borrowers pay depending on their perceived credit worthiness; and that rate is falling. China can then turn around and offer an average 4.2% interest rate on its overseas lending in US$ (e.g. on Belt & Road projects); lower than the rate at which the US government can borrow.
Underlining the heavy debt and deficit levels in the US, with the US Treasury Secretary attempting to keep longer rates lower by borrowing short, but there is reducing appetite to buy US long term debt. China is a net seller of US Treasuries, recycling its US$ earnings into foreign lending rather than US Treasuries. With China’s current account surplus with the US rapidly shrinking with the trade war, Chinese demand for US Treasuries will fall even further.
Trump just blinked again and extended the Chinese trade war grace period for negotiations by another 90 days. This is one of the reasons, China is financially strong and the US is weak and getting weaker.
Sydney Loving, a Central Committee member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, joined the 2025 Friends of Socialist China delegation on a ten-day visit to Xi’an, Yan’an, Dunhuang, Jiayuguan, and Shanghai. The trip, hosted by the China NGO Network for International Exchanges, aimed to deepen solidarity, build understanding of the Global Civilisation Initiative, and counter Western Cold War lies about China.
In the interview below, originally published in FightBack News, Sydney emphasises that China’s achievements must be seen in the context of its pre-1949 poverty, war, and foreign domination. Visiting Yan’an, the cradle of the revolution, underscored how the Communist Party of China (CPC) grounded itself in the masses. Today, after 76 years of socialist construction, China has lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty, raised life expectancy to over 79 years, and built a high-tech, increasingly green economy.
Daily life in China, Sydney observes, contrasts sharply with US cities: clean, walkable streets, safety for pedestrians, abundant public spaces, and virtually no homelessness. Historical and cultural heritage is actively preserved and made accessible. In poorer Gansu Province, projects like the JISCO steel complex, solar power plants, and ecological greening of desert areas illustrate the link between poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability.
Sydney stresses the CPC’s visible role in daily life, from free medical checkups to street sanitation, with leadership positions earned by serving the people rather than by spending money on marketing. She argues that socialism’s central planning and mass mobilisation achieve outcomes capitalism simply cannot.
For US revolutionaries, the lesson is twofold: socialism works, and the main obstacle to global peace and dignity is US imperialism. While China’s path cannot be copied directly, its example shows that a people-centred, revolutionary movement is possible.
Fight Back!: How did you go to China? What was the purpose of the trip?
Sydney Loving: The delegation was organized by Friends of Socialist China, a political project aiming to strengthen understanding and support for China on the basis of solidarity and truth. I repped Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the delegation included folks from Black Alliance for Peace, Workers World, Progressive International, Communist Party of Britain Young Communist League, Black Liberation Alliance, Qiao Collective, Iskra Books, and others.
We were invited by the China NGO Network for International Exchanges, and over ten days we visited Xi’an, Yan’an, Dunhuang, Jiayuguan, and Shanghai.
Traveling to a range of areas, we got to investigate how China is building socialism, the incredible advances they’ve made in 76 years of socialist construction, and we had awesome dialogues about how we can better counter the negative narratives and Cold War-type lies we’re bombarded with in the West. Ultimately what we found was a country led by a forward-thinking political party, with a purpose that’s carving out a better future for everybody.
Fight Back!: How would you describe China’s path of development?
Loving: To really understand how remarkable China’s development is, you’ve got to understand the history and what life was like for most people. Before the revolution in 1949, China was totally devastated by imperialism and foreign occupation, brutal feudalism, man-made famines, warlordism, etc. Life expectancy in the rural areas was as low as 24 years old. In Xi’an we went to some ancient history sites, and the terracotta generals and statues of noblewomen were plump – because mass starvation was a feature of society for centuries. So, socialism had all this to overcome.
We went to Yan’an, which was really the cradle of the revolution from 1935 to 1947. The Red Army re-grouped there after the Long March, and the CPC [Communist Party of China] held the 7th National Congress there, (16 long years after the 6th Congress, because they were fighting Japanese imperialism and the KMT) where Mao Zedong Thought was crystalized and adopted. They fought dogmatism and made the decision to be the party of the masses of Chinese people. When they built the political structures and elected representatives to the Congress, they had a system of bowls and beans for people who couldn’t read to vote for their candidates
Now, 76 years later, we saw a country that’s the largest economy in the world as measured by Purchasing Power Parity. Even smaller cities are high-tech and increasingly green, life expectancy is over 78 years, and of course where over 800 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty– and we’re not just talking by dollar amounts. We’re talking guaranteed food, clothing, housing, electricity and water, healthcare and education.
Capitalism is just not capable of that kind of project. They did it through central planning and mass mobilization. Every single city we visited showed how the Communist Party is guiding development that puts people first.
Fight Back!: What differences did you notice in daily life?
Loving: It really feels very different than cities in the U.S., even our biggest cities. The streets are clean, walkable, and well-organized despite how populous they are. To the point where moms and their kids would just walk across the intersection, confident the cars would stop for them. Lots of electric vehicles and things are designed with the needs of the elderly, children and workers in mind. Even at one of our hotels, the workers would all meet in the quad for a dance/exercise in the mornings. It was really peaceful but lively, with parks and gardens everywhere, and tons of free activities and access to culture and historical sites.
In Xi’an and Dunhuang especially we saw how thousands of years of civilization are being preserved as part of people’s living identity. And with internal tourism being a big deal, museums and sites were full of schoolkids, seniors and families. To me it was clear that having history and culture belong to the people is part of the revolutionary spirit.
And unlike cities in the U.S., we saw almost no homelessness. In ten days, traveling around five cities, I saw just one person begging on the street with a QR code in the bottom of a pan. Compare that to San Francisco or New York, where you have entire neighborhoods of encampments.
Also, the technology was unreal. From little robots that take the elevator to deliver food to your hotel room to the airports where you just stand in front of a camera and it displays all your gate and flight info. Our hosts advised against us taking the bullet train because we Westerners were too slow with all our luggage and definitely would’ve been late, but the normal train was awesome, too.
Fight Back!: You went to the northwest, a poorer region of China. What stood out?
Loving: Yes we went to Gansu Province, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, one of the most historically impoverished parts of China. But we were really blown away by what they’re doing there.
In Jiayuguan, we visited JISCO, a state-owned steel company that the workers built the whole city around in the 1950s. Today it has 42% green cover, with ponds and parks– remember this is the Gobi Desert. It’s a testament to the level of development of the productive forces that now JISCO even has a dairy farm and a winery with the largest indoor wine cellar in Asia (yes we tasted the wine – delicious). We also toured the Dunhuang molten salt solar power plant, which can store energy at night, and a smart grid AI control center that helps reduce carbon output across the province. We asked a worker there what’s the difference in tech between how their power grid works vs. in the U.S., and he modestly said, “Well our grid never goes down.” Unfortunately, I got a kick out of that – being from Texas.
There’s a big emphasis on ecological modernization. They’re really transforming a desert into a livable, sustainable place. It’s a testament to how poverty alleviation and environmentalism go hand in hand under socialism.
China is also proving that tech isn’t inherently anti-human. In Shanghai we went to a robotics facility where they demonstrated the advancements for surgery and industry, and a Lenovo factory where they showed off how they’re partnering with the school system to bring advanced tech into rural classrooms. The difference is who controls tech, under what system, and for what purpose.
For China, development that leaves some folks behind means failure. That’s why they focus on balancing the regions, uplifting the west and northwest instead of letting wealth pool on the coasts. So after the success of the massive poverty alleviation projects -which even the UN can’t deny – the next phase is “common prosperity.”
Fight Back!: What was the role of the Communist Party in daily life?
Loving: The Communist Party was everywhere. I mean they just celebrated reaching 100 million members. Villages, hospitals, schools and factories have Party branches. In Jiayuguan we passed one of the “Party Centers,” where our guides told us people can go and ask questions or get help from cadres, even childcare.
Again, it’s so different than political parties here. Local officials are graded on how well they serve the people, with the party being a meritocracy in that sense. You can’t buy your way into leadership like they do for political parties here in the U.S.
Actually, to rise the ranks in the Party, you have to demonstrate your dedication and service to the people. One Party member who was a teacher and an impromptu tour guide on our bus summed it up by saying it’s a feeling of pride in how far they’ve come and where they’re going. And for a good reason.
The CPC’s presence isn’t shadowy or abstract. It’s doctors giving free checkups, committees organizing street sanitation, workers shoring up safety conditions. It proves why they were able to defeat Japanese militarism and the KMT: because they were, and still are, deeply rooted in the masses.
Fight Back!: What lessons should revolutionaries in the U.S. draw from your experience?
Loving: We know that monopoly capitalism is a dying system, so one of the lessons for everyone is that socialism works. This is real life, so it’s not a utopia, and there’s contradictions and improvements to be made in everything. But it’s doing the most important work there is, which is lifting up people’s lives and solving huge complicated problems like poverty, climate change, and attacks on sovereignty and threats of war, with creativity and flexibility in changing times. If you get the chance, folks should definitely visit and see for yourselves.
But it’s not enough to just admire China. For revolutionaries here, we have to understand our tasks. The biggest obstacle to a peaceful, dignified future for everybody is U.S. imperialism. The same system that bombs Palestine, blockades Cuba, funds coups in Africa, and they’d like to wage war on China.
U.S. imperialism is the enemy of the people here, too.
As communists, we are earning leadership in all the strands of the people’s struggle and building a revolutionary movement at home, to create a party of the working class, rooted in the people, with the same agility and clarity of purpose that China’s communists have shown for almost a century. That being said, there’s no copy-pasting of China’s path that will work for us. We have to apply revolutionary science to our own conditions, time and place.
Fight Back!: Final thoughts?
Loving: Socialism is the future! In many respects China is showing the way, but it’s true for all of us. People in every corner of the world deserve to live with dignity and peace. We will get there if we fight for it.
Academic witch hunt: US arrests Chinese scientists in dangerous escalation
This episode of The China Report, hosted by KJ Noh in collaboration with Pivot to Peace, focuses on the recent arrest of two Chinese researchers from the University of Michigan on US federal charges of ‘agroterrorism’. The scientists, Yunqing Jian and Chengxuan Han, are accused of smuggling biological materials into the country – fusarium graminearum, a plant fungus – without permits. Prosecutors allege these could pose a grave threat to US crops, but plant pathology experts say the fungus is already widespread in the United States, is not on any official list of dangerous pathogens, and that the researchers’ work aimed to mitigate its effects, not cause harm.
The discussion brings together three guests: Linda Wan, a University of Michigan alumna and Code Pink organiser; Julie Tang, retired judge and co-founder of Pivot to Peace; and Bob McMurray, local resident and Michigan graduate. Linda Wan, who has been helping to organise protests and petitions in defence of the scientists, frames the case as part of a broader pattern of fear-mongering and xenophobia toward China and Chinese people.
Julie Tang calls the prosecution a clear case of overcharging – padding the main allegation with lesser counts to pressure a plea deal – and situates it within the racist McCarthyite China Initiative, introduced under the first Trump presidency, which investigated hundreds of Chinese scientists in order to whip up anti-China hysteria.
Bob McMurray notes that this case follows a standard playbook for manufacturing consent for both cold and hot wars. The arrests are part of an escalating pattern of propaganda, legal overreach and racial tropes aimed at building public support for confrontation with China. This is damaging to US-China relations, to the Asian-American community, to scientific progress, and to the prospects for peace.
BERTRAND Critiques Hudson Institute Report: China after Communism, preparing for a post-CCP China
August 23, 2025
By Arnaud Bertrand in Switzerland, Intellinews, July 29, 2025
It may be one of the most insane reports ever produced by a US think-tank, and that’s saying something.
The Hudson Institute has just published a 128-page plan entitled “China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China“, edited by Miles Yu (director of the Institute’s China Centre), which provides detailed operational plans to bring about the collapse of the Chinese regime through systematic information operations, financial warfare and covert influence campaigns, followed by detailed protocols for post-collapse management by the United States, including military occupation, territorial reorganisation, and the installation of a political and cultural system subservient to the United States.
I really don’t know whether to laugh or cry about it.
Cry at the arrogance and casualness with which they write about overthrowing the government of the world’s largest economy, the main economic lifeline for most of the planet and a quarter of the human race.
Laugh at this cartoonish wickedness of believing that a declining empire, which can’t even maintain its own infrastructure and has lost every major conflict it has provoked in the last two decades, could orchestrate and manage the controlled collapse of a country of China’s importance.
Regardless, the report is fascinating to read because it reveals so much about the sick soul of the American empire and some of the main reasons for its decline – a comical detachment from reality, an inability to learn from past failures, a zero-sum worldview, a denial of sovereignty in others, and, more than anything else, the fact that this report screams despair.
There is a common pattern well-known to political sociologists: when groups face existential threats to their status and identity, they often exhibit compensatory extremism – becoming caricatured versions of themselves to defend themselves against irrelevance. This was, for example, the case of the Southern Confederacy before the Civil War, which responded to growing abolitionist pressure by becoming more fanatically committed to slavery and “the honour of the South” than it had ever been before.
This Hudson Institute report reads a little like this: Witnessing the end of American primacy, some members of the imperial establishment are transforming themselves into a grotesque caricature of themselves, taking every toxic aspect of American foreign policy and amplifying it to absurd extremes, becoming more imperially ambitious and delusional than ever before, planning interventions of unprecedented scale and audacity, as if doubling down on their worst impulses might somehow restore their waning dominance.
As such, this report should not be read as a true policy blueprint – its analysis of China is so detached from reality as to be completely worthless. Rather, it should be read as an anthropological specimen, a fascinating window into the fever dreams and neuroses of a dying empire, where compensatory extremism strips away all pretence and reveals what US hegemony has always been – just as the Confederacy’s fanatical focus on slavery exposed the moral rot that had always defined that system.
So let’s examine this artifact piece by piece and see what it reveals about the dying empire that produced it.
Below is a summary of the main points in the rest of the article:
Core criticisms
Misreading Chinese History and National Identity
The report assumes Chinese citizens want US-led “liberation” from the Communist Party, ignoring:
China’s “century of humiliation” under Western colonial powers.
The Communist Party’s legitimacy stemming from restoring sovereignty, not just economic growth.
“The idea that the Chinese people are secretly dying to see the Communist Party collapse… is beyond absurd: it represents the exact opposite of everything around which the Chinese national psyche is organised.”
Advocacy of hyper-colonialism
The report proposes measures worse than 19th-century colonialism:
Support for secessionist regions to fragment China.
Nuremberg-style tribunals and rewriting of Chinese history.
Military occupation with “20 US Special Operations Forces” in every major city.
US restructuring of China’s financial system and constitution.
“In short, the report proposes colonialism on steroids.”
Instrumentalising Ethnic Tensions
The document suggests using separatist movements purely for American gain:
Xinjiang independence is encouraged, but Tibetan independence discouraged – because of Indian sensitivities.
“These are mere tools to be exploited for American geopolitical interests.”
A Vision of ‘Controlled Fragmentation’
The plan is to:
Break China into manageable units.
Keep it economically useful but politically weak.
“They want to create an ‘ideal point’ of permanent subordination for China.”
Hubris of “managing civilisation”
The report outlines a technocratic blueprint for rebuilding Chinese society:
A 151-201 person convention to write a new constitution for 1.4bn people.
Governance suggestions treated as if China were a business merger.
“This is hubris of the highest order… as if one of the youngest nations on the planet can somehow teach governance to a 5,000-year-old civilisation.”
The author points to the failures of US nation-building in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as evidence of the folly.
Projection and delusion
The report accuses China of coercion, corruption, and economic fragility – yet the US exhibits many of these traits more acutely:
Declining global trust in US leadership.
A weakened domestic economy and crumbling infrastructure.
Low public trust: “literally single digit”.
“The somewhat rogue world state they describe as China is just themselves, to a much greater extent than China.”
China, by contrast:
Has 95.5% central government approval (Harvard study, 2016).
Grew 5.4% in Q1 2025, while the US shrank by -0.5%.
Final judgment
The author sees the report as:
A reflection of imperial nostalgia and delusion.
Evidence that American strategists cannot accept decline.
A naked expression of imperial ambition without pretense.
“They may have accidentally produced the most honest document ever written about the American empire.”
How Does China Work? Four Books Only One Good Read
Roger Boyd
Aug 27, 2025
Apple In China, Patrick McGee, Scribner, 2025
Breakneck, Dan Wang, W. W. Norton & Company, 2025
China In Global Capitalism, Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu, and Ashley Smith, Haymarket Books, 2024.
How China Works, Xiaohuan Lan (translated by Gary Topp), Palgrave MacMillan, 2024.
In this piece I take to task the authors of the first three books, which in no way provide a good understanding of how China works while being both factually incorrect and ideologically blinded. If you just want to know how China works you can skip to the section on the book of that name.
Authors
Patrick McGee has a BA in Religion from University of Toronto (2006) and an MA in Global Diplomacy from SOAS University of London (2017). He does not speak Mandarin and has never lived in China. He has worked as a journalist, most recently for the Financial Times in San Francisco, reporting on “all things Apple”.
Dan Wang is a Western analyst on China and technology. He moved to Canada from China when he was seven years old and has a bachelor’s degree from Rochester University USA in economics and philosophy (2014). He was based in China from 2017 to 2023 working for Gavekal Dragonomics, a China-focused research firm based in Beijing - founded by Arthur Kroeber who wrote the book China’s Economy (a quite thoughtful and insightful work). He is now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, after being a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.
Eli Friedman has an MA and a PhD in Sociology from University of California Berkeley, and a BA in Asian Studies from Bard College, and is a professor of global labour and work at Cornell University. Kevin Lin is stated to be an activist and researcher on China’s labour movement, what is not mentioned is that he is the China programme officer at the International Labour Rights Forum which is a Washington D.C. NGO funded by oligarch foundations (e.g. Ford Foundation) and that he is based in Hong Kong (most probably HK Chinese). Rosa Liu is stated to be a former Chinese NGO worker who now resides in Canada, who writes about the environment and gender politics. Ashley Smith is said to be a socialist writer and activist from Vermont, who is a Western Marxist/Trotskyist.
Xiaohuan Lan was a professor at the School of Economics, Fudan University before becoming a professor at the China Europe International Business School. He has a BA in Economics from Dongbei University (2001), an MA in Economics from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2006), and PhD in Economics from University of Virginia (2012). His research is focused on Chinese development and the role of the state, and he has published in numerous journals and is also an editor of two journals.
Apple In China
The author does not speak Mandarin and does not interview Chinese sources, while also not having a background in technology or manufacturing, and not a good understanding of geopolitics. Completely unqualified to write this book, and it shows. His thesis is that Apple made China into a manufacturing and technological powerhouse, when in fact Apple’s presence in China is just one of many factors.
Well into the 2010s, China was still operating as the manufacturer of other company’s products, making relatively small margins and not exercising control over the global supply chains involved and Chinese exports were dominated by foreign-owned firms. This position lead commentators such as Sean Starrs to doubt that China could ever overcome US hegemony. The move from contract manufacturer to technology and supply chain leader was a conscious one driven by the Chinese leadership in the 2010s, intensified by the first Trump administration’s trade war and sanctions on Huawei when it established a lead in networking technology and challenged the Apple and Google dominance of the smart phone market. The Chinese state also provided long term support to sectors such as electric vehicles and solar panels that has paid off massively. China’s massive expansion of its university sector, together with the xenophobic and racist persecution of Chinese scholars, in the US has also lead to many of those that would have helped the US innovate return home to China.
The move by many US corporations of their technological and manufacturing capabilities to China had nothing to do with geopolitics and everything to do with wage arbitrage to increase profits. An Apple manager even explains to the author that geopolitics had nothing to do with it. Once China had joined the World Trade Organization in 2000, foreign firms rushed to move their operations to China; in essence becoming “virtual” organizations employing MBAs, lawyers, logistics and marketing people to manage the global supply chain while not making anything themselves. With its vast and under-utilized population, China could easily supply these manufacturing plants with ease for over a decade of 10%+ yearly growth rates.
One commenter on the book, who was deeply involved in Apple’s China operations, takes the author to task for producing more of a fictional than a factual account, that was “riddled with basic errors - misspelled names, distorted timelines, and inaccurate cause-and-effect relationships supported by selective and misleading information”. He also correctly notes that many, many Western companies had set up manufacturing plants in China a decade or two before Apple and therefore it was not Apple that taught China how to do manufacturing.
McGee is also extremely negative toward Apple for some reason, while treating the Chinese as having little or no agency. He deeply underestimates how far China has come, and the reasons for that progress that sit within political economy and not the story of a single US company. Much of his narrative is also couched in xenophobic language about “the China threat” that Western companies such as Apple should stop helping. Sadly, it seems that McGee’s status as a journalist at the Financial Times has lent his superficial and deeply misleading analysis credibility, with him being splattered all over the Western media - even on the Daily Show. The ignorant interviewing the ignorant to utterly mislead the average US viewer.
He even seems to have little real understanding of the Chinese smartphone market, where Huawei (18%) and Vivo (18%) shared the lead in Q2 2025, followed by Oppo (16%) and Xiaomi (16%), followed by Apple (15%). Vivo serves over 400 million users in 60 countries and regions, while Oppo is ranked fourth in the global smartphone market with 8.8% share, and Xiaomi is a company whose products stretch from household appliances to smart phones to electric vehicles. McGee’s statement that “HarmonyOS will dominate the Chinese market” is therefore utterly ignorant of a basic reality that can be found with a simple google search. There is even Honor that was split from Huawei and enjoys a 13% share of the Chinese smart phone market.
To makes matters worse, the author then talks about drones when the dominant global drone company in the world is Chinese, DJI which had 90% of the global consumer drone market in 2024, and developed its own technology and manufacturing processes. While scaremongering about the US giving the Chinese the technologies with which to invade their own province of Taiwan. The book could have been the fever dream of some fellow at a US think tank. The standards at the Financial Times have certainly fallen.
Breakneck
To say that Dan Wang would be expected to have a much more superficial understanding of how China works than Xiaohuan Lan would be putting it mildly. Dan also brings with him all the Western intellectual baggage that can get in the way of really understanding how China works, not helped by his lack of academic training. Dan’s thesis can be summed up very succinctly as “engineers run China and lawyers run the US”, but with wide meanderings into areas he has little real background in and where he ends up repeating Western propaganda and showing his own ideological blinders. The book reads as a Western outsider’s view of the China he left when he was seven years old for a Western audience, that reinforces that audience’s ideologically blinded views.
Wang utilizes the classic Western “yes, but at what cost?” argument structure, when he claims huge social harms from these engineers when they try to “engineer society” through social and political control. This leads him to making some really egregious errors, such as claiming that Song Jian was responsible for the One Child Policy and that that policy was a “disaster”. He completely misses the “later, longer, fewer” campaign that was started in the 1970s that encouraged couples to marry later, wait longer between births, and have fewer children (two) which as time passed was more strictly enforced and was successful in reducing birth rates. The total fertility rate (TFR) had already dropped from 5.75 in 1970 to 2.32 in 1980.
The leaders of the Party then decided to transform this into the One Child Policy (with exceptions for agricultural workers for two children) in 1979, with Song Jian’s role greatly over-estimated in the 2005 paper by Greenhalgh (Missile Science, Population Science: The Origins of China’s One-Child Policy); where all such stories about Song Jian seem to stem from. Greenhalgh’s work has been refuted by several leading scholars, including one who was present at many of the Party leadership discussions on the matter. Wang utilized an utterly debunked claim to help make his point.
Although the TFR had dropped quite significantly in the 1970s, China’s Christmas tree shaped demographics promised ongoing robust increases in child-bearing females. The TFR actually increased in the 1980s before falling to 1.45 in 2000 as the new ranks of fecund females started to drop; with the population increasing from 981 million to 1.263 billion. The TFR then rose slowly until the end of the One Child Policy in 2014, with the population at 1.372 billion. China’s population peaked in 2021 at 1.412 billion. The TFR stayed low after 2014, and then went into decline in 2020 (COVID), falling to 1.07 in 2023 and only recovering to 1.15 in 2024.
The classic problem for developing countries is that the death rate is greatly lowered, while the birth rate lags far behind, creating an extremely rapid increase in population. This is what had happened in China from 1949 to 1970 when the population increased by 52%, in a nation of limited arable land; if left unchecked such population growth can cripple a nation’s economic development. Without the One Child Policy, China’s population would have been about 300 million larger than it currently is; and that amount would have been even greater without the earlier 1970s policies. The Party chose economic development and higher living standards over population growth, and was extremely successful in doing so. China would be a lot poorer, and a lot less powerful, today is had not chosen to limit population growth.
Wang also regurgitates the utterly debunked Western propaganda on Xinjiang, with the region now opened for tourists to see its reality; I covered the Western propaganda campaign here. And then also goes on to criticize the COVID restrictions that he lived through, even though those restrictions were shown to be incredibly successful at limiting case of COVID. Overall, this allowed for much less social disruption and deaths than in North America and sidestepped the massive economic fallout of the West’s failed policies. Having watched the authorities in Canada chase down people walking in the park, and issue Orwellian lies about the efficacy of certain vaccines, I would question which nation’s response was more authoritarian.
The we get to the core premise of the book, where Wang follows a classic process of blaming a part of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), lawyers, for all America’s technological ailments. His argument completely misses the fact that the PMC are simply doing the bidding of the bourgeois oligarchy, and it is the failings of that oligarchy that are the issue. It also misses the fact that lawyers were more dominant in previous periods when the US economy was extremely good at getting things done. Perhaps it was the “entrepreneurial state” that Mazzucatto refers to, and the tight control of the financial sector and rentier activities, which helped facilitate such technological success. The recent cuts to university research by the Trump administration certainly will not help the US compete in technology with China. And also that the state was more active in regulating business decisions generally in the earlier period. Perhaps in the last few decades, the mass drive to offshore to China and India the production and engineering jobs that are so critical to technological development has become a problem; leaving virtual shells that manage global supply chains. Perhaps also the misuse of H1B visas to keep wages for scientists and engineers low, and the continual denigrations and low relative wages of public sector planning and implementation staff. The “best and the brightest” certainly do not view becoming a government bureaucrat as a highly esteemed career.
With respect to China, just because so many of its leaders may be engineers does not drive its technological success. That would be the overall quality of the Party-State, based upon brutal entrance exams and other criteria that go back to the imperial eras. In addition, the Marxist-Leninist ideology aligned with the specifics of China and cognizant of the errors of the Soviet Union. And the Mao-era successes at destroying the prior ruling class, raising literacy and lifespans, and building up much of the basic industrial and agricultural infrastructure while growing the economy twice as fast as India. Neither Mao, nor most of his leadership team including Deng (1979 to 1989), were engineers. Nor was Jiang Zemin (1989 to 2002), while Hu Jintao (2002 to 2012) was a trained engineer but did not work as such. Xi Jinping (2012 -) started a degree in chemical engineering, but the official record shows him graduating in political science. Probably much more a factor in his success would have been the knowledge imparted from his father Xi Zhongxun who was a key figure in the Party from the pre-WW2 years into the 1990s. Xi’s father was instrumental in Deng’s policies of economic liberalization.
Another factor why China was not run by lawyers and MBA’s is that Mao shut down all the law and business schools so that taking such a degree was not an option. Later these schools re-opened and Xi gained a law degree in 2003, studying in parallel to his work. When we look at the Politburo Standing Committee, we see that most of the members are in fact not engineers:
Xi Jinping - Bachelor’s in political science, Doctor’s in Law
Li Keqiang - Bachelor’s in law, Doctor’s in economy
Li Zhanshu - MBA
Wang Yang - Master’s in Engineering
Wang Huning - Bachelor’s in international relations, Master’s in law
Zhao Leji - Master’s in politics
Han Zheng - Bachelor’s in international relations and economics, Master’s in Economy
So, Wang’s whole premise is based on a lack of understanding of the backgrounds of the Party senior leadership team. The Party-State is run by technocrats, not engineers, which the entrance exams make sure are from the top 1% in intelligence of the population. Positions in the Party-State are held in high esteem as a path to power and influence, and the “best and the brightest” covet such positions. Then, the constant vetting and validation for performance over decades streams that highly intelligent population for the best at planning and getting things done while being loyal to the Party and the nation. The educational system does turn out twice as many STEM graduates per capita than the US, which does create a huge advantage for the technological upgrading of the economy, but that is not the underlying reason behind the success of China.
Wang’s book is just your run of the mill deeply flawed and shallow attempt by a Westerner to understand China, based on no real deep understanding of how China works and not even the US. Reflective of much of the American academy, and political and policy making circles. You only have to watch the first ten minutes of the interview below to understand that Wang is a wannabe intellectual with very little real depth of understanding of either China or the West.
China In Global Capitalism
Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu, and Ashley Smith suffer from both ideological blindness and a fundamental lack of real knowledge about Chinese political economy; perhaps only one of them has ever lived in mainland China, but she could also be from Hong Kong. In at least one case an author is working for a US oligarch-funded NGO; I cannot find which NGO Rosa Liu worked for. The book fails at the first chapter with the title “China Is Capitalist” (no it isn’t, it does not have a bourgeois oligarchy!), then states that China is also imperialist with no proof, and makes an equivalence of China and the US. It is also shocking how few references there are to back one wide ranging assertion after another. Utter Trotskyist, “critical theory” superficial and ignorant analysis, which also fetishizes grass roots organizations and is resistant to the role of the state in driving fundamental political-economic change. There are many Western “leftist” books like this about China, written by people who usually know very little about China and generally reject actually-existing socialist states as “authoritarian”.
An interview given by some of the authors with a representative of the publisher of the book, with far, far too many words wrapped around fundamental ignorance, superficiality and ideological blinders.
How China Works
And now thankfully to Xiaohuan Lan’s book that has sold millions of copies within China itself and been translated into a number of languages, from an author who has spent his whole life in China as an academic and administrator studying how China works.
He delves into how the strong Party-state uses general interventions to drive growth in targeted sectors, driven by the five-year planning cycles, while not picking corporate winners. The strong discipline of market competition is utilized with the state acting to maintain competitiveness (e.g. anti-trust and anti-rentier actions) while also acting to limit destructive price-cutting driven competition. This has been seen recently within an EV market where the Party-state has not moved to reduce the myriad of competing firms but has acted to limit what it sees as destructive levels of price cutting.
He also covers the high level of decentralization of state activities in China, with regional authorities enjoying a large amount of autonomy and the right to use local state land holdings to fund local development and attract companies; significantly more diversified than Western structures. Local governments were also allowed to borrow money to fund large infrastructure projects, which were not impeded by private property owners as the land belonged to the state. Debt was taken both on balance sheet within the local governments, but also off balance sheet within financing vehicles known as Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs). The land sales and off and on balancing sheet lending abilities acted like developmental rocket fuel to local Party-State officials who were judged on how fast their regions developed; creating quite intense regional-level competition. China’s massive reflationary policies post-GFC only added to the rocket fuel of debt-fuelled development. The hangover was to be later (see below).
This helped drive a huge amount of regional innovation, infrastructure investment, and support for local enterprises within regions that in many cases are as big as European countries; with policies designed for specific regional needs. A facilitator of this was the earlier “third front movement” to develop industrial and military facilities within China’s interior, away from possible attacks by the US and Soviet Union. This produced more centres of industrialization in the south west and north west provinces, and while many plants went out of business after liberalization others remained and prospered as a base for the local economy. These include the Panzhihua Iron & Steel Group in Sichuan, China Nuclear City in Qinghai, and the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Sichuan.
The mixture of competition and regional diversity can be seen in the car market, with the mix of:
Regional-state-owned firms (SAIC Motor, majority owned by the Shanghai municipal government; GAC owned by the Guangdong provincial government; Chery owned by the Wuhu municipal government, BAIC owned by the Beijing municipal government)
Luxeed joint venture brand with Chery and Huawei
Stelato joint venture brand with BAIC and Hu5.1% with awei
Chinese private companies (BYD, Geely, Leap Motor, Xiaomi, Xpeng, Nio, Li Auto, Great Wall Motor)
Foreign private companies (Tesla)
Chinese-foreign joint ventures (SAIC-GM, SAIC-VW, FAW-VW, FAW-Toyota, GAC-Toyota, Dongfeng-Nissan, Dongfeng-Honda, GAC-Honda, Changan-Mazda, Changan-Ford, BMW-Brilliance, Beijing (BAIC)-Benz, Beijing (BAIC)-Hyundai, JAC Group (Anhui provincial government and VW).
Maextro joint venture brand with JAC Group and Huawei
Hybrid companies (Seres Auto, controlled by the founders family, Dongfeng, and the municipal government of Chongqing).
Seres Aito joint venture brand with Huawei
All of these companies and joint-ventures compete on a level playing field in the Chinese personal vehicle market. The author details the rise of BOE Technology, which developed from low technology to high technology products, greatly aided by state investments and support. Also, the Chinese solar PV industry.
At the same time, the “commanding heights” of the economy in such things as banking, fossil fuel exploration, electricity grid, electricity production, railways, heavy industry, shipbuilding, shipping and universities are the province of state-owned organizations (SOEs). They provide a stable infrastructural base upon which society, and private companies can rely upon while being directly planned and run by the Party-State. The SOEs prioritize the support of the broader economy and the national interest above profits, this is what used to be called a “mixed economy” in the West. With basic services and infrastructure provided by organizations which are in many cases natural monopolies, focused on public service and by their state ownership not available for rentier style profiteering; while still somewhat disciplined by the market. A good short segment on the role of the SOEs.
The land sale and debt-fuelled rapid development created both a housing finance bubble and a local government finance bubble. In the late 2010s, Xi started to make the moves necessary to deflate the housing finance bubble without a financial crash and has done an excellent job so far - with a remarkably fast re-orientation of bank finance away from housing and toward productive investments. The concentration of the speculative housing bubble in pre-construction properties meant that such investments were being made by the richer households (less rich households tend not to buy multiple properties), reducing the wealth effect on consumption from falling property prices.
The deflation of the real estate bubble has reduced the very revenues that local governments were going to use to service their debt loads and fund local investments. The Wall Street Journal has estimated the hidden off balance sheet debt to be between US$7.5 and US$11 trillion compared to a GDP of US$18.74 trillion. With all of this debt held in local currency, and owed to the state-controlled banking system, there is little possibility of a large scale financial crisis. Instead, an “extend and pretend” approach will be used to allow the bubble to be restructured and worked off incrementally over a number of years. With the economy still able to grow at about 5% a year that is quite possible. A little bit of inflation, as against the current mild price deflation, would help in increasing nominal GDP faster.
The drive to deflate house prices relative to incomes is not just to remove the housing finance bubble, but also to make life more affordable for especially younger generations. This is a focus of Xi’s leadership, with improvements in social services such as healthcare and pensions required to make China more affordable to all generations. Such actions may also help reduce the extremely high levels of personal savings that the Chinese maintain, unlocking greater levels of consumption and economic growth. The Party-State does understand though that sustainable growth can only be based upon developing the productive forces and not lead by consumption. Here Lan sounds more like a Western liberal economist than a Marxist one, as he pushes for a consumption focus.
Lan also notes growing income inequality but seems to be very much behind the times on this one. China’s Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) peaked at 43.7 in 2010 and then fell to 35.7 in 2021 (the latest number available). That’s below the level of Portugal, the United States, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil. And not far above Australia, Switzerland, Italy and Spain.
Xi’s government has been directing educational, infrastructure and industrial development to reduce regional income inequalities which help drive national income inequality. Changes to the very regressive tax system could help bring in more revenues to fund a speed up to changes to the Hukou system that limits the availability of government services to migrants, and better fund and enforce the pension and health insurance system. This should be targeted at reducing inequality, not increasing a level of consumption that I have shown is severely under-estimated by Western statisticians.
Another good book that is now nine years old, is Arthur R. Kroeber’s China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know. Sad that his protege Dan Wang wrote such an awful book about China.
Over the past two decades, the PLAAF has undergone a major transformation. The strategy has shifted from quantity to quality, replacing older aircraft and personnel with modern, high-tech platforms.
Manpower
In 2007, the PLAAF had about 400,000 personnel and 2,700 combat aircraft. By 2025, the force had grown only slightly to 403,000 personnel, while the number of combat aircraft had fallen to 2,284. These numbers mask a sharp decline in the early 2010s, when older second- and third-generation aircraft were being retired faster than new ones were being brought into service. At one point, the number of combat aircraft had dropped to 1,500 and personnel to 330,000.
Today, despite the smaller numbers, the fleet has become noticeably larger. Almost all of the outdated Jian-6/-7/-8 fighters and Qiang-5 attack aircraft have been decommissioned and replaced with modern Su-27/-30, Jian-11, Jian-10/-16, and the fifth-generation Jian-20.
Bomber Aviation
The number of bombers remains roughly the same — 219 against 222 in 2007. But their combat capabilities have increased significantly: the Hong-6 bombers have received new engines, an in-flight refueling system, and the ability to use long-range cruise missiles. The Hong-6N strategic bomber is now capable of carrying both nuclear and conventional air-launched ballistic missiles based on the Dongfeng-21. Development of the Hong-20 long-range bomber continues.
Long-range strike has become a key element of China's strategy to deter possible US intervention in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. The Hong-6, supported by airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft, is the backbone of the anti-access/anti-operation concept.
Support aircraft
Tankers
The most notable growth was in the support aircraft segment, with the Yun-20U tanker expanding its long-range capabilities. The Air Force received nine new aircraft in 2024.
Military transport aviation
The transport aviation was also replenished with Yun-20A/B aircraft. The fleet increased to 55 Yun-20 + Yun-8 and Yun-9.
Special and reconnaissance aviation
The capabilities of the AEW systems have improved significantly from experimental prototypes in 2007 to 54 operational platforms today. These aircraft are now regularly used to support bombers and on joint patrols with the Russian Aerospace Forces. The reconnaissance and electronic warfare capabilities have also been increased by the arrival of new Yungan-9 SIGINT aircraft and Jian-16D and Yun-9G electronic warfare aircraft.
However, auxiliary aircraft make up only 17% of the fleet, compared to 31% in the US Air Force.
Military Reforms and Command Structure
In 2015–2016, large-scale reforms were carried out: the aviation was subordinated to five new commands, most regiments/divisions were transformed into air brigades/bases. In 2023, most of the PLA Navy aviation units were reassigned ( https://t.me/china3army/26696 ) to the Air Force, which made it possible to consolidate the tasks of coastal air defense and strikes against naval targets under a single command.
In-house production
The Chinese aviation industry has switched to its own production of combat aircraft (the same Jian-16, Jian-20). At one time, Su-30 and Su-35 fighters were purchased from Russia in small batches. Air defense systems, including the Hongqi-9 based on the S-300, are produced in large quantities. Dependence on imported engines is gradually decreasing. Unmanned aerial vehicles have become an integral part of the armed forces, including the Wuzhen-7/-10, BZK-005, Gongji series and Caihong.
The stable environment has allowed China to modernize gradually, but with the intensification of strategic competition with the United States and the changing balance of power in the region, the Air Force is forced to accelerate its development. In the near future, the PLA Air Force will continue to develop 6th generation aircraft (Jian-36/-50), adopt the Hong-20, and expand the fleet of tanker aircraft, transport aircraft, reconnaissance and special aircraft.
Insight Into South Korean Policy from a Chinese Perspective
Karl Sanchez
Aug 27, 2025
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung delivers a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, the US, on August 25, 2025.
Some Gym members may have caught President Lee’s meeting with Trump where that latter said a few things related to the Outlaw US Empire’s occupation of South Korea, while Lee was circumspect and said as little as possible of anything of consequence. Global Times reported on Lee’s trip and also on the visit made to China by Park Byeong-seug, special envoy of President Lee. Both items provide insight into South Korea’s policy dilemmas and possible solutions. It must be noted that South Korea has the largest amount of sovereignty of any nation occupied by the Outlaw US Empire that allows it to pursue a pragmatic policy given its constraints. Trump’s Trade/Tariff War against the world has provided opportunities for lessening Imperial control for those witty enough to see and pursue them. As you’ll read, Lee is careful but still pushes the envelope. We’ll begin with Mr. Park’s visit to China as what transpired there provides some context for the analysis of Lee’s trip:
China's top legislator, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, Zhao Leji on Tuesday met with Park Byeong-seug, special envoy of President of the Republic of Korea (ROK) Lee Jae-myung, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
During their meeting, Zhao said that the two heads of state have reached important consensus on deepening China-ROK strategic cooperative partnership, pointing out the direction for the development of bilateral relations.
China stands ready to work with the ROK to adhere to mutual respect, enhance dialogue and communication, deepen practical cooperation, expand people-to-people and cultural exchanges, and promote the steady and long-term development of bilateral relations, Zhao added, according to Xinhua.
The NPC of China is willing to enhance exchanges and cooperation with the National Assembly of the ROK to contribute to the sustained and positive development of China-ROK relations, Zhao said, Xinhua reported.
Park said the new ROK government attaches great importance to developing a mature and stable ROK-China relationship.
He noted that the ROK is willing to work with China to implement the important consensus reached by the two heads of state, continuously enhance political mutual trust, strengthen friendly feelings between the two peoples, bring ROK-China relations back on track, and jointly promote regional peace, stability and development, per Xinhua.
A special envoy delegation sent by South Korean president Lee started China visit on Sunday, coinciding with the 33rd anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries.
Chinese experts told the Global Times on Tuesday that the South Korean delegation's visit to China demonstrates a high-level and comprehensive approach and reflects a pragmatic focus, particularly on China-South Korea economic and trade cooperation.
Chinese Vice President Han Zheng also met with Park earlier on Tuesday. During their meeting, Han said China is willing to work with the ROK to implement the important consensus reached by the two heads of state, consolidate strategic mutual trust, expand common interests, enhance multilateral coordination, and promote the sustained, healthy and stable development of bilateral ties, Xinhua reported.
Han added that China is ready to work with the international community, including the ROK side, to jointly safeguard the outcomes of the victory of World War II and uphold true multilateralism, per the report.
Park said the new ROK government attaches great importance to its relations with China and respects the one-China principle.
"Park's remarks on the Taiwan question reflects the positive side of the Lee Jae-myung administration's policy toward China," Dong Xiangrong, a senior research fellow at the National Institute of International Strategy under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Xiang Haoyu, a research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times that South Korean side's statements reflect a pragmatic focus on China-South Korea economic and trade cooperation.
According to an earlier report by the Yonhap News Agency, the delegation, led by Park, also consists of ruling Democratic Party lawmakers Kim Tae-nyeon and Park Jeung, and Roh Jae-hun, son of former President Roh Tae-woo.
Xiang noted that the delegation to China is composed of figures with diverse backgrounds and significant political weight, including senior politicians who had promoted parliamentary exchanges between China and South Korea, scholar-politicians with long-standing expertise on China, and leading "China hands" in South Korean politics.
Including the son of former President Roh Tae-woo underscores the symbolism of the 33rd anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties, Xiang noted. He added that the lineup not only reflects the great importance Seoul attaches to relations with China, but also conveys a diplomatic signal of maintaining balance in managing ties between China and the US.
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As noted, symbolism is important in Asian relations, and in this case is doubly important with President Lee meeting with Trump. Nothing earth-shattering was revealed by this visit aside from the clear intention to reset positive relations after the poor period during the reactionary term of Yoon Suk Yeol who was impeached and removed from office on 4 April 2025. Lee was elected after the constitutionally mandated snap election was held on 3 June 2025. Lee’s trip and the speeches he’s made during his journey have provided the first real glimpse of what foreign polices he might employ. And that brings us to the second article entitled, “To adjust ‘security with US, economy with China,’ S.Korea must first address this key question”:
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung delivered a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think-tank, on August 25. He said that it's no longer possible to maintain the logic of "security with the US, economy with China," sparking widespread attention. According to Lee, in the past, "before the US had a very firm position against countering China or containing China, it is - I guess it could be said that [South] Korea relied its security on the US and its economic cooperation with China." However, in recent few years, as the competition between China and the US has "become fierce" and "the supply chains are being readjusted accordingly, it's no longer possible to maintain that kind of logic." At present, "while the US is competing with China in some areas, there are other areas in which the US is cooperating with China," Lee said, adding that "so, South Korea is currently kind of distanced from America's export controls and supply chain controls regarding China." He added that "because we are geographically very closely located to China, we are maintaining our relationship with China."
The so-called strategy of "security with the US, economy with China" was once a pragmatic path for South Korea to maximize its interests amid major power competition. It acknowledged South Korea's security dependence on the US, while recognizing its close economic ties with China. We understand and respect South Korea's choice of alliance based on historical ties and security considerations. But South Korea today seems to be using "having no other choice" as an excuse for strategic slackness, thereby avoiding a more difficult question: As a considerable medium-sized power, how can it maintain and expand its strategic autonomy in a world undergoing profound changes unseen in a century?
When the "security with the US, economy with China" approach is portrayed as a thing of the past, and when "having no other choice" becomes the latest annotation of South Korea's foreign policy, it essentially places South Korea's national interests in a subordinate position under the US' global strategy. The US' strategy of containing China and pursuing partial "decoupling" is primarily about maintaining its own global hegemony, not the protection of its allies' security and economic interests. When South Korean companies are constrained by US export control lists against China and are forced to give up some segments of the Chinese market, isn't this the bitter fruit of the so-called "having no choice"? If economic interests are sacrificed, how can national security remain solid? This is the calculation South Korea's political elites and corporate leaders must make.
Ironically, the much-vaunted "security with the US" approach has not brought South Korea genuine security. On the contrary, in recent years, as the US-South Korea alliance has been increasingly strengthened under the banner of "deterrence," tensions on the Korean Peninsula have escalated, and unprecedented security anxiety is spreading across South Korean society. At the same time, when the Yoon Suk-yeol administration chose to embed itself more deeply in the US-led, overtly exclusive and confrontational "Indo-Pacific Strategy," even joining in the creation of "small blocs" targeting specific third parties, South Korea was pushed to the forefront of great-power competition, and was compelled to take on geopolitical risks unrelated to its own national interests.
The lessons of history are not far behind us. The deployment of the THAAD missile defense system not only failed to help resolve the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, but also severely damaged China-South Korea relations and heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Today, if South Korea were to blindly follow Washington's orders to contain China on issues concerning China's core interests such as semiconductors, supply chains, the Taiwan Straits, and the South China Sea, it would be tantamount to tying its own national destiny to a dangerous chariot. This is by no means the kind of "having no other choice" that truly serves South Korea's national interests. Shouldn't maintaining a peaceful and stable surrounding environment and keeping good relations with a neighboring country that cannot be moved away be the core cornerstone of South Korea's security strategy?
The fundamental driving force behind the development of China-South Korea relations stems from the common interests of both sides. It is not directed against any third party, nor should it be influenced by any third-party factors. Looking back at the history of China-South Korea diplomatic ties, the two economies have become deeply integrated, with highly complementary industrial and supply chains. For many years, China has been South Korea's largest trading partner, its biggest export market, and its top source of imports. If Seoul shifts its "security with the US, economy with China" approach toward distancing itself from China, it will deal a severe blow to South Korea's economy and its people's livelihoods, undermining its most fundamental interests. Even the US itself seeks to manage differences with China and preserve space for cooperation. How can South Korea possibly answer the "either the US or China" question?
China and South Korea are close neighbors that cannot be moved away from each other, and share common interests in maintaining regional peace and stability. This is the key that makes China-South Korea relations different from US-South Korea relations. Managing relations with China well is not a matter of "choosing" between China and the US, but a "must-answer question" concerning South Korea's own vital interests and development. A sound and stable China-South Korea relationship is itself one of South Korea's most important strategic assets, and a solid foundation for South Korea to resist external pressure and maintain peace on the Korean Peninsula. Will South Korea act as a chess player, or merely as a pawn on a chessboard? Its political elites should show greater strategic resolve to make independent judgments and decisions based on their country's long-term interests.
China’s preferential POV is clearly on display, but it does ask the most fundamental policy questions and provides a basic policy rationale. Credible reporting on the Lee-Trump Summit was provided by al-Mayadeen. The following is an excerpt:
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung narrowly avoided what he called a “Zelensky moment” during his first Oval Office summit with US President Donald Trump on Monday, as both leaders managed to sidestep public confrontation and project unity despite early tensions.
The meeting, which had raised alarm in Seoul following Trump’s last high-profile clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, ultimately concluded without incident. South Korean officials had feared a similar ambush, particularly after Trump posted a provocative message on Truth Social just hours before the summit, questioning the political situation in Seoul and referring to it as a possible "Purge or Revolution."
Despite the tense prelude, the summit proceeded with a display of mutual praise. Trump expressed support for Lee Jae Myung’s DPRK policy and reaffirmed the importance of the South Korea-US alliance. In return, Lee maintained a calm and diplomatic tone, even referencing Trump's book The Art of the Deal during a post-summit event, suggesting he anticipated the president’s approach.
"My staff was worried that we might face a Zelensky moment," Lee said with a laugh. "But I already knew that I would not face that kind of a situation… because I had read President Trump's book."
As an ending tag for this article, I’ll provide some suggestions for reading and watching. I’ve already highlighted the importance of Alastair Crooke’s recent essay and chat with Judge Napolitano. Pepe Escobar writes in a similar vein with his “Mythic Trump: the incendiary Narcissus” that’s further explained during his chat with Nima. And as a parting gift for those readers of the Gym, Grimm's Fairy Tales, All 250 Children's And Household Tales Of The Brothers Grimm, Editor Lord Henfield, 2022; a non-profit compilation that’s free to download at the link, whose frontispiece artworks are themselves quite fascinating, and certainly a distraction from our times.
Aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) transits the Pacific Ocean.
China challenges legality of U.S. ‘freedom of navigation’ operations
Originally published: Sri Lanka Guardian on August 26, 2025 by Sri Lanka Guardian (more by Sri Lanka Guardian) | (Posted Aug 29, 2025)
China has released a detailed legal assessment challenging the United States’ so-called “freedom of navigation” operations, claiming that they lack a foundation in international law and serve as a tool for military coercion.
On Monday, the China Institute for Marine Affairs under the Ministry of Natural Resources unveiled the report, marking what Chinese officials described as the first comprehensive legal evaluation of U.S. freedom of navigation practices. The report concludes that the U.S. operations distort international law, impose self-created legal standards, and reflect a pattern of using military force to pressure other nations.
“Through these operations, the U.S. seeks to maximize its own rights while compressing the legitimate rights of other nations,” said Zhang Haiwen, former director general of the Institute, at a press conference. He described the report as an effort to expose U.S. hegemonic practices disguised as lawful.
The assessment examines U.S. legal positions and practices on 11 key issues, including the innocent passage of warships, transit passage, archipelagic sea lanes, international waters, the legal status of islands, baselines, military activities in exclusive economic zones, air defense identification zones, and historic waters. The report argues that U.S. interpretations often contradict established international law and the practices of many countries.
According to the report, the U.S. has created concepts such as “international waters” and “high seas corridors” that undermine the jurisdiction of coastal states, particularly in areas like the Taiwan Straits. The report also highlights longstanding double standards in U.S. military operations, pointing out that U.S. forces insist on “freedom of overflight” in other countries’ air defense zones while criticizing similar activities by non-allied nations.
“US freedom of navigation operations serve national interests and geopolitical strategies, posing a threat to regional peace and stability,” the report states. Experts argue that these actions disrupt international maritime order, exacerbate tensions, and risk maritime and air incidents.
The report cites recent incidents as examples. On August 13, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army expelled the U.S. destroyer USS Higgins after it entered Chinese territorial waters near Huangyan Dao without authorization. The U.S. Department of Defense’s 2024 fiscal year Freedom of Navigation report identified China as the primary target of U.S. operations, challenging its claims in multiple maritime areas.
The report also criticizes the U.S. for its selective approach to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which it has not ratified but selectively cites to justify operations. The report traces the origins of the U.S. Freedom of Navigation Program back to 1979, noting its continued use of military force to challenge coastal state claims and target what it calls “excessive maritime claims.”
“One core purpose of releasing this report is to effectively uphold the international rule of law,” said Xu Heyun, deputy director of the China Institute for Marine Affairs.
The U.S. employs blatant double standards, using international law when it suits it and discarding it when it doesn’t, severely undermining it. This report aims to restore an objective and fair interpretation of maritime law.
World leaders to gather in China to mark victory in anti-fascist war
China will stage a massive military parade on September 3 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War and 26 heads of state or government will attend on the invitation of President Xi Jinping.
This was announced by Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Hong Lei on August 28.
China’s official listing foregrounds Russian President Vladimir Putin and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) top leader Kim Jong Un. With Kim also being joined by the Presidents of Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, this represents an unprecedented gathering of the heads of state of all five presently existing socialist countries.
The presidents of all five of China’s Central Asian neighbours – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – will also attend, as will the leaders of Belarus, Armenia and Azerbaijan, meaning that nine of the 15 former republics of the USSR, who collectively waged the Great Patriotic War against Nazism, will be represented at top level. Other national leaders from countries with a long and significant history of friendship with China, include those from Cambodia, Mongolia, Nepal, Zimbabwe, the Republic of Congo, Iran, Serbia and Slovakia, the last mentioned being the only member of the European Union and NATO to be represented at top level.
Besides those mentioned above, China’s southeast Asian neigbours will also be represented by Indonesia, Malaysia and Myanmar (meaning that six of the ten members of the Association of South East Asian Nations, ASEAN, will be represented at top level), while Pakistan and the Maldives join Nepal in representing China’s South Asian neighbours.
In addition, at the invitation of the Chinese government, heads of parliaments, deputy prime ministers and high-level representatives from various countries, heads of international organisations, and former political dignitaries will also attend the V-Day commemorations.
Announcing the participation of Kim Jong Un, Hong Lei said that China and the DPRK are traditional friendly neighbours. He noted that during the arduous years of war, the Chinese and DPRK people supported each other and fought side by side against Japanese aggression, making important contributions to the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and humanity’s just cause. He further said that safeguarding, consolidating and developing China-DPRK relations is the firm stance of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government, adding that China stands ready to continue working with the DPRK to enhance exchanges and cooperation, and advance socialist development.
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) also announced Kim’s China visit.
Hong also said that President Putin’s attendance at the commemoration events further highlights the high level of the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era and underscores their unity in safeguarding the victorious outcome of World War II. He stressed that China and the Soviet Union, as the main battlefields of World War II in Asia and Europe, respectively, served as pillars in the fight against militarism and fascism 80 years ago and made immense national sacrifices.
“Our peoples fought shoulder to shoulder and supported each other, rescuing their nations from peril, saving the future of mankind, and making a decisive contribution to the victory in the World Anti-Fascist War.”
He added that in May, Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a state visit to Russia and attended celebrations in Moscow marking the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union.
“Together they [Presidents Xi and Putin] sent a strong message that the historical truth of World War II cannot be distorted, the victorious outcome cannot be denied, and the post-war international order cannot be challenged.”
The two countries, he added, will strengthen coordination under multilateral frameworks, including the UN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS, practice true multilateralism, and work together to build a brighter future for humanity.
At time of writing, Kim and Putin are the only two leaders whose visits have been the subject of individual articles carried by the Xinhua News Agency.
Immediately prior to the September 3 events, the Summit Meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) will be held in the Tianjin municipality, near to Beijing, on August 31-September 1, along with the SCO+ gathering. The SCO currently comprises 10 member states, 2 observer states and 14 dialogue partners, and with some 20 state leaders scheduled to attend, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, these meetings will be the largest in the group’s history.
Also on August 28, Hu Zhaoming, Spokesperson for the International Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee (IDCPC), announced that China’s top legislator Zhao Leji will lead a party and government delegation to visit Vietnam from August 31 to September 2.
Zhao, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), will attend events marking the 80th anniversary of the August Revolution and the National Day of Vietnam, and co-chair the first session of the joint committee between the two countries’ legislative bodies.
And Zhang Xiaogang, Spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defence, announced same day that the Guard of Honour of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will participate in events marking the 80th anniversary of the August Revolution and the National Day in Vietnam. This marks the second time for the Chinese military to participate in such ceremonies in Vietnam, the first occasion being earlier this year, when a PLA contingent joined those from Laos and Cambodia to march in Ho Chi Minh City in celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the south and national reunification.
The following articles were originally published by the Xinhua News Agency.
26 foreign leaders to attend China’s V-Day commemorations on Sept. 3
BEIJING, Aug. 28 (Xinhua) — At the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, 26 foreign leaders will attend China’s V-Day commemorations in Beijing, Assistant Foreign Minister Hong Lei announced on Thursday.
China will stage a massive military parade on Sept. 3 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.
Foreign leaders invited to attend the commemorations include Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni, Vietnamese President Luong Cuong, General Secretary of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party Central Committee and Lao President Thongloun Sisoulith, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, Mongolian President Ukhnaa Khurelsukh, Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, Nepali Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedov, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, President of the Republic of the Congo Denis Sassou Nguesso, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Miguel Diaz-Canel, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and Cuban president, and Min Aung Hlaing, acting president of Myanmar.
At the invitation of the Chinese government, heads of parliaments, deputy prime ministers and high-level representatives from various countries, heads of international organizations, and former political dignitaries will attend the V-Day commemorations.
Kim Jong Un to attend China’s V-Day commemorations on Sept. 3
BEIJING, Aug. 28 (Xinhua) — Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), will attend China’s V-Day commemorations, Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Hong Lei announced on Thursday.
China will hold a grand gathering, including a military parade, in central Beijing on Sept. 3. to mark the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.
“We warmly welcome General Secretary Kim Jong Un to China to attend the commemorations,” Hong said at a press conference.
China and the DPRK are traditional friendly neighbors, Hong said, noting that during the arduous years of war, the Chinese and DPRK people supported each other and fought side by side against Japanese aggression, making important contributions to the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and humanity’s just cause.
He said that safeguarding, consolidating and developing China-DPRK relations is the firm stance of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government, adding that China stands ready to continue working with the DPRK to enhance exchanges and cooperation, and advance socialist development.
China is also willing to closely coordinate with the DPRK in promoting regional peace and stability, and safeguarding international fairness and justice to write a new chapter in the traditional friendship between the two countries, Hong said.
Putin to attend China’s V-Day commemorations on Sept. 3
BEIJING, Aug. 28 (Xinhua) — Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend China’s V-Day commemorations on Sept. 3 in Beijing, Assistant Foreign Minister Hong Lei announced on Thursday.
Putin’s attendance at the commemoration events further highlights the high level of the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era and underscores their unity in safeguarding the victorious outcome of World War II, Hong said at a press conference.
As part of the commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, China will stage a massive military parade on Sept. 3 in Tian’anmen Square at the heart of Beijing.
Hong stressed that China and the Soviet Union, as the main battlefields of World War II in Asia and Europe, respectively, served as pillars in the fight against militarism and fascism 80 years ago and made immense national sacrifices.
“Our peoples fought shoulder to shoulder and supported each other, rescuing their nations from peril, saving the future of mankind, and making a decisive contribution to the victory in the World Anti-Fascist War,” he said.
Hong recalled that in May, Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a state visit to Russia and attended celebrations in Moscow marking the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, where he and Putin reached a series of important consensuses.
“Together they sent a strong message that the historical truth of World War II cannot be distorted, the victorious outcome cannot be denied, and the post-war international order cannot be challenged,” he said.
This year also marks the 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations (UN). Hong said that, faced with a world of change and disorder, China and Russia, as founding members of the UN and permanent members of the UN Security Council, will continue to uphold the UN authority and defend international fairness and justice.
The two countries, he added, will strengthen coordination under multilateral frameworks, including the UN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, practice true multilateralism, and work together to build a brighter future for humanity.
China’s top legislator to visit Vietnam, attend major commemorative events
BEIJING, Aug. 28 (Xinhua) — China’s top legislator Zhao Leji will lead a party and government delegation to visit Vietnam from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2, said Hu Zhaoming, spokesperson for the International Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, on Thursday.
Zhao, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, will attend events marking the 80th anniversary of the August Revolution and the National Day of Vietnam, and co-chair the first session of the joint committee between the legislative bodies, Hu said.
Zhao will make the visit at the invitation of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee and National Assembly Chairman Tran Thanh Man, said Hu.
PLA guard of honor to participate in Vietnam’s National Day celebration
BEIJING, Aug. 28 (Xinhua) — At the invitation of Vietnam’s Ministry of National Defense, the Guard of Honor of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will participate in events marking the 80th anniversary of the August Revolution and the National Day in Vietnam, a Chinese military spokesperson said Thursday.
Scheduled from late August to early September, the mission aims to further expand China-Vietnam military and cultural exchanges and deepen the traditional friendship between the two countries and their militaries, said Zhang Xiaogang, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense.
Chinese scholar says Vietnamese socialism is a new theoretical model for global socialism and a reference for developing countries
As the Socialist Republic of Vietnam gears up for massive celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of the August Revolution and the September 2nd proclamation of the then Democratic Republic of Vietnam by President Ho Chi Minh, a Chinese Marxist scholar has said that the country exemplifies the successful fusion of socialism and a market economy.
Speaking to Vietnam News Agency (VNA) correspondents in Beijing, Professor Dr. Pan Jin’e from the Research Institute of Marxism under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, noted that since embarking on reforms in 1986, Vietnam has gradually built a “socialist-oriented market economy,” shifting from a planned to an open economy. As a result:
In 2024, GDP reached 476.3 billion USD and per capita GDP exceeded 4,700 USD.
The World Bank recognises Vietnam as a “model for poverty reduction among developing countries.”
With renewable energy accounting for 8% of the energy mix by 2024, the country’s target of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 is drawing global attention.
The country has established the theory of a socialist rule-of-law state “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” blending Marxism with local realities to balance political stability and social vitality, a breakthrough in Marxist theory on proletarian state power.
Additionally, Vietnam pursues “development for the people,” making strides in education, healthcare, employment, and social security. Education is free from preschool to public high school; primary school enrolment reached 99.7% in 2024, with a target of 35% university enrolment by 2030. Healthcare insurance coverage reached 93.35% in 2024, nearing universal health coverage, with life expectancy rising from 40 years in 1945 to 75.8 years today.
The interview notes: “These successes stem from decades of struggle against colonialism and invasion. Vietnam’s history is a heroic example for developing countries overcoming backwardness through socialist leadership, the regime’s strengths, and the unity and resilience of its people, supported by international solidarity and proletarian internationalism.”
Regarding Vietnam’s development of and contributions to global socialism, the Chinese scholar described the country’s accomplishments as offering a “Vietnamese solution” to the world socialist movement. Vietnam presents a new theoretical model and developmental path for socialism globally, serving as a reference for developing countries.
Pan concluded that Vietnam’s achievements in building socialism confirm Marx’s view on diverse development paths. She emphasised that Vietnam’s experience revitalises the global socialist movement and opens “another possibility” for developing countries to explore the path of modernisation. “Socialism is not an abstract doctrine, but a creative practice rooted in the country and responsive to the era’s needs,” making this Vietnam’s most valuable contribution to the global socialist movement.
The following article was originally published by Nhân Dân.
Viet Nam, a country that has steadfastly pursued socialism, has gained remarkable achievements in a wide scope of sectors that includes the economy, politics, society, and culture, according to a Chinese expert on Vietnamese affairs.
Economically, Viet Nam exemplifies the successful fusion of socialism and a market economy, Prof., Dr. Pan Jin’e from the Research Institute of Marxism under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in an interview with Viet Nam News Agency correspondents in Beijing.
Since the 1986 reforms, Viet Nam has gradually built a “socialist-oriented market economy,” shifting from a planned to an open economy. In 2024, GDP reached 476.3 billion USD, per capita GDP exceeded 4,700 USD, and labour productivity rose to 9,182 USD per worker, she noted.
Pan highlighted that poverty reduction and social equity have advanced notably. Through the National Target Programme on Sustainable Poverty Reduction, Viet Nam cut its multidimensional poverty rate from a majority at independence to 1.93%. The World Bank recognises Viet Nam as a “model for poverty reduction among developing countries,” she said.
Green economy and sustainable development have gained traction, with renewable energy accounting for 8% of the energy mix by 2024 and a target of carbon neutrality by 2050 drawing global attention.
Politically, Viet Nam has made clear progress. Firstly, it established the theory of a socialist rule-of-law State “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” blending Marxism with local realities to balance political stability and social vitality, a breakthrough in Marxist theory on proletarian state power.
Secondly, comprehensive reforms – from Party to administrative and social management – have perfected Viet Nam’s democratic political system, ensuring social stability and development under the leadership of the Communist Party of Viet Nam.
Thirdly, Viet Nam has realised strong national unity and cultural identity, rooted in loyalty to the nation and devotion to the people.
Socially, Viet Nam pursues “development for the people,” making strides in education, healthcare, employment, and social security. Education is free from preschool to public high school; primary school enrolment reached 99.7% in 2024, with a target of 35% university enrolment by 2030. The government’s “Science, Technology and Innovation Development Strategy to 2030” aims to raise high-tech industrial products to 45% and foster a skilled workforce for future growth.
Healthcare insurance coverage reached 93.35% in 2024, nearing universal health coverage, with life expectancy rising from 40 years in 1945 to 75.8 years today -comparable to middle-income countries.
Trends in employment and urbanisation indicate that the labour force is expected to reach 51.9 million in 2024, with 38.3% of individuals living in urban areas. There is a notable shift from rural to non-agricultural sectors. Youth unemployment remains low at 4.2%, which is below the Southeast Asia average.
These successes stem from decades of struggle against colonialism and invasion. Viet Nam’s history is a heroic example for developing countries overcoming backwardness through socialist leadership, the regime’s strengths, and the unity and resilience of its people, supported by international solidarity and proletarian internationalism.
Pan affirmed that these achievements and experiences provide a solid foundation for the Communist Party of Viet Nam, under the leadership of General Secretary To Lam, to lead the country into a new era. They form a rich spiritual asset vital for Viet Nam’s goal of becoming a developed socialist nation by mid-century, fulfilling President Ho Chi Minh’s dream of a nation “standing shoulder to shoulder with the great powers.”
Regarding Viet Nam’s development and contributions to global socialism, the Chinese scholar described Viet Nam’s accomplishments as offering a “Vietnamese solution” to the world socialist movement.
Viet Nam presents a new theoretical model and developmental path for socialism globally, serving as a reference for developing countries.
Practically, Viet Nam has paved a path to modernisation for developing nations, achieving a “low starting point, high growth” miracle through renovation and opening. The World Bank recognises Viet Nam for market-oriented reforms while maintaining political stability, a model for transitioning countries. Viet Nam’s flexibility in foreign investment attraction and private sector development offers new ideas for socialist countries integrating into the global economy.
In regional and global governance, Viet Nam actively integrates into mechanisms such as ASEAN, RCEP, and CPTPP, and promotes initiatives like the “Two Corridors, One Belt” economic corridor and China-Viet Nam cross-border railway projects.
As a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, Viet Nam advocates for “peace, cooperation, and development.” The country actively contributes to addressing climate change and promotes South-South cooperation. The UN Development Programme has recognised Viet Nam for enhancing the international voice of socialist countries through multilateralism, reflecting the revolutionary spirit in modern diplomacy.
Pan concluded that Viet Nam’s achievements in socialist building confirm Marx’s view on diverse development paths.
She emphasised that Viet Nam’s experience revitalises the global socialist movement and opens “another possibility” for developing countries to explore the path of modernisation. “Socialism is not an abstract doctrine but a creative practice rooted in the country and responsive to the era’s needs,” making this Viet Nam’s most valuable contribution to the global socialist movement.
The Experience of Nanjie Village and the Possibilities of Socialist Development in Contemporary China: Successes of the Collective Economy under Reform and Opening-Up
By Gabriel Gonçalves Martinez (Posted Aug 27, 2025)
With the beginning of the reform and opening-up policy, the People’s Republic of China entered a new historical period in its development. Starting in 1978, the country began to prioritize a development model with characteristics quite distinct from those prevailing during the previous period (1949–78). From then on, China began to emphasize the growth of the private economy and gradually dismantled the system of people’s communes, which had been established during the first thirty years of socialist construction (1949–76).
A new economic structure soon took shape, in which the state and public sector progressively lost their dominant position, especially in quantitative terms, while “multiple forms of ownership” were promoted and encouraged. This new political orientation led to the emergence of private capitalist property and the formation of a market economy under the control of the Communist Party of China (CPC), a situation that contributed to intensifying class contradictions, the loss of social status for workers, and a range of problems characteristic of capitalist societies. The Chinese then began to theorize about “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Even in this context, some local experiences of development and strengthening of public and collective economy survived—and many even prospered to the point of becoming genuine models that significantly influence the national debate on building new socialist rural areas. In an era where much is said about achieving “common prosperity,” it is of utmost importance to pay attention to these experiences. Among the collective villages still existing in China, the most emblematic and relevant example is that of Nanjie.
The Historical Context of the Economic Construction of Nanjie Village
Launched in 1978, the reform and opening-up policy had its initial landmark in rural areas. Officially, the CPC considers that these rural reforms began in Xiaogang village, located in Anhui province. At the time, a group of eighteen peasants signed a “secret agreement” in which they agreed to violate the existing laws, clandestinely implementing a model of production and distribution based on the division of land into family plots, which could be cultivated individually by peasant households. This model was later implemented elsewhere, becoming the basic model for rural reforms in the early phase of the new policy. This episode illustrates the difficulties and challenges in establishing socialist relations of production in the face of the spontaneous petty-bourgeois tendencies of peasants in a large rural country like China.
Nanjie is a village located in Luohe City, Henan Province. It houses about 3,000 permanent residents, with a total population of around 13,000 (including migrant workers and employees of local enterprises). It is one of the rare cases of rural development that followed a path diametrically opposed to Xiaogang. Nanjie’s experience is often portrayed by the bourgeois press as the “last Maoist village in China.” This is due to the fact that Nanjie preserved and promoted rural collective ownership and centered its development on the defense and advancement of public ownership.
It is a fact that in present-day China, as the private economy gains ever more strength and influence, examples like Nanjie represent exceptions to the rule, although it is not the only village that still adopts a model based on collective economy.
At the beginning of the reform period, Nanjie also sought to adopt the household responsibility system, following the example then being implemented throughout China. Especially after the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Nanjie also began to encourage the growth of individual and private property.[1] However, such incentives and measures soon showed concerning results: a drop in production indices, deterioration of living conditions, and the emergence of social polarization.
Living in a village located near the city, Nanjie’s peasants had historically developed a certain commercial tradition. With the dismantling of the old collective system of people’s communes, the peasants quickly abandoned their rural activities to engage in various commercial activities. At that time, after these changes began, street vendors, food and cigarette merchants, migrant workers, and individuals eager to open private factories reemerged. Many peasants also began leasing land to relatives and friends; in some cases, they even completely abandoned their land. According to data provided by the Party committee in Nanjie, in 1985, annual grain production dropped to just over 3.75 tons per hectare, with agriculture “entering a general decline.”[2]
In response to these problems, the village and the people of Nanjie reacted quite differently from what common sense might suggest. Rather than deepening reforms in favor of private property, the local Party committee chose to resume collectivization. In 1986, the Communist Party committee in Nanjie published a document addressed to the population that expressed the following:
1. Those capable of farming their land must, above all, take good care of their fields. Only then may they engage in trade or outside work. Otherwise, the village would have the right to intervene. It was forbidden to lease contracted land to outsiders or abandon it.
2. Those who, for special reasons, could no longer take care of their land could submit a formal request to the village committee. Upon evaluation and approval, their land would be returned to the collective, and the village mill would ensure the supply of flour for these families.[3]
After publishing the notice, three hundred residents requested the return of their land, which once again came under the collective administration of Nanjie village.
During the brief period when Nanjie experimented with the “Xiaogang path,” in addition to decollectivization, the village also handed over its two small factories (brick and flour) to private management, which resulted in intensified class contradictions and the deterioration of the Party’s leadership position. As revealed in the book The Light of the Ideal, prepared under the supervision of the CPC committee in Nanjie:
The result of the experience was the opposite of what residents had expected: instead of benefits, what came was a hard lesson. Workers were deceived. Besides not receiving regular wages, many went the entire year without any payment, working in vain. Meanwhile, individual contractors visibly enriched themselves, with food, clothing, housing, and possessions far superior to those of ordinary residents. The Party’s authority in the village plummeted; complaints spread. Letters of denunciation reached the Provincial Party Committee and the municipal government, protest posters were placed from the county office to the door of Secretary Wang Hongbin. Leaders at all levels also expressed dissatisfaction with the village’s cadres.[4]
The eventual positive results that reforms brought to Xiaogang and other rural areas did not occur in Nanjie. This shows in practice that, for a reform to succeed, it must consider not only top-down orders or successful experiences from other places, but above all the concrete conditions of each region.
Collectivization as a Prerequisite for the Development of the Productive Forces
The peasants of Nanjie felt firsthand the negative effects of returning to individual production. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, they gradually found a new path to development. Wang Hongbin, secretary of the Communist Party in Nanjie, played a central role in this new endeavor in the small village in Henan. Elected secretary of the Communist Party committee in 1977, Wang Hongbin began to stand out in village politics during the final years of the Mao Zedong era. At the time, he received honorary titles such as “promoter of the limitation of bourgeois right” and “promoter of the reduction of the three great inequalities.”[5] According to his own reflections, the main reason for the political and economic deterioration in Nanjie was that the Party, instead of properly using its leading role to mobilize the masses in their struggle to overcome poverty, had adopted the path of private individual economy, which ended up “hurting the residents’ feelings and tarnishing the reputation of Party organizations.”[6]
With Wang Hongbin at the helm, the Communist Party committee in Nanjie mobilized to find an answer to the village’s new problems. By holding mass meetings with the residents of Nanjie, the decision was made to resume the collective economy, undertaking economic and ideological construction simultaneously, putting “politics in command.” Successfully carrying out both economic and ideological work was what the Communist Party of China historically called “acting with both hands and with equal strength.”[7]
After resuming the path of collectivization, Nanjie once again recorded high levels of economic growth. From 1984,the year it returned to the collective economy—until 1998, the village’s collective enterprises grew from two to twenty-six, including four joint ventures. Fixed assets increased from just over 500,000 yuan to 460 million yuan. The total output value of the village’s collective enterprises jumped from 700,000 to 802 million yuan, and taxes paid gradually rose to over 17 million yuan.[8] These are figures that completely refute the entrenched view that equates collective economy with backwardness and stagnation.
The Communist Party established a method of ideological education based on “red culture” and Mao Zedong Thought. Contrary to what happened in the rest of China after the beginning of the reform and opening-up policy—where Mao Zedong Thought was often declared “outdated”—in Nanjie, the Communist Party committee placed the ideological formation of Party cadres and members, as well as villagers, at the center of its agenda, based on the principles of communist ideology. The classical works of Marxism-Leninism and the writings of Mao Zedong were widely printed and made available to villagers. In terms of Party propaganda, references to China’s revolutionary history, Marxism-Leninism, political speeches, orientations, and revolutionary songs became part of daily life in Nanjie.
Higher Forms of Cadre-Mass Relations: The ‘Spirit of 250’
Once the collectivization of the village’s basic means of production was consolidated, the Communist Party in Nanjie began developing new forms of relations between cadres and the masses. One of the major problems and challenges brought about by the reform and opening-up policy was the loss of prestige of Party organizations. With the reintroduction of the market economy at the national level, the idea that the Communist Party could serve as a springboard for social ascent became widespread. As a result, bureaucratism across China became an extremely serious issue, contributing to the growing public discontent that would culminate in the protests of the 1980s. This had negative consequences for the cause of socialism and communism in China. Nanjie was not immune to this phenomenon.
In the early period of the reforms, when Nanjie also decided to follow the “Xiaogang path,” relations between cadres and the masses quickly deteriorated. According to Marxism-Leninism, cadres play a decisive role in the construction of socialism. The way they perform their duties and relate to the people is a factor that can determine the success or failure of a given endeavor. If cadres engage in economic activities for personal profit and gain, the masses will inevitably begin to view the Party and its representatives with distrust. If such behavior is allowed to flourish, the character of the Party is diluted, and it runs the risk of degenerating into something hostile to the people. Considering these issues, Wang Hongbin correctly observed that the policy initiated by the CPC Central Committee—encouraging people to become rich (remember the slogan “to get rich is glorious”)—should not mean that “Party members should be the first to get rich.” The Party in Nanjie gradually established a cadre management system that took the principle of “serving the people” seriously, implementing the mass line in practice and promoting the so-called “250 spirit” (èr bǎi wǔ, 二百五).
Wang Hongbin, secretary of the Communist Party committee in Nanjie, was the main advocate of adopting the so-called “250 spirit.” In Chinese, the term “250” carries a derogatory connotation, often used to describe someone as a “fool,” “idiot,” or “naive.” However, in Nanjie, this expression took on a completely different meaning, representing “courage,” “boldness,” and a spirit of dedication to the collective. The initiative to use the term “250” as a political and ideological slogan came from Wang Hongbin himself, based on his personal experiences. In the late 1970s, before being elected Party secretary in Nanjie, Wang was offered a transfer to work in a city factory, where he would serve in the warehouse department. Given China’s conditions at the time, working in the city was seen as a real opportunity for social advancement for a peasant. However, Wang Hongbin did not adapt to the new position, feeling that the work he was doing lacked meaning. For him, life alongside his comrades in the countryside was far more valuable—that was where he wanted to be, contributing to the collective construction of socialism.
Upon returning to Nanjie, he was criticized by relatives and ridiculed by friends. Many called him a “250,” that is, a fool. But to Wang, it was precisely this kind of spirit that communists should cultivate and promote. After all, in class societies—and under socialism there are still classes and class struggle—aren’t those who devote themselves to a common cause often labeled as “naïve”? By giving new meaning to the term “250,” the Party began promoting the “250 spirit,” encouraging and fostering the spirit of sacrifice and dedication to the collective cause. Doing “foolish” things became a requirement and a model for Party members.[9]
Among the “foolish” things done by the Party leadership in Nanjie was the establishment of a salary regime for local Party officials that did not exceed 250 yuan per month—a rule that also applied to Wang Hongbin. The justification for such a measure lies not only in the Party’s own experience in Nanjie but also in the historical experience of the workers’ movement and socialist construction on an international scale. Some Chinese commentators and scholars even compare this measure with the example of the Paris Commune. As we know, during the short-lived Paris Commune in 1871, one of the adopted measures was to equalize the salaries of Commune officials with those of workers. As Marx pointed out: “First, it [the Commune] filled all positions—administrative, judicial, and educational—by election, with the right of recall at any time by the voters. Second, it paid all functionaries, high or low, only the wages of other workers. The highest salary was 6,000 francs.”[10]
The comparison between this measure applied in Nanjiecun and the example of the Paris Commune is quite valid—with the difference that in Nanjiecun’s case, the Communist Party leadership receives not the same salary as workers, but a lower one.[11] Evidently, this measure is frequently ridiculed and discredited by many analysts, both inside and outside China, but it helps explain, to some extent, the high degree of influence, prestige, and trust the Party leadership enjoys among Nanjiecun residents. It is one of the ways the Communist Party found to keep its top cadres “grounded” and strengthen their integration with the masses.
Strengthening the Collective Economy and the Socialist Distribution Model at the Village Level
In 1986, Nanjie established a new type of distribution system based on the collective provision of basic benefits to the population. Even with a weak economic base at the time, the village began to guarantee a wide range of social services to its residents: “From 1986 to 1994, the welfare items expanded from the free provision of water and electricity to 14 items, including gas, cooking oil, flour, special holiday foods, free education through university, collectively funded cultural activities, personal insurance, vaccinations, medical expenses, family planning, agricultural taxes, etc.”[12]
These measures were also very important in consolidating the prestige of the Party leadership in Nanjie among the local population. They represented enormous progress compared to what was happening in other regions of China, where the implementation of reforms was often accompanied by cuts or reductions in benefits previously provided by the State and work units. The Party leadership in Nanjie viewed the distribution system based on collective provision as an effective measure to combat inequality and poverty, as well as a means of alleviating social tensions and conflicts. As the village developed its productive forces, the Party sought to strengthen the supply-based distribution mechanism, expanding its scope of action. From 1993 onward, Nanjie began to build modern residential buildings, with apartments and houses of up to 92 square meters, fully furnished (sofa, bed, wardrobe, air conditioner, television, etc.), distributed free of charge to the local population. In the area of food, the village also began to provide it for free through its collective restaurants, where village residents can take their daily meals, although use of these facilities is not mandatory.[13]
This distribution model applied in Nanjie has only grown stronger over the years. Today, in addition to all the benefits listed above, the village also provides free healthcare and education. The hospital and local health clinics provide basic health services to the population; when specialized treatment is required in more advanced facilities—regardless of which city in China—the expenses are fully covered by Nanjiecun, even for surgeries or expensive procedures. In education, residents who are accepted into Chinese universities can study with all expenses paid by the village, along with a monthly subsidy. The same applies if they need to study abroad.
It is important to note that the current distribution system in the village does not reject the wage system. The Party leadership in Nanjie understands that, because the village’s productive forces are not yet highly developed, it is still necessary to maintain wages, applying the distribution method based on the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” In this regard, the village established a system that combines wage payments with the collective provision of services and social benefits by the State, placing greater emphasis on the latter, in a 30 percent to 70 percent ratio.[14]
According to Secretary Wang Hongbin, the adoption of the “wage + collective provision” system stems from two main factors:
1. Because China is in the socialist stage, residents’ ideological awareness still has many limitations. Therefore, it is important to establish a social environment that rewards those who contribute more to the collective through the principle of “those who work more, earn more,” while also exerting pressure on ideologically backward elements;
2. Through collective provision, people have the opportunity to experience concretely what the communist mode of distribution would look like (even if only in embryonic form), which has an important ideological impact and encourages workers to dedicate themselves more actively to the collective cause, reducing the influence of selfish ideas. This greatly aids the work of building the “socialist spiritual civilization.”
In this sense, the existence of wages corresponds to the fact that Chinese society—including Nanjiecun itself—is still in the primary stage of socialism; the collective provision system, then, aligns with the communist character of society, pointing to the direction in which economic and social development should move. The success of the distribution model based on “wage + collective provision” is one of the distinctive features of Nanjiecun. Its success, even in a small village, demonstrates to all of China the feasibility and superiority of a distribution model based on public ownership of the means of production, as well as presenting a creative way of applying the principle of “limiting bourgeois right” in the new era. It can serve as an important reference for achieving common prosperity.
Nanjie and the Reform and Opening-Up Policy: Building a ‘Communist Community’ in the New Era
It is quite evident that the path taken by Nanjie in its economic development process has characteristics that are very distinct from those applied in the rest of China since 1978. While in other areas the trend of decollectivization prevailed, Nanjie opted to promote its development through the strengthening of the collective economy and, consequently, the public sector. The Party committee in Nanjie set out on a mission to build what they call a “communist community”: a small rural community that lays the foundations of socialism and communism at the local level.
In the early 1990s, China’s political and economic debate was in full swing. The international context was marked by the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries; in China, following the protests of the late 1980s, the debate over which path the reforms should take deepened, while neoliberal ideology gained increasing influence within society. In 1992, with Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, the political conditions were created for a new wave of reforms, which led to the interruption of the debate about the “nature of the reforms”—whether they were capitalist or socialist—a debate that had been largely promoted by what many considered the “left” within the Communist Party of China at the time.[15] Nationally, the Communist Party of China set as its main goal the creation of a “socialist market economy” and allowed the private sector to expand more rapidly.
In the opposite direction, the Communist Party committee in Nanjie—without denying the reality of the market economy—openly defends the need to build a village with an economic base rooted in public ownership of the means of production.
As Wang Hongbin stated:
Especially today, upholding and defending the line of public ownership has become a central point and focus of attention for all of society. Public ownership is the core of socialism, the direction and lifeline of socialist society’s development. It expresses the essence of the socialist system and is the principal economic form in the victorious march of socialist society. If we do not understand the superiority of public ownership, if we do not understand its origin and development, nor its distinction from private ownership, we will not be able to recognize the correctness and value of the path followed by Nanjie.[16]
In September 1997, the Communist Party in Nanjie launched the “great debate on public ownership,” a major political mobilization process that involved not only Party cadres but also workers and village residents. In August of that same year, during a leadership meeting in Nanjie, Wang Hongbin read a letter written by a young researcher from Beijing who had visited the village to conduct fieldwork. In the letter, the young researcher stated that the principal contradiction in Nanjie was the struggle between capitalism and socialism; between collectivist and selfish worldviews; between the idea of serving the people and the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and fame. The letter also pointed out some political and social problems emerging in the village as it overcame its condition of poverty. Among them: bureaucratism; resistance among youth to revolutionary ideological education; criticisms of the existing distribution system in the village; individualism, etc. All these manifestations demanded that the village better systematize a correct ideological line, which would help solidify among Party cadres a clear understanding of the superiority of public ownership. It also concretely showed that building a “communist village” must not rely solely on economic development.
The defense of public ownership of the means of production is considered a basic premise for the ideological construction of Nanjie. The Communist Party committee in Nanjie actively promotes the study of the works of Mao Zedong, texts by Deng Xiaoping, and Party documents in which the defense of public ownership is explicitly mentioned. Deng Xiaoping, on several occasions, also pointed out that the socialist system is based on public ownership of the means of production, meaning that Nanjie never needed to “deviate” from the Party’s official line to defend its project of building a “communist village.” Even so, the Communist Party in Nanjie openly criticizes the pro-privatization tendencies seen in other regions, as well as the cadres and intellectuals who promote the demonization of public ownership.
According to Wang Hongbin:
Currently, there are people in our village who still have a vague understanding of public ownership, showing mistaken attitudes. They do not perceive its superiority nor understand the dangers of private property. We said years ago that ‘privatization’ is the source of all evils. When selfish desires grow and individualism acts, phenomena such as ‘eating, drinking, prostitution, gambling, smoking, extortion, deceit, kidnapping, fraud, and theft’ emerge—and such situations in society are alarming. Those who do not understand the superiority of public ownership end up losing faith in it.[17]
Nanjie began promoting ideological campaigns aimed at clarifying the superiority of the public and collective economy, exposing the evils produced by private ownership. In the context of the “great debate” taking place in the village, Professor Xing Guosen, a veteran cadre and member of the Party committee in the village, gave a public lecture in which he explained to residents the essence of private property:
In all societies based on exploitation—whether in slavery, feudalism, or capitalism—the majority of wealth belongs to individuals who hold economic power. In slave society, even the life and death of slaves were completely controlled by the masters. During feudalism, the State itself was considered the property of a dynasty, concentrating power and resources in the hands of a hereditary aristocracy. In capitalism, the political system is manipulated by the bourgeoisie, which defends private ownership, while most social wealth remains concentrated in the hands of capitalists. Workers’ wages barely guarantee the minimum for survival—and sometimes not even that. The relationship between capitalists and workers remains one of exploitation. To transform this reality and achieve the true liberation of the working masses, private property must be eliminated.[18]
In terms of property relations, with the re-collectivization and the development of local enterprises controlled by the Party committee, the individual economy gradually lost its economic influence, so that the ownership of the means of production and commerce quickly returned to State control. The issue of eliminating private property was placed by the village committee as a present task, not something for a distant, unreachable future. In this way, socialist relations of production were preserved and consolidated, which brought enormous benefits to the village.
Nanjie’s leaders are aware that they cannot deny the reality that today the village is a “small island” of public economy surrounded by a vast sea of market economy. Therefore, Nanjie was forced to develop a commercial and entrepreneurial vision as a means of advancing its local enterprises, adopting a policy known as “externally flexible, internally strict.” This policy aligns with the measures of reform and opening-up, but introduces them in a highly original way.
On the “external” level, Nanjie’s economy needs to operate in accordance with the practice of the “socialist market economy,” following market competition laws and the national and international standards established therein. For instance, regarding foreign investment and partnerships with foreign enterprises, Nanjie established a few companies with foreign capital participation, which helped modernize local production.[19]
On the “internal” level, however, Nanjie’s policies must align with the socialist and communist character of the village, ensuring that business management obeys socialist principles and remains under the firm control of the Party committee. Even in joint ventures, this guarantees that the negative aspects of dealing with capitalist firms and actors do not contaminate or negatively influence the village’s internal development. Nanjie is not immune to the “entry of mosquitoes”—hence the Party committee’s constant emphasis on “placing politics in command” and persisting in the construction of “socialist spiritual civilization.” All profits generated by the village’s enterprises are funneled into a collective social fund, which is later reinvested in infrastructure projects and expansion of social benefits. The path taken by Nanjie allowed the village, already in the 1990s, to become a “billionaire village.” According to available data, between 1984 and 1997, the village’s economy grew more than 2,200 times, with output value rising from 700,000 to 1.6 billion yuan.[20]
Conclusion
The existence of Nanjie is not without controversy. In China, openly right-wing intellectuals view the village’s successful experience with suspicion and proclaim that sooner or later the path it has chosen will fail. Among the Chinese left, opinions are also divided. Some enthusiastically support the village’s experience, arguing that it can serve as a viable model for rural revitalization and the resumption of socialist construction in the country. There are also those who argue that what exists in Nanjie is a kind of “collective capitalism,” making comparisons with the socialist period of Mao Zedong’s era impossible. The fact that the village still accepts foreign capital participation for financing, and that it employs peasant labor from other regions (in which case the workers do not enjoy all the benefits granted to original villagers—although it must be acknowledged that even in these cases, working and living conditions are generally much better than those of most Chinese peasants and migrant workers), seems to support this argument.
However, while it is correct to take into account all the concrete limitations imposed on Nanjie’s development and its project of building a “communist village,” it is equally mistaken to underestimate its existence or to fail to recognize the highly positive value this experience holds in demonstrating the feasibility and superiority of development centered on public ownership of the means of production—even while acknowledging the inherent contradictions of having to adapt and integrate into the broader context of the market economy. The existence of a village with Nanjie’s characteristics demonstrates in practice that the collective economy can play a positive role in China’s overall economic development, and that its strengthening is a necessary condition for achieving “common prosperity” and expanding socialist relations of production on a national level.
From the perspective of Party “governance” within the village, the “Nanjie model” can also serve as a reference for more concretely visualizing the Communist Party of China’s role as an active force in socialist construction at its best. In Nanjie, the Party’s role as educator and organizer of the masses is evident—but it is more than that. The Party acts in a manner consistent with its proletarian character, placing Marxism-Leninism at the forefront and seeking to educate and mobilize the masses in the spirit of that ideology.
Another Chinese Initiative: The Global Governance Initiative
China's Fourth Major Initiative
Karl Sanchez
Sep 01, 2025
Xi Jinping delivering Global Governance Initiative at SCO+ Meeting
There’s never a good time to be felled by a debilitating bug, but a few weeks earlier wouldn’t have been so bad. The Global Majority’s leading nation has decided that it’s now time for it to take the lead to salvage what was erected 80 years ago and never allowed to properly function. To be sure, Xi’s initiative didn’t emerge from a vacuum but is the product of events over many years that have come to a head as the Tianjin Declaration of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization notes at its outset (translation from Russian original):
The world is undergoing profound historical changes that affect all areas of political, socio-economic, and social relations. There is a growing desire to create a more just, equitable, and representative multipolar world order that opens up new opportunities for the development of nations and mutually beneficial international cooperation.
At the same time, geopolitical confrontation and challenges and threats to security and stability, including in the SCO region, are intensifying. The global economy, particularly international commodity and financial markets, is experiencing serious upheavals.
The year 2025 is marked by the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations (UN). The great victory, which was made possible by the unity of the peoples of all peace-loving countries in the fight against Nazism, fascism, and militarism, has determined the course of world history and created the conditions for the formation of a stable system of international relations that guarantees the peaceful development of humanity. Member states are calling for the preservation of the historical memory of the heroic deeds of the peoples and the lessons of the Second World War.
The UN has established itself as a unique intergovernmental organization that promotes effective and relevant cooperation in the areas of peace and security, socio-economic development, and human rights. Member states have reaffirmed their commitment to building a more representative, democratic, just, and multipolar world order based on the universally recognized principles of international law, including those enshrined in the UN Charter, respect for cultural diversity, and mutually beneficial and equitable cooperation among states, with the UN playing a central coordinating role.
The Council of Heads of SCO Member States adopted a statement on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the establishment of the United Nations.
They believe that it is necessary to adapt the UN to modern political and economic realities by implementing a well-thought-out reform to ensure that developing countries are represented in the UN's governing bodies.
The member states have confirmed their commitment to the equal and full observance of the goals and principles of the UN Charter and the SCO Charter, as well as other universally recognized principles and norms of international law in relations between the SCO member states.
Member States support the respect for the right of peoples to make their own independent and democratic choices regarding their political and socio-economic development, and emphasize that the principles of mutual respect for the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of states, equality, mutual benefit, non-interference in internal affairs, and non-use or threat of use of force are the basis for the sustainable development of international relations.
The Member States, reaffirming their commitment to the goals and principles of the SCO Charter, will continue to act in accordance with the "Shanghai Spirit" of mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, mutual consultation, respect for cultural diversity, and the pursuit of common development, and will consistently deepen cooperation for the sake of security, stability, and sustainable development in the SCO region.
Member States adhere to a line that excludes bloc-based and confrontational approaches to solving international and regional development issues.
They emphasize that cooperation within the SCO can serve as a basis for building an architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia.
The member states noted the initiative to develop a Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity for the 21st Century, aimed at consolidating development processes on the Eurasian continent.
Taking into account the views of the Member States, they reaffirmed the relevance of initiatives to promote cooperation in building a new type of international relations based on mutual respect, justice, equality and mutually beneficial cooperation, as well as to form a common vision of the idea of creating a community of common destiny for humanity and to develop a dialogue based on the idea of "One Earth. One Family. One Future." The Member States called on the international community to join the SCO Initiative on Global Unity for a Just World, Harmony and Development.
]
The above is just the prelude to the very extensive document. The SCO has always said it’s not aimed at any one nation, but it becomes clear that it’s aimed at the Collective Western Empire that includes the Zionist terrorist forces in Palestine. Yes, many will scoff at the retention of the UN for many well-argued reasons, although most know what and who caused those failures. But as noted, the Declaration serves as the template for Xi’s Initiative. And at this juncture it’s supremely important to note that all of this was agreed upon via consensus—not via command diktat as seen in the West. We need to concede that the Global Majority agrees that the UN is dysfunctional in many ways, but not 100%, and see it as capable of being reformed. A recent Chinese observer stated the bathwater was thrown out but the baby was kept, and that’s the wisdom I see being applied in this case. The entire text of Xi Jinping’s speech is available in English here, and I suggest it be read in its entirety. Xi, makes the historical linkages very relevant in his opening:
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and the founding of the United Nations. It is a milestone prompting us to remember the past and create a better future together. Eighty years ago, the international community learned profound lessons from the scourge of two world wars and founded the United Nations, thus writing a new page in global governance. Eighty years later, while the historical trends of peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit remain unchanged, the Cold War mentality, hegemonism and protectionism continue to haunt the world. New threats and challenges have been only increasing. The world has found itself in a new period of turbulence and transformation. Global governance has come to a new crossroads.
As you read the rest of his speech, you’ll note that not once does he name the opponent(s), the forces causing the current global chaos. Rather, Xi choses to emphasize that by acting together as one the world can overcome and defeat those forces, although admittedly that currently gives little hope to Palestinians and others being attacked by Exceptionalist Extremists in the Levant.
Global Times has produced a Concept Paper on the Global Governance Initiative that provides greater depth. It notes the following at its outset:
The current international landscape is undergoing changes and turbulence. The U.N. and multilateralism are being challenged. The deficit in global governance continues to grow. The existing international institutions have shown three deficiencies. First, serious underrepresentation of the Global South. The collective rise of emerging markets and developing countries necessitates boosting the representation of the Global South and redressing historical injustice. Second, erosion of authoritativeness. The purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter have not been effectively observed. Resolutions of the Security Council have been challenged. Unilateral sanctions, among other practices, have violated international law and disrupted the international order. Third, urgent need for greater effectiveness. The implementation of the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is seriously lagging behind. Issues such as climate change and the digital divide are becoming more salient. Governance gaps exist in new frontiers such as artificial intelligence (AI), cyberspace and outer space.
Yes, we can say that much of the above has occurred since 1945 and in reality that very little is new. Thus, many will ask why now when events were just as bad ten years ago with the Outlaw US Empire’s invasion of Ukraine and the illegal sanctions made against Russia as punishment for the exercise of their rights by Crimeans? Of course, that’s not how the false Western Media Narrative told the story, but now the reality is fairly well known outside the West. It could also be said that many in the West are completely ignorant of the global governance deficiency because their own has declined just as much and consumes their concern.
I’ve applauded all of Xi’s Initiatives where he’s employed a non-violence approach to the solutions he’s suggested. The world hasn’t seen that before and is taking awhile to understand how one non-hegemonic approach to global management is done. And again, Xi/China is doing this via consensus; so, while he makes the major announcements via his speeches, he clearly isn’t the only thinker involved in those initiative’s creation. I have only one word: IMAGINE
They Can't Handle The Truth: Preferring Right Wing Day Dreams To Reality
Roger Boyd
Sep 03, 2025
Arnaud Bertrand mentioned this Hudson Institute report in a post, so I decided to have a look at it. The editor is Miles Yu who left China after gaining a bachelors at Nankai University, and then gained a masters at Swarthmore and a PhD at Berkeley; before becoming a right-wing ideologue who obviously hates the CPC. He will have left China in about the mid-1980s, so knows very little of modern China. Other authors are Bryan Clarke, a generic “biosecurity” researcher, Gordon C. Chang who predicted the collapse of China in 2001 and now views the country through a deep paranoid delusional lens, Richard D. Fisher Jr., a Cold War desk warrior, and Nina Shea a classic “human rights” US imperialist, plus some others it seems that did not want their identity revealed.
The Hudson Institute is one of the pinnacles of oligarch “free market” US imperialism think tankery, and whatever it publishes usually represents the wet dreams and paranoid delusions of the right wing of the right wing of the US oligarchy. It is in the same propaganda space as the Heritage Foundation that authored Project 2025, and was founded by right wing conservative Herman Kahn and colleagues at the RAND Corporation. Kahn had many parallels with the character Dr. Strangelove. It is very obvious that the authors have very little real knowledge of how China actually functions and view it through a deeply delusional and paranoid lens. In his introduction Yu makes the classic US Cold War warrior giveaway of calling the Communist Party of China (CPC) the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); so childish its pathetic. So how is China regime change going to be accomplished by the dying Imperial Core that is the US?
The chapter “OSS IN CHINA AGAIN: THE ROLE OF US SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES AFTER CCP COLLAPSE” written by Anonymous reads like a CIA drunk fever dream enhanced with LSD. I mean WTF?
A vast, frozen inheritance awaits China’s present-day Pasternaks, spanning the Westernization and self-strengthening movement of 1861–95, the aspirations of 1895–98, the May Fourth Movement of 1919, River Elegy in 1988, and the Democracy Movement of 1989. By recalling this truncated past, they will continue a centuries-old endeavor to at last reconcile land and sea. Inevitably, they will traverse a “history that is howling to be told” and confront a question that they have to answer: What became of land and sea during those intervening decades?
…
Like Pasternak, first these actors will need to find and give names to sorcery, starting with the CCP’s official account of the past and its many revisions. Since 1949, the largest psychological operation in the world has been the one the PRC government organized against the Chinese people. Its elaborate regime of indoctrination and information control spanned education, faith, language, the arts, family, work, and individual thought. The CCP devised a theory of world history by which it meticulously reshaped the public and private life of the world’s most populous nation.
…
Finally, they will need to find and give names to the sea. During its rise and under its rule, the CCP appealed to the legitimate grievances of the land to wage a revolutionary struggle against ideas and institutions that came from the sea, which it labeled “bourgeois,” “counterrevolutionary,” and “imperialist.” China’s modern disenchantment, it is true, began with a British gunboat. It was China’s great misfortune, and the world’s, that it clashed with the international maritime system at the dawn of the age of Lord Palmerston. The Opium Wars featured all the iniquities of nineteenth-century imperialism—military intimidation, commercial greed, and moral decadence—that, then as now, exemplified the worst tropes of a menacing West. But the sea, like Pandora’s box, concealed one vital idea: underneath Palmerston’s imperious demands for diplomatic recognition and trade was the doctrine of the sovereign equality of states, the basis of modern world order.
No wonder the writer wanted to hide their identity, this is just crazy stuff. Then the author proposes that the US should launch an all-out regime change covert and propaganda operation to widen supposed “schisms” within the Party-state. Then, when the CPC “inevitably” collapses, there must be a rush to direct intervention among the Chinese people and then of massive aid in “helping” them discover the joys of the Liberalism From The Sea, to develop an “equilibrium between land and sea”.
Then the chapter by Ryan Clarke “TARGETING BIOWEAPONS FACILITIES WITH PRECISION AFTER A CCP REGIME COLLAPSE: KEY ASSETS AND LOCATIONS, MISSION OPTIONS, AND STRATEGIC EXECUTION PLAN”. Basically accusing China of doing everything that the US is doing to weaponize biology. Just standard Western propaganda BS. Nothing about the research at Wuhan being funded by the US government of course.
The next chapter by Ryan Clarke “RESTRUCTURING THE CHINESE FINANCIAL SYSTEM AFTER CCP COLLAPSE: RECAPITALIZATION, REPUDIATION, PRIVATIZATION, AND DECENTRALIZATION” is all about handing over the Chinese financial system to the Western banksters to facilitate oligarch financial control and maximum rentier extraction. All the state’s gold will of course go mysteriously missing.
The next chapter by Gordon C. Chang “SECURING CHINA’S ASSETS IN AMERICA” is all about stealing Chinese state assets held in the US, such as their US$ foreign exchange reserves. The next chapter by Rick Fisher “SECURING AND RESTRUCTURING THE PLA, PAP, AND PEOPLE’S MILITIA” is all about creating a vassal Chinese military and re-orienting foreign policy toward serving US interests.
The next chapter by Anonymous “SPY VERSUS SPY VERSUS SPY: THE CCP’S SECURITY AND ESPIONAGE APPARATUS IN THE ABSENCE OF CENTRAL AUTHORITY” is all about re-orienting the security services to serve US aims. As with the previous chapter it is intermixed with much simplistic Chinese historical analysis and incorrect parallels to the present, together with uninformed speculation about the culture of different parts of the security services.
The next chapter by Nina Shea “CHINA’S AUTONOMOUS REGIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS” not surprisingly spews one lie after another about how the citizens of these provinces are treated by the Party-state. It then laughably proposes US intervention to stop ethnic violence etc., when the US is the greatest promoter of ethnic violence in the world! The funders of Al Qaeda, the heavy funder of the ethnic violence in Syria and Iraq, the supporter of the Indonesian genocide, the current supporter of the Zionist genocide! A nation itself founded upon genocide!
Then we have Anonymous with the chapter “HOW TO INITIATE A TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION PROCESS IN CHINA”. How about you start with Israel first, and then the US, and the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Australia, New Zealand?After you have done all of that then perhaps, just perhaps, you may be ready to offer advice to the Party-state. Of course there would be relatively little truth in the proposed Chinese “truth” process, it would be overwhelmingly propaganda to get the Chinese people to hate their own revolution and the Party-state. And then from Anonymous “A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION PLAN”, which will be all about imposing a Western liberal constitution upon China that will embed an oligarch-dominated performative democracy that is a vassal of the US. Just like what was done to Japan and South Korea after WW2.
A right of right-wing propagandist think tank in the heart of the dying US Empire day-dreaming about what would happen if the Chinese Party-state would just go away. But it wont go away, and the US Empire will continue to die. They can’t handle the truth.
Military parade in Beijing to mark 80th anniversary of Victory over Japan
September 3, 7:42
Military parade in Beijing to mark 80th anniversary of Victory over Japan
(Video at link.)
Trump was burned by what he saw.
The main question that remains to be answered is whether Chinese President Xi Jinping will mention the enormous support and "blood" that the United States of America provided to China to help it gain freedom from an extremely hostile foreign invader... Have a wonderful and long holiday to Chairman Xi and the wonderful people of China. Give my warmest wishes to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un as you plot against the United States of America. (c) Trump
Of course, his own parade was extremely mediocre. And who's talking? He himself recently belittled the role of the USSR in his statements, and remained silent about China's sacrifices in World War II. So let him be jealous and try harder.
On Monday 2 September at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Plus meeting in Tianjin, President Xi Jinping proposed the Global Governance Initiative (GGI), which aims at establishing “a more just and equitable global governance system and advancing toward a community with a shared future for humanity”.
He set out five guiding principles for the GGI:
Adhere to sovereign equality: all countries, regardless of size, strength or wealth, have their sovereignty and dignity respected; have the right to independently choose their social system and development path; and have the right to participate in, make decisions in and benefit from the global governance process as equals.
Abide by international rule of law: The purposes and principles of the UN Charter are universally recognised as the basic norms of international relations. International law and rules must be applied equally and uniformly, without double standards.
Practise multilateralism: Global affairs should be decided by all, the governance system built by all, and the fruits of governance shared by all.
Commit to a people-centred approach: The people of all nations are the fundamental actors in global governance, and their well-being is its ultimate benefit.
Focus on results: Effective global governance is essentially one that resolves real problems.
The proposal makes clear that the GGI is not about overturning the UN-based system or trying to create a parallel international order. Rather, it aims to improve the existing international system and make it more effective in addressing global challenges. In his speech announcing the initiative, Xi Jinping observed that “while the historical trends of peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit remain unchanged, Cold War mentality, hegemonism and protectionism continue to haunt the world”, and noted that new threats and challenges to peace and development are emerging.
The GGI concept paper notes some important deficiencies in global governance that need to be urgently addressed:
First, serious underrepresentation of the Global South. “The collective rise of emerging markets and developing countries necessitates boosting the representation of the Global South and redressing historical injustice.”
Second, erosion of the UN’s authority, particularly due to unilateral measures and violations of international law taken by some countries.
Third, the need for greater effectiveness. Urgent issues such as climate change, the digital divide, AI regulation and cyberspace need to be effectively managed within a global framework.
The concept paper insists:
We must stand firmly on the right side of history, and join hands with all progressive forces in the world to build a community with a shared future for humanity and make relentless efforts for mankind’s noble cause of peace and development.
The GGI is the fourth major initiative proposed by China, following the Global Development Initiative (GDI), the Global Security Initiative (GSI) and the Global Civilisation Initiative (GCI), which collectively aim to foster global development, peace, friendship, understanding and cooperation. Xinhua reports that Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Nepal and Venezuela – as well as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres – have already stated their support for the initiative.
These initiatives reflect and reveal China’s strong commitment to a safer, fairer, more peaceful, more prosperous, more equitable, more sustainable world. They stand in the starkest contrast with the US-led imperialist world order, which thrives on war, domination, unilateralism, coercion, destabilisation and inequality.
We reproduce below the full text of Xi Jinping’s speech at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Plus Meeting, as well as the concept paper issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Full text of Xi Jinping’s speech at the ‘Shanghai Cooperation Organization Plus’ Meeting
September 1 (State Council)
Pooling the Strength of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization To Improve Global Governance
Statement by H.E. Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China
Distinguished Colleagues,
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and the founding of the United Nations. It is a milestone prompting us to remember the past and create a better future together. Eighty years ago, the international community learned profound lessons from the scourge of two world wars and founded the United Nations, thus writing a new page in global governance. Eighty years later, while the historical trends of peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit remain unchanged, the Cold War mentality, hegemonism and protectionism continue to haunt the world. New threats and challenges have been only increasing. The world has found itself in a new period of turbulence and transformation. Global governance has come to a new crossroads.
History tells us that at difficult times, we must uphold our original commitment to peaceful coexistence, strengthen our confidence in win-win cooperation, advance in line with the trend of history, and thrive in keeping pace with the times.
To this end, I wish to propose the Global Governance Initiative (GGI). I look forward to working with all countries for a more just and equitable global governance system and advancing toward a community with a shared future for humanity.
First, we should adhere to sovereign equality. We should maintain that all countries, regardless of size, strength and wealth, are equal participants, decision-makers and beneficiaries in global governance. We should promote greater democracy in international relations and increase the representation and voice of developing countries.
Second, we should abide by international rule of law. The purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter and other universally recognized basic norms of international relations must be observed comprehensively, fully and in their entirety. International law and rules should be applied equally and uniformly. There should be no double standards, and the house rules of a few countries must not be imposed upon others.
Third, we should practice multilateralism. We should uphold the vision of global governance featuring extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefit, strengthen solidarity and coordination, and oppose unilateralism. We should firmly safeguard the status and authority of the U.N., and ensure its irreplaceable, key role in global governance.
Fourth, we should advocate the people-centered approach. We should reform and improve the global governance system to ensure that the people of every nation are the actors in and beneficiaries of global governance, so as to better tackle the common challenges for mankind, better narrow the North-South gap, and better safeguard the common interests of all countries.
Fifth, we should focus on taking real actions. We should adopt a systematic and holistic approach, coordinate global actions, fully mobilize various resources, and strive for more visible outcomes. We should enhance practical cooperation to prevent the governance system from lagging behind or being fragmented.
Colleagues,
The founding declaration and the Charter of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization made it clear at the outset that we should promote a more democratic, just and equitable international political and economic order. Over the past 24 years, the SCO has adhered faithfully to the Shanghai Spirit of mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, consultation, respect for diversity of civilizations, and pursuit of common development. We have discussed regional affairs together, built platforms and mechanisms together, and benefited from cooperation together. We have also initiated many new global governance concepts and put them into practice. The SCO has increasingly become a catalyst for the development and reform of the global governance system.
In response to the once-in-a-century transformations unfolding faster across the world, the SCO should step up to play a leading role and set an example in carrying out the GGI.
We should contribute to safeguarding world peace and stability. With a vision for common security, SCO member states have signed the Treaty on Long-Term Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation, conducted effective security cooperation, and maintained overall stability in the region. We should continue to uphold the principles of non-alliance, non-confrontation and not targeting any third party. We should combine our efforts in addressing various threats and challenges, give full play to the newly established SCO Universal Center for Countering Security Challenges and Threats and the SCO Anti-drug Center, and build a community of common security in the region. We should remain a force for stability in this volatile world.
We should step up to take the responsibility for open cooperation across the globe. SCO member states have rich energy resources, big markets and strong internal driving forces, and we are contributing a rising share to world economic growth. We should continue to dismantle walls, not erect them; we should seek integration, not decoupling. We should advance high-quality Belt and Road cooperation, and push for a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization.
China will readily share the opportunities of its vast market, and continue to implement the action plan for high-quality development of economic and trade cooperation within the SCO family. China will establish three major platforms for China-SCO cooperation in energy, green industry, and the digital economy, and will set up three major cooperation centers for scientific and technological innovation, higher education, and vocational and technical education. We will work with fellow SCO countries to increase the installed capacity of photovoltaic and wind power each by 10 million kilowatts in the next five years. We are ready to build with all sides the artificial intelligence application cooperation center, and share the dividends of progress in AI. We welcome all parties to use the Beidou Satellite Navigation System and invite countries with relevant capacities to take part in the International Lunar Research Station project.
We should set an example in championing the common values of humanity. Among SCO member states, cultural exchanges are packed with highlights, people-to-people interactions are frequent and robust, and different civilizations radiate their unique splendor. We should continue to promote exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations, and write brilliant chapters of peace, amity and harmony among countries different in history, culture, social system and development stage.
China will host and ensure the success of the SCO Political Parties Forum, the SCO Green and Sustainable Development Forum, and the SCO Forum on Traditional Medicine. In the next five years, China will treat 500 patients with congenital heart disease, perform 5,000 cataract operations, and carry out 10,000 cancer screenings for other SCO countries.
We should act to defend international fairness and justice. In compliance with the principles of justice and fairness, SCO member states have engaged constructively in international and regional affairs, and upheld the common interests of the Global South. We should continue to unequivocally oppose hegemonism and power politics, practice true multilateralism, and stand as a pillar in promoting a multipolar world and greater democracy in international relations.
China supports the SCO in expanding cooperation with other multilateral institutions, such as the U.N., ASEAN, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, to jointly uphold the international economic and trade order and improve global and regional governance.
Colleagues,
An ancient Chinese philosopher said of the importance of principles, “Uphold the Great Principle, and the world will follow.” In two days, China will commemorate solemnly the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War. Many colleagues will join us in Beijing. We are ready, together with all parties, to uphold courageously the great principle and the common good of the world, promote a correct historical perspective on World War II, resolutely safeguard the fruits of our victory in the War, and deliver more benefits to the entire humanity through the reform of the global governance system and the building of a community with a shared future for humanity.
Thank you.
Concept Paper on the Global Governance Initiative
September 1 (MFA)
I. Background
The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. Eighty years ago, upon deep reflection on the bitter lessons of the two world wars, the international community decided to establish the United Nations, commencing a brand new practice in global governance. Over the past 80 years, the visions and practice of global governance, i.e. the international system with the U.N. at its core, the international order underpinned by international law, and the basic norms of international relations based on the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter have made historic contributions to maintaining world peace and development.
The current international landscape is undergoing changes and turbulence. The U.N. and multilateralism are being challenged. The deficit in global governance continues to grow. The existing international institutions have shown three deficiencies. First, serious underrepresentation of the Global South. The collective rise of emerging markets and developing countries necessitates boosting the representation of the Global South and redressing historical injustice. Second, erosion of authoritativeness. The purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter have not been effectively observed. Resolutions of the Security Council have been challenged. Unilateral sanctions, among other practices, have violated international law and disrupted the international order. Third, urgent need for greater effectiveness. The implementation of the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is seriously lagging behind. Issues such as climate change and the digital divide are becoming more salient. Governance gaps exist in new frontiers such as artificial intelligence (AI), cyberspace and outer space.
As a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and the biggest developing country, China has all along been a staunch builder of world peace, contributor to global development, defender of the international order and provider of public goods. Focusing on a subject of our times, namely what kind of global governance system to build and how to reform and improve global governance, and regarding it as the fundamental guideline to uphold the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter and practice the vision of global governance featuring extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefit, China proposes the Global Governance Initiative (GGI) to promote the building of a more just and equitable global governance system and work together for a community with a shared future for humanity.
II. Core Concepts
1. Staying committed to sovereign equality. This is the foremost premise of global governance. Sovereign equality is the most important norm governing state-to-state relations, and the foremost principle observed by the U.N. and all other international institutions and organizations. The essence of sovereign equality is that all countries, regardless of size, strength or wealth, shall have their sovereignty and dignity respected, their domestic affairs free from external interference, the right to independently choose their social system and development path, and the right to participate in, make decisions in and benefit from the global governance process as equals. Greater democracy should be promoted in international relations to make the global governance system better reflect the interests and aspirations of the majority of countries and to increase the representation and say of developing countries.
2. Staying committed to international rule of law. This is the fundamental safeguard for global governance. The purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter are universally recognized basic norms of international relations. They must be upheld unwaveringly. In emerging areas, international rules should be formulated on the basis of extensive consensus. International law and rules must be applied equally and uniformly, without any double standards or imposition. The authority and solemnity of international law must be upheld. Major countries, in particular, must take the lead in advocating and defending international rule of law.
3. Staying committed to multilateralism. This is the basic pathway of global governance. Multilateralism is the core concept of the existing international system and international order. The principle of extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefit must be upheld. Global affairs should be decided by all, the governance system built by all, and the fruits of governance shared by all. Practice of unilateralism must be rejected. The U.N. is the core platform for practicing multilateralism and advancing global governance, whose role must be enhanced, not weakened. Other global and regional multilateral institutions should give play to their respective strengths and play a constructive role. All discriminatory and exclusionary arrangements should be avoided.
4. Staying committed to the people-centered approach. This is the underpinning value of global governance. The people of all nations are the fundamental actors in global governance, and their well-being is its ultimate benefit. The global governance system must meet the people’s needs and consistently foster their confidence and belief in a stable future in order to be extensively supported and effective. It must seek improvement through reforms in order to inspire, among peoples of all countries, a greater sense of fulfillment through accelerated common development, a greater sense of safety through more effective response to humanity’s common challenges and a greater sense of well-being through advancing the common interests of different countries and communities.
5. Staying committed to real results. This is an important principle of global governance. Effective global governance is essentially one that resolves real problems. Given the close links among various issues, global governance should be carried out in a more coordinated, systematic and holistic way. It must address both root causes and symptoms to find sustainable solutions. It must both tackle pressing issues and take into account long-term challenges. Developed countries should earnestly take on their responsibilities and provide more resources and public goods. Developing countries, on their part, should pull together for strength and do their best for the world.
III. Way Forward
The GGI is another major initiative proposed by China, following the Global Development Initiative (GDI), the Global Security Initiative (GSI) and the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI). The GDI focuses on promoting international cooperation on development, the GSI on encouraging dialogue and consultation over international discord, the GCI on promoting exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations, and the GGI on the direction, principles and path for reforming the global governance system and institutions. The four initiatives have their respective priorities and can be pursued simultaneously. They will each be a source of positive energy for a changing and turbulent world and impetus for humanity’s development and progress.
The “five core concepts” of the GGI stem from the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter, and respond to the shared aspiration of most countries. To reform and improve global governance does not mean to overturn the existing international order or to create another framework outside the current international system. Rather, the goal is to make the existing international system and international institutions better at taking actions, working effectively, adapting to changes, responding promptly and effectively to various global challenges, and serving the interests of all countries, particularly developing ones. No matter how the international landscape changes, China will remain firm in safeguarding the international system with the U.N. at its core and the international order underpinned by international law, stand firmly on the right side of history, and join hands with all progressive forces in the world to build a community with a shared future for humanity and make relentless efforts for mankind’s noble cause of peace and development.
We will uphold principles, embrace new ideas, stay open-minded and inclusive, adhere to the principle of extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefit, and work under the framework of the GGI with all parties to enhance policy communication and coordination, so as to build extensive consensus and enrich the methods and pathways for reforming and improving global governance.
We will leverage the platforms provided by the U.N., relevant international organizations, and regional and subregional multilateral institutions to take active actions with all parties and contribute our thoughts and energy to reforming and improving global governance. Priority will be given to areas where governance is in urgent need and scant supply, such as the reform of the international financial architecture, AI, cyberspace, climate change, trade, and outer space, and to firmly upholding the authority and central role of the U.N. and supporting the U.N. in implementing the Pact for the Future. We would like to increase communication and cooperation in these areas to build consensus, identify deliverables, and bring about early harvests.
Humanity has become a closely intertwined community with a shared future. Enhancing global governance is the right choice for the international community to share in development opportunities and address global challenges. China will strengthen joint efforts with all parties to explore ways to reform and improve global governance and open up a bright future of peace, security, prosperity, and progress.
Remembering China’s role in the global anti-fascist war
The following article by Carlos Martinez, a condensed version of which appeared in Beijing Review on 3 September, highlights the often-overlooked role of China in the global victory against fascism during World War II. While mainstream accounts foreground the US and Britain, Carlos stresses that China was the first nation to wage war against fascist occupation and sustained the longest campaign, suffering 35 million casualties and massive displacement.
Japanese aggression began with the invasion of northeast China in 1931. For six years, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) prioritised suppressing the Communists over resisting Japan. Resistance in the northeast was led by the Communist Party of China (CPC), supported by the Soviet Union and joined by Korean fighters (including Kim Il Sung). Mounting student protests and patriotic pressure culminated in the 1936 Xi’an Incident, forcing Chiang into an United Front with the CPC, enabling a coordinated national resistance after Japan’s full-scale invasion in 1937.
The CPC’s people’s war strategy mobilised peasants and established base areas for guerrilla operations, and landmark battles such as Pingxingguan and the Hundred Regiments Campaign broke Japan’s aura of invincibility. Despite being subjected to some of history’s most horrific war crimes, including the Nanjing Massacre, Chinese forces tied down over a million Japanese troops—two-thirds of Japan’s military strength—crippling Tokyo’s expansionist plans and bolstering Allied success in both Europe and the Pacific.
The war had a decisive role in ending China’s century of humiliation, re-establishing its status as a major power, and laying the foundations for the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Globally, China’s resistance not only contributed to fascism’s defeat but also inspired anti-colonial struggles across Asia. Carlos concludes:
The courage, sacrifice, daring and strategic brilliance demonstrated by the Chinese people in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression form an indelible chapter in the history of the struggle for a world free from fascism, militarism, colonialism and imperialism.
The second of September 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, bringing an end to World War 2.
China’s role in the war, and indeed the very existence of the Pacific Theatre, has to a significant degree been written out of history. In his book China’s War with Japan: 1937 – 1945, British historian Rana Mitter writes that, “for decades, our understanding of [World War 2] has failed to give a proper account of the role of China. If China was considered at all, it was as a minor player, a bit-part actor in a war where the United States, Soviet Union and Britain played much more significant roles” (Rana Mitter, 2014. China’s War with Japan: 1937 – 1945; the Struggle for Survival. Penguin Books, p5).
However, China was the first country to wage war against fascist occupation, and the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was of decisive importance to the overall global victory over fascism. In the course of 14 years of war (1931-45), China suffered over 35 million casualties, and around 20 percent of its people were made refugees.
The war started in 1931
Following its emergence as a capitalist country in the second half of the 19th century, Japan had been steadily expanding its colonial ambitions in relation to China, Korea and the Russian Far East. Taiwan, the Penghu Islands and the Liaodong Peninsula were ceded by China to Japan in 1895 under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, at the conclusion of the First Sino-Japanese War.
After Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), it started to extend its sphere of influence in Manchuria (Northeast China), which was seen as an essential source of raw materials, as well as being a crucial strategic location for further aggression against both Russia and China. Taking advantage of the weakness and instability of the young Republic of China, which had been established on 1 January 1912, the Japanese Empire issued its notorious Twenty-One Demands in 1915, forcing China to grant extensive economic privileges, including extensions of Japanese leases and expanded mining and railway rights in Manchuria.
On 18 September 1931, Japanese troops carried out a false flag operation, destroying a section of the Japan-owned South Manchuria Railway in Shenyang. Pinning the blame on militant Chinese nationalists, Japan used the incident as a pretext to launch a full invasion and occupation of Manchuria. Japanese armed forces moved quickly to separate the region from China, creating the Japanese-aligned puppet state of Manchukuo, with a population of around 35 million.
In the People’s Republic of China, Japan’s invasion of Northeast China is considered to be the start of the World Anti-Fascist War since, although the Chinese government of the time, led by Chiang Kai-shek, ordered “non-resistance”, a number of volunteer armies – predominantly organised by the Communist Party of China (CPC) – engaged in guerrilla operations against the Japanese occupation. It is noteworthy that these volunteer armies included large numbers of Koreans, including Kim Il Sung, at a time when the Korean resistance movement against Japanese colonisation was centred in Northeast China.
The Kuomintang (KMT) government continued its policy of appeasement, signing the Tanggu Truce in May 1933, which resulted in China giving de facto recognition to Manchukuo and agreeing to a demilitarised zone extending 100km south of the Great Wall, with the Great Wall itself under Japanese control. Chiang Kai-shek’s priority was not to defend China’s sovereignty but to annihilate the communists, as is recognised by Rana Mitter: “The Tanggu Truce of 1933 had created a breathing space in Sino-Japanese relations that allowed Chiang more time and space to direct his armies against the CPC” (op cit, p62).
Resistance remained the near-exclusive preserve of the CPC and its allies for six long years. In February 1936, the assorted anti-Japanese guerrilla forces were reorganised into a single Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, led by the CPC and supported by the Soviet Union. The United Army was able to deal some important blows to the Japanese occupation forces.
United Front
The Kuomintang came under intense pressure to fight back against Japanese occupation. On 9 December 1935, a gathering of a few thousand students in Beijing (at that time known as Beiping) was brutally suppressed by the Kuomintang army and police. In the ensuing days, students in cities around the country held large demonstrations calling on the government to initiate full-scale nationwide resistance against Japanese imperialism. Among the students’ demands was that the KMT end its war against the CPC.
Later that month Mao Zedong gave a report, On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism, in which he highlighted the urgent need to establish a national united front to fight the invaders:
The Japanese imperialists have already shown their intention of penetrating south of the Great Wall and occupying all China. Now they want to convert the whole of China from a semi-colony shared by several imperialist powers into a colony monopolised by Japan… The workers and the peasants are all demanding resistance… What is the basic tactical task of the Party? It is none other than to form a broad revolutionary national united front… The task of the Japanese imperialists, the collaborators and the traitors is to turn China into a colony, while our task is to turn China into a free and independent country with full territorial integrity… What the revolutionary forces need today is to organise millions upon millions of the masses and move a mighty revolutionary army into action. The plain truth is that only a force of such magnitude can crush the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators.
Chiang Kai-shek and his allies remained intransigent. At the urging of the Soviet Union, some secret negotiations between the KMT and CPC took place, but little progress was made. In December 1936, patriotic KMT generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng detained Chiang in Xi’an, where he was coordinating the next stage of his suppression campaign against the communists. The generals demanded that Chiang agree to end his war on the CPC and establish an alliance of all patriotic forces against Japanese expansionism.
Under duress, Chiang agreed to such an alliance. Although he publicly renounced the agreement after his release, negotiations continued and the United Front was formally established in 1937, shortly after the 7 July Marco Polo Bridge incident, which marked the beginning of Japan’s full-scale invasion of China.
Although the KMT tried to hedge its bets, the communists propagated a clear message of unity which resonated with the vast majority of the Chinese people:
Defend our homeland to the last drop of our blood! Let the people of the whole country, the government, and the armed forces unite and build up the national united front as our solid Great Wall of resistance to Japanese aggression! Let the Kuomintang and the Communist Party closely co-operate and resist the new attacks of the Japanese aggressors! Drive the Japanese aggressors out of China!
Extraordinary heroism and sacrifice
As per the agreement between the CPC and KMT, the northern units of the Red Army were reorganised into the Eighth Route Army of the National Revolutionary Army, and the southern units into the New Fourth Army. At the end of August, the Eighth Route Army crossed the Yellow River to march to the frontlines, and on 25 September its 115th division scored the first victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan, ambushing the Fifth Division of the Japanese army in Pingxingguan, Shanxi, wiping out more than a thousand Japanese troops.
In an important speech marking the 60th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, President Hu Jintao recounted:
Resistance forces under the leadership of the KMT and the CPC were engaged in operations against Japanese aggressors on frontal battlefields and in the enemy’s rear respectively, forming a strategic common front against the enemy. As the main force on frontal battlefields, the KMT army organised a series of major campaigns, particularly the Shanghai, Xinkou, Xuzhou and Wuhan campaigns during the initial phase of the War, which dealt heavy blows to the Japanese army. In the enemy’s rear areas, the CPC went all out to mobilise the masses to engage in an extensive guerrilla warfare. The Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, the South China Guerrillas, the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, and other anti-Japanese armed forces of the people fought bravely against the Japanese occupation. The victory of the Pingxingguan Battle broke the myth that the Japanese army is invincible. The Hundred-Regiment Campaign boosted the confidence of the soldiers and civilians throughout China to win the war of resistance.
The major cities on the Eastern seaboard fell to Japan in the second half of 1937, starting with Beijing and Tianjin in July, Shanghai in November, and the Kuomintang’s capital Nanjing in December. Atrocities were perpetrated everywhere, but Nanjing was singled out for the most horrific episodes of mass murder and widespread rape in history. Rana Mitter writes: “From the first hours of the occupation, the Japanese troops seem to have abandoned all constraints. For the next six weeks, until the middle of January 1938, the soldiers of the Japanese Central China Area Army embarked on an uninterrupted spree of murder, rape and robbery.” (Rana Mitter, op cit, p129)
The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, the Eastern counterpart to the Nuremberg trials, estimated that 260,000 people were killed in the weeks following Japan’s seizure of the city. Tens of thousands of women were raped. The Nanjing Massacre is widely understood to be, in the memorable words of the late historian Iris Chang, “an orgy of cruelty seldom if ever matched in world history” (The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Basic Books, p14).
With the capture of the country’s largest cities and the government’s relocation to Chongqing, the conflict developed into a war of attrition. The majority of the Chinese victories were scored by the communist-led armies in the base areas, relentlessly carrying out guerrilla and sabotage operations.
Mao Zedong’s theory of people’s war was developed to a large degree during the War of Resistance Against Japan. By building up the support of the peasantry, the CPC-led military units were able to achieve the highest levels of mass mobilisation. As Mao wrote in On Guerrilla War in 1937, people’s war means “military strength organised by the active people and inseparable from them”. These ideas would go on to find applicability in many places around the world, including Vietnam, Zimbabwe and Palestine.
Ultimately, the combined Chinese forces were able to fight Japan to a standstill. On so doing, they pinned down over a million Japanese troops on the Chinese front – approximately two-thirds of Japan’s military strength. This was a major impediment to Japan’s war plan, which involved quickly subduing China and moving on to invade the Soviet Union and occupy South and West Asia. Mitter writes that “the success of the Allies in fighting on two fronts at once, in Europe and Asia, was posited in significant part on making sure that China stayed in the war” (op cit, p6). As Hu Jintao observed:
For a long time, we Chinese contained and pinned down the main forces of Japanese militarism in the China theatre, and annihilated more than 1.5 million Japanese troops. This played a decisive role in the total defeat of Japanese aggressors. The war of resistance lent a strategic support to battles of China’s allies, assisted the strategic operations in the Europe and Pacific theatres, and restrained and disrupted the attempt of Japanese, German and Italian fascists to coordinate their strategic operations… The Chinese people made indelible historic contributions to the eventual defeat of the reactionary Fascist forces worldwide.
Historic significance
In his address at the Commemoration of the 70th Anniversary of The Victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, in 2015, President Xi Jinping attested to the historic significance of China’s victory:
The Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War were a decisive battle between justice and evil, between light and darkness, and between progress and reaction. In that devastating war, the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression started the earliest and lasted the longest.
The victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression is the first complete victory won by China in its resistance against foreign aggression in modern times. This great triumph crushed the plot of the Japanese militarists to colonise and enslave China and put an end to China’s national humiliation of suffering successive defeats at the hands of foreign aggressors in modern times. This great triumph re-established China as a major country in the world and won the Chinese people respect of all peace-loving people around the world. This great triumph opened up bright prospects for the great renewal of the Chinese nation and set our ancient country on a new journey after gaining rebirth.
As such, the war marks a turning point in modern Chinese history, and provided the foundations for the success of the Chinese Revolution. “Precisely on the basis of this victory the CPC proceeded to lead the Chinese people in winning the new-democratic revolution and founding the People’s Republic of China, which represents the greatest and most profound social transformation in China’s history” (Hu Jintao).
But the significance of the victory reverberates beyond China’s borders. As described above, China made an indispensable contribution to the overall Allied victory in the World Anti-Fascist War. Furthermore, Japan’s defeat was a victory for anti-colonial and anti-imperialist forces across Asia, and gave impetus to the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948.
The courage, sacrifice, daring and strategic brilliance demonstrated by the Chinese people in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression form an indelible chapter in the history of the struggle for a world free from fascism, militarism, colonialism and imperialism.
Yesterday, China held a military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, where the Chinese demonstrated the achievements of their local military-industrial complex. Most of the equipment on display has already been on display at other events, including exercises, but there were some new items as well .
What interesting things were shown to the public?
For the first time, the Chinese publicly demonstrated in one place all components of the nuclear triad, consisting of sea-based (JL-3), land-based ( DF-31/DF-61 ) and air-based ( JL-1 ) missiles. Particular attention was drawn to the DF-5C ICBM with multiple warheads, capable of hitting up to 10 targets around the world.
Also on display were hypersonic anti-ship missiles, which the Chinese had previously tested on mock-ups of American aircraft carriers. Among them were the YJ-19, YJ-17, and YJ-20 . The Chinese demonstrated the CJ-20A, YJ-18C, CJ-1000 cruise missiles, and the YJ-21 and DF-26D hypersonic missiles , equipped with “all-weather combat modules . ”
Among the new products was the new DF-61 ICBM. Its technical characteristics are not disclosed, but according to estimates, the range of the new missile exceeds 12 thousand km . It is equipped with a multiple warhead with individual targeting units, which can increase its effectiveness in overcoming missile defense systems.
In addition, the Chinese presented a full range of anti-drone systems , including missile-gun systems, laser and microwave weapons. This "triad" was specifically developed by the PLA to protect against drone attacks. The LY-1 laser system , designed for missile defense, attracted attention .
Several unmanned vehicles debuted at the parade. For example, the Chinese showed an unmanned underwater vehicle called the AJX002 . Its characteristics are unknown, but visually it resembles the Russian Poseidon vehicle.
The new HQ-29 long-range air defense system also debuted . Its purpose is similar to the Russian S-500, but it is likely to focus more on combating satellites rather than ballistic missiles.
The display of new weapons at the Beijing parade demonstrates progress in the development of the Chinese military-industrial complex . The achievements are the result of many years of investment in R&D, which made it possible to establish a full cycle of creating modern weapons systems.
However, the actual characteristics of the products can only be confirmed in a real combat situation, which the Chinese troops cannot boast of . Therefore, the declared performance characteristics do not always reflect the real situation.
It is important to note that China is already focusing on means of defense against drones, especially low-flying ones, realizing that it is precisely these weapons that could create the greatest problems in the event of an armed conflict.
The Silk Road Tango: Can the elephant and dragon share one stage?
In the following article, Mayukh Biswas argues that India and China, in spite of ongoing tensions, have deep historical, cultural, and economic ties that position them as key actors in reshaping the global order, with much to gain from friendship and cooperation.
The article opens by noting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s embrace of Trump and the US’s long-term strategy to leverage India against China. The US side disrupted this process recently by imposing punitive tariffs on Indian imports, thereby exposing the limits of US–India alignment.
Globally, Mayukh situates India–China relations within wider shifts: Brazil’s leftward turn under Lula, Africa’s escalating resistance to neo-colonialism, and growing anger around the world at Western sanctions and militarism. BRICS and the other institutions of an emerging multipolarity offer a counterweight to US hegemony.
Tracing two millennia of exchange, the author highlights how Buddhism, science, mathematics, art, and trade linked India and China peacefully. From the Bandung Conference and Panchsheela to today’s BRICS, cooperation between the two countries has also made an important contribution to the construction of the Global South.
Yet political contradictions remain. The BJP’s ideological base fuels anti-China rhetoric, while Western powers exploit tensions through forums like the Quad, seeking to draw India into the US-led strategy of China containment. Despite this, India and China share overlapping interests: strengthening the Global South, addressing climate change, and resisting Western dominance.
Mayukh concludes that the “elephant and dragon” should choose the path of greater cooperation, helping to guide a more multipolar and peaceful global future.
Colonial “divide and rule” only breeds conflict. Long before Europe’s rise, India and China traded and exchanged culture. In the 21st century, this cooperation is vital for global peace.
Mayukh Biswas is former All India General Secretary of the Students’ Federation of India, current Communist Party of India (Marxist) West Bengal state committee member, and a researcher in International Relations at Jadavpur University.
The Modi government had left no stone unturned in praising Trump – from “Namaste Trump” to “Howdy Modi.” Not long ago, far-right Hindutva groups celebrated Trump’s birthday and even performed rituals for his victory. But despite all the theatrics, Trump has imposed a 50% tariff on Indian goods, the highest in Asia. This import duty, applied as “punishment” for buying cheap oil from Russia, will severely impact India’s leather, textiles, IT, and agriculture sectors, risking millions of jobs.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the ideological lodestar of the ruling BJP, had supported Trump’s anti-Muslim policies, seeing his divisive moves align with their communal agenda; they thought Trump was their ‘long-lost brother.’ Now, Modi is in a deep dilemma. Meanwhile, despite their cold relations, China has made its stance clear. Chinese Ambassador Zhu Feihong tweeted in support of New Delhi: “Give the bully an inch, he will take a mile.” He highlighted how the U.S. weaponizes tariffs, violating UN and WTO rules to suppress other nations, destabilizing the world.
The World is Changing Fast
Brazil, South America’s top economy, has returned to the leftist path. Trump-Modi ally Bolsonaro lost, while leftist trade union leader Lula da Silva reclaimed the presidency through mass movements. Lula now criticizes the U.S. and strengthens ties with China and Russia. Meanwhile, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s former leftist president, heads the BRICS Bank – an alternative to the IMF and World Bank. Western powers, cozy with the U.S., are losing sleep over this.
In 1990, a year before the USSR collapsed, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised Russia that NATO would not expand “an inch eastward” if Russia agreed to German reunification. That promise was broken. Today, NATO reaches Ukraine (though Ukraine is not NATO member, but is weaponised by NATO), right at Russia’s border, fuelling the current conflict. NATO was meant to counter the Soviets, but even after the USSR’s fall, it bombed Afghanistan and Libya. Putin pointed out that Russia has never deployed missiles near the U.S. border, while American weapons sit at its doorstep. That’s why they demand security guarantees.
For 500 years, Western powers like Portugal, France, Britain and Belgium sucked Africa dry. But now, the tide is turning! Countries like Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso are expelling old colonizers. Africa demands accountability for how Europe and the U.S. looted gold and uranium under the guise of “peacekeeping.” France is even shutting embassies there.
Though apartheid ended in South Africa, whites still own most land. Calls for land reform grow louder. Defying Western threats, South Africa stands with Palestine, challenging Israel’s brutality at the International Court of Justice. This courage has Trump and co seething! But Africa is no longer alone: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) is its powerful ally.
Western bullying has sparked global anger. The U.S. and its allies impose sanctions or military strikes if others disobey; Libya was destroyed because, among other things, Gaddafi rejected the petrodollar. Six decades of embargo on Cuba, blocking Iran’s oil sales, threatening India for buying Russian oil – all are examples of Western hegemonism. BRICS isn’t just an economic bloc; it can be a platform for true global equality.
Elephant and Dragon
India and China, both BRICS founders, share a 3,800 km border and have a combined population of 2.88 billion people. Both countries inherit thousands of years of civilisation. Around 200 BCE, China first learned of India through Central Asian tribes, and direct ties began by 200 CE. China called India Shendu (from Sindhu) and Tianzhu (Land of Heavenly Bamboo). India gifted the world the important mathematical concepts including zero and decimal numbers. Baudhayana calculated π (pi) in the 6th century. Meanwhile, China, known as Serica (Land of Silk), pioneered paper, gunpowder, the compass, printing, abacus, and binomial theory. Pliny noted that Chinese iron was prized in Rome. For 2,000 years, China’s production technology outpaced the West. Marco Polo marvelled at China’s paper currency.
Buddhism, which originates in the Indian sub-continent, deepened ties between two civilisations. Art in Ajanta and Dunhuang reflects cultural fusion. In the 8th century, Indian astronomer Gautama Siddhartha headed China’s astronomy bureau. Beyond religion, the exchange encompassed goods like Indian spices, pearls, for Chinese porcelain, paper, silk as well as science (Indian mathematics, astronomy, medicinal knowledge) and technology. Chinese pilgrims like Faxian and Xuanzang came for Buddhist texts, while Bengali scholar Atisa Dipankara preached in China. During the Song era (1000–1300 CE), China was Buddhism’s heart. Even as Buddhism declined in India, many still travelled to China – the land of Maitreya, Manjushri, and Amitabha. Due to Mongol attacks via land, maritime trade boomed, enriching the Chola and Rashtrakuta empires. Chinese influence is seen in Kerala’s Zamorin elections and still now in Cochin’s fishing nets. Even in 1440, China mediated Bengal-Jaunpur conflicts. The most famous symbol of this connection was the Silk Road, which was not just a conduit for silk and spices, but a bridge for Buddhism, art, and technology.
Both countries suffered under European colonialism. The Opium Wars literally looted China. Later, Chinese communist leader Zhu De sought Nehru’s help against Japan, and Indian freedom fighters sent a medical mission, of which Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis remains a symbol of friendship (Mao called him “an emblem of solidarity”). In 1915, Communist Party co-founder Chen Duxiu translated Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali – the work in Chinese that earned Tagore the first Nobel Prize in Literature for an Asian. For centuries, the two ancient neighbours shared conflict-free cultural exchanges, engaged not through conquest, but through the silent yet powerful routes of trade and ideas.
From Bandung to BRICS
Soon after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, India offered friendship to New China, leading to the Bandung Conference and adoption of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Panchsheela). But colonial distortions sowed seeds of border clashes. Communist Party of India (Marxist) has always urged dialogue to resolve disputes and strengthen millennia-old ties – yet they are branded by the Indian bourgeoisie as “Chinese agents.” Meanwhile, Chinese investors bypass Indian restrictions via Singapore or partnerships like Reliance.
Present day China dominates industries like a black hole, sucking in global production. 30% of India’s exports go to China. Despite the 2020 border clash, trade grew (43% and 8.6% in 2020-21 and 2021–22 respectively). In 2020, bilateral trade hit $88 billion. Chinese firms thrive in India – from smartphones to infrastructure (even the Reserve Bank of India approved Bank of China). Politically, the RSS calls for boycotts of Chinese products, but the BJP maintains trade ties. Chinese firms build tunnels in Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut and Gujarat’s Statue of Unity.
The reality is that India and China share many common interests: expanding the influence of the Global South, addressing environmental crisis, strengthening BRICS and jointly resisting Western pressure. No Indian government can deny this. But the RSS needs anti-communist hate for their own narrow political purposes. Ironically, Modi has visited China more than ten times, and RSS leaders tour there often also.
Meanwhile the West exploits India-China tensions, pushing India into the Quad – a tool of imperialist control over the Global South – to contain China. This tests Modi’s credibility within BRICS. India buys Pegasus from Israel to spy on opposition leaders or its critics, shifts arms imports from Russia to Israel, and bonds with Zionists over anti-Muslim extremism.
In colonial times, the Indian Ocean was a “British lake.” Post-WWII, it became a Cold War battleground, reaching peak tension during Bangladesh’s liberation war. Today, the U.S. sees it as strategic, deploying its navy there. In 1976, Britain leased Diego Garcia to the U.S. to counter the USSR. But now, India and China’s rise reshapes the region. For India, the Persian Gulf to Malacca Strait is vital; for China, these sea lanes secure energy and trade. The U.S. pushes the Quad to counter China’s “String of Pearls” and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), while weakening BRICS. So, this region is now a global power hub.
The Need for Cooperation
A Buddhist temple in Quanzhou, China, bears Indian influences – proof of ancient maritime trade from Malabar to Malacca. Lion motifs (native to neither South India nor China) symbolize royalty in both cultures, inspiring Sri Lanka (Sinhala, “Lion People”) and Singapore (“Lion City”). These prove that ideas travel with trade and they evolve.
India-China economic ties are transforming. Asia’s two largest populations must rethink relations. Resolving border issues would reduce U.S. influence in Asia, letting these ancient civilizations guide the world beyond Eurocentrism. Colonial “divide and rule” only breeds conflict. Long before Europe’s rise, India and China traded and exchanged culture. In the 21st century, this cooperation is vital for global peace.
Interview: China’s successes are based on socialism
On the Global Majority for Peace podcast, Ileana Chan talks with Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez about why so much of the Western left doesn’t support China; what the differences are between Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and capitalism; the nature of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the aims of the multipolar project; whether China’s engagement with the world can be considered “imperialist”; the nature of China’s relationship with the Democratic Republic of Congo; the state of the semiconductor wars; and China’s remarkable progress in green energy.
The first half hour of the interview is embedded below. Readers are also welcome to access the full 53-minute video, which is currently unlisted.
Taking inspiration from Chinese socialism: British delegates report back from China
The following is a report back from the recent Friends of Socialist China delegation, written by Callum Norris and Twm Draper of the Young Communist League of Britain.
Callum and Twm note that delegates explored revolutionary history in Yan’an, where Mao and other leaders developed the core ideas of Mao Zedong Thought, and in Shanghai, at the site of the CPC’s first congress. These visits highlighted China’s transformation from one of the world’s poorest countries in 1949 into a modern socialist state that has eliminated extreme poverty.
At the Fourth Dialogue on Exchanges and Mutual Learning Among Civilisations in Dunhuang, speakers from over 60 countries celebrated China’s role fostering cooperation and infrastructure development in the Global South. Concrete examples from Botswana, Laos, Nepal, and Egypt countered Western claims of “debt traps.”
The authors note China’s strong cultural preservation, accessible public spaces, and vibrant use of history, contrasting this with commodified cultural access in the West. They also commend China’s commitment to green development, evidenced by the Dunhuang Salt Tower solar plant and the extensive system of parks and green belts.
Discussions at Fudan University reflected growing confidence in the concept of Chinese socialism as a model with global relevance. Delegates also observed how technology is applied for social benefit, from AI-driven renewable energy management to robotics in industry.
Callum and Twm conclude that Chinese socialism offers valuable lessons in poverty eradication, ecological development, and international solidarity; and that British leftists should “take inspiration from Chinese socialism … but build socialism based on the conditions in Britain”.
Introduction
We were fortunate to be part of Friends of Socialist China’s delegation, including delegates from Britain and the US, involved in a range of organisations including the Young Communist League/Communist Party of Britain, Progressive International, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Workers World Party, Black Liberation Alliance and Qiao Collective. We were hosted by the China NGO Network for International Exchanges (CNIE).
We visited a number of cities in Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, as well as Shanghai.
The themes of the trip were building people to people relations between China and the rest of the world, and China’s construction of n ecological civilisation.
History
In 1949, when the Communist Party of China (CPC) declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it was one of the poorest countries in the world. Average life expectancy was below 35. Illiteracy was rife and disease was common. Imperialist aggression contributed to all this, as the world’s colonial powers sought to carve up China for their own interests, culminating in the Japanese invasion , which claimed the lives of tens of millions of people.
The delegates were able to witness this history first hand and see the success of 76 years of Chinese Socialism, with visits to important revolutionary and historical sites across the country. This began in Yan’an where, more than 90 years ago, the communist forces concluded the Long March, when tens of thousands of party members marched the length of China in a strategic retreat from the encroaching Nationalist Party (Kuomintang (KMT)). They arrived in Yan’an with greatly depleted numbers and held the 7th National Congress, more than a decade later in 1945, during which the party adopted a number of important resolutions, including an endorsement of the guerrilla warfare strategy which contributed decisively to victories in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the ensuing Revolutionary Civil War.
Yan’an is also where Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Lui Shaoqi, Zhu De and other leaders lived in cave homes, which are meticulously preserved to this day. Here party school students, and people from across China and beyond, come to see where Mao developed much of what would become known as Mao Zedong Thought, including important documents such as, On New Democracy, In Memory of Norman Bethune, Rectify the Party’s Style of Work, among many other important writings.
Finally, we visited the site of the 1st National Congress of the CPC in Shanghai. The small, modest room, alongside the cave homes in Yan’an, showed the humble beginnings of the CPC which stand in stark contrast to the success of 76 years of socialist construction, where cave homes have been replaced with modern apartments which ensure not a single person goes without a roof over their head.
Exchanges and mutual learning among civilisations, Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) and carrying forward the silk road spirit
We arrived in Dunhuang, Gansu province, on 29 May to attend the Fourth Dialogue on Exchanges and Mutual Learning Among Civilisations, together with delegates from over 60 countries. The dialogue demonstrated China’s successes with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is rooted in the ancient Silk Road, which spanned many countries, and came to fruition through cooperation and dialogue among civilisations. The BRI is rapidly developing infrastructure, energy and telecoms cooperation between countries, particularly in the Global South, on the basis of equality and mutual benefit, from which numerous countries across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas are already benefitting.
Vice President of the People’s Republic of China, Han Zheng, opened the conference and reiterated some key principles that President Xi Jinping has advanced to make dialogue and people to people communication more dynamic and respectful whilst recognising differences.
Anti-China propaganda claims that China is only pursuing the BRI to put countries in a debt trap and become dependent. However, Dithapelo Keorapetse, Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Botswana, gave clear examples of how BRI programmes have directly benefitted his country. Since Botswana gained independence from Britain in 1966, China has given grants and interest-free and concessional loans, financing over 60 projects, including the renovation of railways, construction of highways, residential houses and schools, donation of epidemic-prevention materials, and the provision of medical services. China was the first country to offer assistance during the COVID pandemic. Enabling Botswana to build road networks connecting towns and cities across the country has been an essential perquisite for the country’s development. Under British colonialism, there was only 10km of tarmac across the entire country, directing the country’s natural resources towards London.
We also heard speakers from Laos, Nepal and Egypt give concrete examples of how the BRI was driving towards world peace and stability, while recognising different cultures and managing differences.
Martin Woesler, a German Sinologist, spoke about how we now have multiple silk roads across the world, with opportunities for dialogue. He was referring to social media, which is increasingly becoming a useful tool for debunking western propaganda about China.
China is fully committed to mutual learning, people to people dialogue, and peace based on mutual respect. One example of this was how young people from Britain and the US had been invited all the way to China to discuss the issues facing us in ourrespective countries, despite never having been asked to share our opinions by our own governments.
Two delegates from Friends of Socialist China – one representing Qiao Collective in the US and the other the Young Communist League in Britain – were invited to speak at a parallel forum organised by Beijing’s Tsinghua University. They detailed the issues young people currently face in our countries and praised socialist China for achieving successes in eliminating similar problems for their younger generation.
Key takeaways from the delegation were that socialist China’s position on building civilisational links across widely divergent cultures stands in stark contrast to our respective governments, where other cultures have been disrespected, ignored and, in the worst instances, eradicated. What left a strong impression was a clear respect and desire to share and learn from other cultures.
Preservation of history and accessibility of culture
One of the biggest contrasts with the West was the preservation of history, accessibility of culture and the use of public spaces.
This was most noticeable during our time in Dunhuang. We were taken to the sand dunes of that desert city to partake in the Dragon Boat festival. The main event saw over 10,000 people climb a sand dune to witness a visual and musical performance projected onto an opposite dune. The scale of the event was extraordinary. Almost everyone seemed to be singing along to famous Chinese songs. But what truly shocked us was when our host said it was completely free!
This was consistent with many of the historical sites and cultural events we visited. The next day we visited the Dunhuang Seal Bureau, or printing press. A private company which appeared at first to be a simple cafe but which on the lower floor transforms into a creative hub. People can use it as a workspace, read a wide range of books on Dunhuang’s local culture and history, play the piano, stamp items, make mural paintings, etc. Again, most activities were completely free.
Later in the small city of Jiayuguan, we visited the westernmost section of the Great Wall of China and were surprised to see the approach to history. Videos were projected across the Great Wall telling the history of the region and the wall itself.
Drive to net zero and ecological development
Everywhere in China, it was evident the CPC is absolutely committed to dealing with the climate emergency and going beyond words to ensure it plays its part in achieving net zero by 2060. Whether we were in Shanghai, Xi’an or Jiayuguan, we saw thousands of trees lining the roads. This was especially impressive in Jiayuguan, which is in a desert area.
We also visited the Dunhuang Salt Tower CSP Plant, which is a major breakthrough in renewable energy. Some 12,000 solar panels are able to rotate 360° to capture as much of the sunlight as possible. The panels then channel the sunlight to a molten salt tower, which in turn heats the salt and then water to generate steam. Due to the efficiency of the operation, the salt stays hot for 11 hours, meaning that it can continue to generate electricity at night. The salt and water are both recycled.
In China, arable land accounts for less than 15 percent of the total landmass. On our train journey from Xi’an to Yan’an, we saw solar panels on the hills generating renewable energy.
In Shanghai, the amount of green spaces and parks being used by ordinary people was very noticeable – group dance classes, karaoke and exercise throughout the day and night. Quite a contrast to Brighton, the town on England’s south coast where one of us lives, and where one public park has already been gated off by the private business next door, and another is in the process of doing the same. In socialist China, parks and public spaces are there to be used and enjoyed by the people.
Socialism with Chinese characteristics or Chinese socialism?
In Shanghai, our delegation was invited to visit Fudan University by its China Institute think tank. Our delegates Keith Bennett and Carlos Martinez took part in a panel alongside Zhang Weiwei, the well-known Chinese professor of international relations and sometime interpreter for Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, before an open dialogue with our whole delegation.
This discussion revealed an increasingly confident tone from our Chinese comrades, specifically with regard to the term Chinese Socialism. For decades, China has described its own system as ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’. That is, Marxism applied to the concrete conditions in China. However, Zhang said many within the party and Marxist circles in China are discussing whether the term ‘Chinese socialism’ now better describes it.
The term ‘Chinese socialism’, as Zhang explained, doesn’t refute the previous definition of Marxism applied to the specific conditions of China but additionally draws attention to its role as a point of reference for others, both theoretically and practically.
It must be understood that China’s socialist system is not just Marxism applied to China, with nothing for the rest of the world to learn. Applying Marxism to China has enriched scientific socialism as a whole, giving it much greater value and increasingly universal applicability, most especially for the Global South. The term ‘Chinese socialism’ may therefore be more appropriate in the new era.
Contradictions and common prosperity
It’s common to hear people on the ‘left’ in Britain, and the west, dismissing China’s socialism and asserting that it has become a fully capitalist country. Or disparaging China as a dirty and polluted country doing nothing to tackle the climate emergency.
However, even before the founding of the PRC in 1949, the CPC was already tackling poverty in the liberated areas, starting with the Jiangxi Soviet Republic (1931-1934). This was subsequently rolled out throughout China and in 2020, it was announced that extreme poverty had been completely eliminated. During Deng Xiaoping’s opening up and reform period, a number of new contradictions emerged alongside its overwhelmingly positive achievements. By sticking to socialist principles and correctly grasping the key task at any given moment, China has been able to eradicate extreme poverty and greatly improve the living standards of all Chinese people. Whilst we were in Jiayuguan, we had a conversation with a university teacher who told us his current income is almost 40 times more than it was 30 years ago, and that the development he had seen in his city made him “satisfied and very proud”. There are some people with great wealth, but you cannot ignore the main achievement, which was to alleviate poverty and improve the lives of all.
Similarly, China’s industrialisation came at a cost to the environment, in the same way as when Britain and other countries industrialised. However, the difference is that China was tackling poverty, illiteracy and the legacy of imperialism, whereas Britain was only serving the interests of the ruling class whilst plundering vast swathes of the world.
The negative effects on the environment have not been ignored by the CPC. General Secretary Xi Jinping has stated: “We must strike a balance between economic growth and environmental protection. We will be more conscientious in promoting green, circular and low-carbon development. We will never again seek economic growth at the cost of the environment.”
Technological advancement
We witnessed technology being used beneficially. In Jiayuguan, a state-run energy company is utilising AI in its electricity grid to predict the weather and in turn increase or decrease the generation of electricity from wind or solar renewable energy sources according to demand.
At Lenovo in Shanghai, which contributes actively to the CPC’s goals of rural rejuvenation, robot hands, controlled remotely, can spray paint cars and keep workers away from the toxic fumes, putting their welfare first. They also had a hi-tech coffee machine that could make your coffee and add the Friends of Socialist China logo on top, because, why not!
We also visited a state-run artificial intelligence and robotics hub where we were able to see the latest developments they were working on, including in the medical field.
Key Lessons from China
A key lesson of the trip was understanding the level of self-sacrifice which was demanded by the harsh conditions and struggle against imperialism and domestic reactionary forces during the Chinese Revolution. While we may complain about how bleak things can seem at home, it doesn’t compare to the level of sacrifice and perseverance of the Chinese people, therefore, we must be ready and willing to work hard and sacrifice for the development of socialism in Britain.
To conclude, the key lessons are:
• Take inspiration from Chinese socialism, but we must build socialism based on the conditions in Britain.
• Give people the facts about China’s success to combat the myths spread by the west. If they don’t want to engage, China is still going to carry on building socialism without their support. We must do the same and focus on our aim as we struggle towards building a socialist Britain, in our lifetime!
The so-called “strategic gradualism” allows China to advance its fundamental interests without taking a single, decisive action that could provoke direct conflict.
A strategic profile with a political heart
In the frenetic development of “warfare,” there are some countries that are rapidly moving toward a redefinition of all domains, at least as we have considered them to date. Among these, China occupies a prominent role because it represents the greatest economic and technological adversary for the collective West.
China has adopted a multi-level strategy in the so-called gray space, resorting to practices that include maritime aggression linked to territorial disputes in the South China Sea, cyber operations, forms of economic coercion, and online propaganda campaigns aimed at influencing public opinion. Specialized literature highlights how Beijing exploits ambiguity and employs unconventional tactics, thus complicating the responses of the United States and its allies. Let us therefore take a look at China’s objectives in the gray zone, its strategy and its tools, until we arrive at a logical model constructed to synthesize these elements.
To understand the People’s Republic’s goals in gray zone operations, we must first consider how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interprets this concept as a political and ideological structure that drives all action. While employing peacetime actions below the threshold of war as an integral part of national policy, Beijing does not define itself as a gray zone actor. Instead, the Chinese leadership recognizes this category as a practice historically used by the great powers—the United States, Russia, and the Soviet Union—including against China itself.
The CCP prefers to avoid Western terminology, speaking instead of “military operations other than war” (MOOTW). Although there is overlap with the American definition of gray zone activities, Beijing does not consider such actions to be hostile acts, but rather strategic tools that serve its political agenda. The different conceptions of peace and conflict between the West and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) explain this choice: in Chinese strategic thinking, “peace” does not equate to the absence of conflict or violence.
China’s central objective remains the assertion and protection of its territorial claims. Since 1949, the CCP has contested sovereignty over lands and seas stretching from the Himalayas to the islands of the East and South China Seas. The 2019 Defense White Paper reiterates the fundamental goal of safeguarding the country’s sovereignty, security, and development interests, including the Diaoyu Dao islands (known in the West as the Senkaku Islands) and other disputed islands.
Over the past two decades, Beijing has intensified the frequency and scope of its actions against rival claims, using both military and non-military means. Through the gray zone, it seeks to consolidate territorial control and push foreign governments and civilian actors to accept its claims. At the same time, Chinese media and officials portray contenders, such as the Philippines, as responsible for violations of international law and threats to regional stability.
For Xi Jinping, these actions are part of the mission of “national rejuvenation,” linked both to the appeal of imperial China and to redemption from the “century of humiliation” marked by colonial occupation and the Opium Wars. In this perspective, MOOTWs are political, economic, social, and strategic tools for transforming China into a fully developed power by 2049.
Regional actions
Operations in the gray space are effective because they exploit the regulatory and cultural ambiguities of the U.S. allies, avoiding both military escalation and the costs of open conflict. Examples such as the differences between Washington and Tokyo on the definition of “armed attack” in incidents between Chinese fishing boats and the Japanese Coast Guard show how Beijing manages to gain advantages while remaining below the threshold of war.
China’s gray zone objectives cover the entire DIMEFIL spectrum, with a particular focus on economic resources. The disputes over the Senkaku Islands, which intensified after the discovery of oil reserves in the 1960s, and the protection of oil platforms such as Haiyang Shiyou 981 in 2014 are examples of this. Similarly, China restricts the mining activities of neighboring countries by invoking the “nine-dash line,” which is not recognized by international law, and accusing them of violations of Chinese sovereignty.
Through such actions, the Chinese government exerts economic pressure and consolidates its presence in disputed territories. The use of coercive force helps to reduce the economic development capacity of its neighbors and strengthen Chinese claims through effective occupation.
China’s assertiveness also aims to strengthen maritime security and deter the projection of U.S. naval power. Control of the South China Sea would guarantee the PLA access to strategic points and maritime corridors, reducing the adversary’s ability to penetrate East Asia in the event of conflict.
The construction and militarization of artificial islands allow China to extend its projection beyond its coastline and prepare the future theater of conflict under more favorable conditions. Constant operations also provide real-world experience to the armed forces, increasing combat capabilities and knowledge of operational areas, as demonstrated by missions with unmanned underwater vehicles or intrusions by research vessels into the exclusive economic zones of neighboring countries.
The increasingly close cooperation between the Chinese Coast Guard, navy, maritime militia, and civilian operators, supported by intelligence fusion centers, enables effective coordination and strengthens China’s position in the gray space. By preparing the ground in peacetime, Beijing aims to secure decisive advantages in the event of future conflict.
China’s gray zone strategy adopts a “whole-of-nation” approach, involving the entire nation, to achieve the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) central goal of national rejuvenation, along with other strategic objectives. In the Chinese conception, comprehensive national power (综合国力) represents a synthesis of all available resources—diplomatic, economic, cultural, legal, and military. Underlying this idea is the principle that national security is a fundamental duty for every Chinese citizen. The CCP aims to mobilize the population and, consequently, to integrate all sectors of society—from the military to the economic sphere—into a single common struggle. Central to this process is the strategy of military-civil fusion (军民融合), which promotes the use of civilian resources for military purposes and, conversely, the use of military technologies in the civilian sphere, both in times of war and peace.
This logic is also enshrined in the National Defense Law of the People’s Republic of China: Articles 7 and 56 define it as the “sacred duty” of every citizen to defend the country and resist aggression, supporting the development of national defense even in “military operations other than war.” This “omnidomain” and “omnisocietal” approach allows China to coordinate resources and tools in a unified course of action aimed at pursuing national rebirth. To put this vision into practice, Beijing uses a layered strategy, employing different tactics simultaneously or sequentially in different domains, with the aim of achieving its strategic goals while making the response of the United States and its allies more complex and costly.
The Three Wars Strategy
One of the pillars of this approach is the so-called Three Wars Strategy (三种战法), which combines psychological warfare, legal warfare, and media warfare to exert pressure on adversaries. China projects its coercive power through four main mechanisms: geopolitical, economic, military, and cyber/information. Of the twenty gray space tactics considered most problematic, ten are military in nature, four are economic, three are geopolitical, and three are related to the cyber or information domain.
This is a strategic concept developed by the People’s Republic of China in the early 2000s and formalized by the Central Military Commission in 2003. It represents a set of non-kinetic instruments to gain strategic and operational advantages without necessarily resorting to direct armed conflict. The basic idea is that modern warfare is not fought solely with conventional military means, but above all with the ability to influence the perception, behavior, and legitimacy of adversaries.
The Three Wars are divided into three main dimensions:
a) Psychological warfare (心理战, xīnlǐ zhàn)
Aims to demoralize adversaries and strengthen the spirit of one’s own forces and population.
It uses propaganda, implicit or explicit threats, demonstrations of force, and psychological operations to influence the enemy’s morale and political or military decisions.
Examples: military maneuvers in disputed areas, aggressive official statements, diplomatic pressure, or intimidation campaigns.
b) Public opinion warfare (舆论战, yúlùn zhàn)
Its goal is to control and shape the internal and external narrative, influencing both the Chinese population and international public opinion.
It uses traditional media, social networks, think tanks, and communication platforms to present China as legitimate and defensive, and its adversaries as aggressive or illegitimate.
It is a form of cognitive warfare, which aims to gain consensus and diplomatically isolate opponents.
c) Legal warfare (法律战, fǎlǜ zhàn)
It focuses on the use of national and international law to legitimize its own actions and delegitimize those of others.
It includes the adoption of domestic laws that reinforce territorial claims, the selective interpretation of international law, and pressure on multilateral legal bodies.
A typical example is the claim to the South China Sea through the “nine-dash line,” supported by Chinese domestic laws that are not recognized internationally.
Although attention is often focused on military operations—such as the dispatch of Chinese Navy ships into other countries’ EEZs—such actions are not isolated. Political leaders must also address the economic and diplomatic dimensions of China’s activities, which accompany its military ones.
A distinctive feature of China’s gray zone strategy is the slow and gradual pace at which actions are carried out. These tactics, often referred to as ‘erosion’ or ‘salami tactics’, aim to test the willingness of adversaries to respond without openly crossing the threshold of escalation. Each failure to react consolidates a precedent that encourages further Chinese moves and progressively raises the rival’s tolerance threshold.
This so-called “strategic gradualism” thus allows China to advance its fundamental interests without taking a single, decisive action that could provoke direct conflict. By spreading risks and pressures over time, Beijing reduces the likelihood of an immediate and drastic reaction from the affected states, thus managing to slowly change the status quo to its advantage.
