This is an extremely long article and it is appropriate for people who are
dedicated to leftist theory, I think. I found it interesting but a bit tedious.
One comment. I wonder how many people who have only positive things to say
about the Chinese state, have actually visited China. I have no disagreements
with this article. I don't know enough about economics to begin to disagree
with the theoretical argument and I am aware that there is a tremendous amount
of scapegoating of China these days. However, I do want to point out that when
I visited China in 1995 or 1996, not sure which year, it was extremely
authoritarian. Tourists were not permitted to roam around, for one thing. The
tour companies were charged with ensuring that their customers went only where
their itineraries said they were going. The amount and type of english TV
broadcasting was extremely limited. I'd done quite a bit of traveling in other
countries by then, and travel in China did feel different.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2021 3:45 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] NEITHER WASHINGTON NOR BEIJING?
NEITHER WASHINGTON NOR BEIJING?
By Carlos Martinez, Invent the Future.
February 23, 2021 | EDUCATE!
A newcomer to politics would likely assume that members of the global left
support the People’s Republic of China. It is after all led by a communist
party, with Marxism as its guiding ideology. During the period since the
Communist Party of China (CPC) came to power in 1949, the Chinese people have
experienced an unprecedented improvement in their living standards and human
development. Life expectancy has increased from 361 to 772 years. Literacy has
increased from an estimated 20 percent3 to 97 percent.4 The social and economic
position of women has improved beyond recognition (one example being that,
before the revolution, the vast majority of women received no formal education
whatsoever, whereas now a majority of students in higher education institutions
are female).5 Extreme poverty has been eliminated.6 China is becoming the
pre-eminent world leader in tackling climate change.7
Such progress is evidently consistent with traditional left-wing values; what
typically attracts people to Marxism is precisely that it seeks to provide a
framework for solving those problems of human development that capitalism has
shown itself incapable of satisfactorily addressing. Capitalism has driven
historic innovations in science and technology, thereby laying the ground for a
future of shared prosperity; however, its contradictions are such that it
inevitably generates poverty alongside wealth; it cannot but impose itself
through division, deception and coercion; everywhere it marginalises,
alienates, dominates and exploits. Seventy years of Chinese socialism,
meanwhile, have broken the inverse correlation between wealth and poverty. Even
though China suffers from high levels of inequality; even though China has some
extremely rich people; life for ordinary workers and peasants has continuously
improved, at a remarkable rate and over an extended period.
Yet support for China within the left in countries such as Britain and the US
is in fact a fairly marginal position. The bulk of Marxist groups in those
countries consider that China is not a socialist country; indeed many believe
it to be “a rising imperialist power in the world system that oversees the
exploitation of its own population … and increasingly exploits Third World
countries in pursuit of raw materials and outlets for its exports.”8 Some
consider the China-led Belt and Road Initiative to be an example of “feverish
global expansionism”.9 The Alliance for Worker’s Liberty, with characteristic
crudeness, describe China as being “functionally little different from, and in
any case not better than, a fascist regime,”10 every bit as imperialist as the
US and politically much worse.
The growing confrontation between the US and China is not, on these terms, an
attack by an imperialist power on a socialist or independent developing
country, but rather “a classic confrontation along imperialist lines”.11 “The
dynamics of US-China rivalry is an inter-imperial rivalry driven by
inter-capitalist competition.”12 The assumption here is that China is “an
emerging imperialist power that is seeking to assert itself in a world
dominated by the established imperialist power of the US”.13 If that is the
case, those that ground their politics in anti-imperialism should not support
either the US or China; rather they should “build a ‘third camp’ that makes
links and solidarity across borders”14 and adopt the slogan Neither Washington
nor Beijing, but international socialism.”
It’s an attractive idea. We don’t align with oppressors anywhere; our only
alignment is with the global working class. Eli Friedman eloquently presents
this grand vision in the popular left-wing journal Jacobin: “Our job is to
continually and forcefully reaffirm internationalist values: we take sides with
the poor, working classes, and oppressed people of every country, which means
we share nothing with either the US or Chinese states and corporations.”15
We’ve Been Here Before: Neither Washington Nor Moscow
This notion of opposing both sides in a cold war – refusing to align with
either of the two major competing powers and instead forming an independent
‘third camp’ – has deep roots. Prominent US Trotskyist Max Shachtman described
the third camp in 1940 as “the camp of proletarian internationalism, of the
socialist revolution, of the struggle for the emancipation of all the
oppressed.”16 During the original Cold War, in particular in Britain, a
significant proportion of the socialist movement rallied behind the slogan
Neither Washington nor Moscow, withholding their support from a Soviet Union
they considered to be state capitalist and/or imperialist.
Then as now, the third camp position drew theoretical justification from the
strategy promoted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in relation to World War 1. The
communist movement in the early 1910s recognised that a war between the two
major competing imperialist blocs (Germany on one side, and Britain and France
on the other) was near-inevitable. At the 1912 conference of the Second
International in Basel, the assembled organisations vowed to oppose the war, to
refuse to align themselves with any component part of the international
capitalist class, and to “utilise the economic and political crisis created by
the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist
class rule.”17 Rather than rallying behind the German, British, French or
Russian ruling classes, workers were called on to “oppose the power of the
international solidarity of the proletariat to capitalist imperialism.”
When war eventually broke out in July 1914, the Bolsheviks stuck to this
internationalist position. Lenin wrote regarding the warring imperialist blocs:
“One group of belligerent nations is headed by the German bourgeoisie. It is
hoodwinking the working class and the toiling masses by asserting that this is
a war in defence of the fatherland, freedom and civilisation, for the
liberation of the peoples oppressed by tsarism… The other group of belligerent
nations is headed by the British and the French bourgeoisie, who are
hoodwinking the working class and the toiling masses by asserting that they are
waging a war for the defence of their countries, for freedom and civilisation
and against German militarism and despotism.”18
Further: “Neither group of belligerents is inferior to the other in spoliation,
atrocities and the boundless brutality of war; however, to hoodwink the
proletariat … the bourgeoisie of each country is trying, with the help of false
phrases about patriotism, to extol the significance of its ‘own’ national war,
asserting that it is out to defeat the enemy, not for plunder and the seizure
of territory, but for the ‘liberation’ of all other peoples except its own.”
However, the majority of the organisations that had signed up to the Basel
Manifesto just two years earlier now crumbled in the face of pressure, opting
to support their ‘own’ ruling class’s war efforts. Lenin condemned the
prominent Marxist leaders in Germany, Austria and France for holding views that
were “chauvinist, bourgeois and liberal, and in no way socialist.”19 This
bitter strategic dispute was a catalyst to a split in the global working class
movement. The Second International was disbanded in 1916, and the Third
International (widely known as the Comintern) was established in 1919 with its
headquarters in Moscow. A century later this rift – described by Lenin in his
famous article Imperialism and the Split in Socialism20 – remains a fundamental
dividing line in the international left. Broadly speaking, one side consists of
a reformist left inclined towards parliamentarism and collaboration with the
capitalist class; the other side consists of a revolutionary left inclined
towards an independent, internationalist working class line.
The theorists of Neither Washington nor Moscow in the 1940s insisted that the
Cold War was analogous to the European inter-imperialist conflict of the 1910s;
that the US-led bloc and the Soviet-led bloc were competing imperialist powers
and that it was impermissible for socialists to ally with either of them. The
characterisation of the Soviet Union as imperialist was highly controversial
within the global left at the time, but prominent socialist thinkers led by
Tony Cliff of the Socialist Review Group (the precursor to the Socialist
Workers Party) argued strongly that “the logic of accumulation and expansion”
drove the Soviet leadership to take part in “external global military
competition”.21 Given Soviet imperialism and state capitalism, “nothing short
of a socialist revolution, led by the working class, would be able to transform
this situation”.22
The third camp has apparently survived the storm generated by the collapse of
the Soviet Union and simply pitched its tent a few thousand kilometres
southeast; Neither Washington nor Moscow has reappeared as Neither Washington
nor Beijing. Once again invoking the spirit of the Bolsheviks, several
prominent left organisations call on the working class in the West to oppose
both the US and China; to fight imperialism in all its forms; to support
workers’ struggle everywhere to bring down capitalism. If their assumptions are
correct – if the New Cold War is indeed analogous to the situation prevailing
in Europe before WW1, if China is an imperialist country, if the Chinese
working class is ready to be mobilised in an international revolutionary
socialist alliance – then perhaps their conclusion is also correct. I argue in
this article that the assumptions are not correct, that China is not an
imperialist country, that China is in fact a threat to the imperialist world
system, and that the correct position for the left to take in regard to the New
Cold War is to resolutely oppose the US and to support China.
Is China Imperialist?
The position of opposing both the US and China relies mainly on the premise
that China is imperialist, and that the New Cold War is an inter-imperialist
war – a war in which “both belligerent camps are fighting to oppress foreign
countries or peoples”23. If China can be shown not to be an imperialist power,
and if the New Cold War can be shown not to be an inter-imperialist struggle,
then the slogan Neither Washington nor Beijing should be rejected.
What is imperialism? One definition is “the policy of extending the rule or
authority of an empire or nation over foreign countries, or of acquiring and
holding colonies and dependencies.”24 Although vague, this incorporates the
core concept of empire, hinted at by the word’s etymology.
In his classic work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism – the first
serious study of the phenomenon from a Marxist perspective – Lenin states that,
reduced to its “briefest possible definition”, imperialism can be considered
simply as “the monopoly stage of capitalism”.25 Lenin notes that such a concise
definition is necessarily inadequate, and is only useful to the extent that it
implies the presence of five “basic features”:
Capitalism has developed to a level where, in the main branches of production,
the only viable businesses are those that have been able to concentrate a huge
quantity of capital, thereby forming monopolies.
The emergence of a “financial oligarchy” – essentially banks – as the driving
force of the economy.
Export of capital (foreign investment) as an important engine of growth.
The formation of “international monopolist capitalist associations which share
the world among themselves”, the equivalent of the modern multinational company.
The world’s territory has been completely divided up among the capitalist
powers; markets and resources around the globe have been integrated into the
capitalist world system.
A century later, Lenin’s definition remains a useful and relevant description
of the capitalist world. Indeed in some important ways it is more apt than
ever, given the further concentration of capital and the domination of
“generalised monopolies … which exert their control over the productive systems
of the periphery of global capitalism.”26
However, a few months after the publication of Imperialism: The Highest Stage
of Capitalism, a new variable appeared in global politics, in the form of a
‘socialist camp’. The socialist group of countries (which at its peak comprised
the bulk of the Eurasian land mass) disrupted the imperialist system in a
number of ways: most obviously, it directly withdrew the socialist countries
from that system; it offered support to colonial and anti-imperialist
liberation movements, accelerating their victory; and it offered aid and
favourable trading relations to formerly colonised states that would otherwise
have little other option than to subject themselves to neocolonial oppression.
The arrival of socialist state power in Europe and Asia was, therefore, an
unprecedented boon for the cause of national sovereignty around the world. At
the same time and in equal measure, it was a setback for the imperialist world
system.
No longer is the world so cleanly divided into imperialist and oppressed
nations as it was before 1917. As such, Lenin’s five features of imperialism
can’t simply be used as a checklist for answering the question of whether any
given country is imperialist. Canadian political analyst Stephen Gowans has
proposed the following broad definition: “imperialism is a process of
domination guided by economic interests.”27 This domination “can be declared
and formal, or undeclared and informal, or both.” This provides a useful
framework for thinking about whether China is imperialist: is it engaged in a
process of domination guided by economic interests? Does it, in Samir Amin’s
words, leverage “technological development, access to natural resources, the
global financial system, dissemination of information, and weapons of mass
destruction” in order to dominate the planet and prevent the emergence of any
state or movement that could impede this domination?28
If it can be proven that China seeks to dominate foreign markets and resources;
that it uses its growing economic strength to affect political decisions in
poorer countries; that it engages in wars (overt or covert) to secure its own
interests; it would then be reasonable to conclude that China is indeed an
imperialist country.
Crossing The Line: At What Point Could China Have Become Imperialist?
If China is an imperialist power, when did it become one? At the time Lenin was
writing, China was unambiguously in the group of oppressed countries, having
been stripped of a large part of its sovereignty by the colonial powers over
the course of the preceding 80 years. One of the world-historic victories of
the Chinese Revolution was to end that domination and to establish the national
independence of the Chinese people.
The People’s Republic of China rejected the capitalist model and set out on the
journey towards communism – an economic system envisioned by Marx as “an
association of free men, working with the means of production held in common,
and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness
as one single social labour force.”29 Jumping directly from semi-feudal
conditions such as existed in pre-revolutionary China to a communist system of
production relations isn’t feasible, and what was established in China in the
1950s was a mixed economy, with publicly-owned industry and massive land reform
as its key features. Feudalism was comprehensively dismantled – another
historic step forward, and one that remains incomplete in most other parts of
the Global South. This mixed economy – which oscillated ‘left’ (with
accelerated collectivisation and a heavy emphasis on moral incentives) and
‘right’ (with the limited use of market mechanisms) – was anything but
imperialist. By no reasonable metric was it an example of monopoly capitalism;
China’s “export of capital” was limited largely to foreign aid projects in
Africa, most famously the Tazara Railway linking Tanzania and Zambia, which
aside from enabling regional development, broke Zambia’s dependency on
apartheid-ruled territories (Rhodesia, South Africa, Mozambique).30
Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the economic reformers among the
revolutionary leadership won the debate about how to move the revolution
forward, and China embarked upon a course of ‘Socialism with Chinese
characteristics’ – leveraging market mechanisms, the profit motive, and foreign
investment (within a context of central planning and heavy regulation) in order
to rapidly develop the productive forces and pave the way for a better quality
of life for hundreds of millions of Chinese people. Private business became
increasingly important, and parts of the economy took on an essentially
capitalist character. But again, not even the most hardline third-campist could
consider China in the 1980s and 1990s as an imperialist country. It exported
precious little capital; rather, it was the recipient of enormous volumes of
foreign capital, from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US and Europe. In a
controlled, limited and strategic way, China opened itself up to exploitation
by the imperialist powers so as to develop its technological capacity and
insert itself into global value chains.
So inasmuch as China is imperialist, this must be a phenomenon of the last 20
years, in which period China’s sustained GDP growth has resulted in it becoming
the largest economy in the world (in PPP terms) and a technological powerhouse.
Certainly China has its fair share of monopolies that deploy extraordinary
quantities of capital. Alibaba and Tencent for example are both in the world’s
top 10 companies by market capitalisation.31 Export of capital has increased by
an order of magnitude, albeit starting from a very small base. The number of
Chinese firms operating globally has grown at an estimated 16 percent a year
since 2010.32 China’s foreign direct investment outflows stand at around 117
billion USD, slightly more than Germany, slightly less than the Netherlands. In
terms of FDI outflows ratio to GDP (ie the importance of capital export to the
national economy as a whole), the value for China is 0.8 percent – a similar
level to Brazil, and far less than Ireland, Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands and
the United Arab Emirates. It would be difficult to make a case for labelling
China imperialist on the basis of its foreign investment alone.
In a long piece for Counterfire, Dragan Plavšić poses the question of whether
China is a socialist force for good or an imperial superpower in the making.
Concluding the latter, he claims that China’s global expansion is “merely the
latest example of a road well-travelled by other major economies such as
Britain, Germany and the US, as they too expanded beyond their national limits
in order to take competitive advantage of global trade and investment
opportunities.” Moreover, “the competitive logic that motivated them is not
qualitatively different from the one motivating China today.”33
Competition demands relentless innovation, which inevitably reduces the role of
human labour in the production process, which by definition reduces the
component of ‘variable capital’ with the magical property of being able to
transform a given sum of money (the cost of labour) into a larger sum of money
(the value added by labour). The ever-declining proportion of variable capital
means an ever-declining rate of profit, which capitalists can only compensate
for with ferocious expansion, capturing new markets and lowering the costs of
production. This is the economic engine at the heart of imperialism.
The problem with Plavšić’s analysis is that the “well-travelled road” taken by
Britain, Germany and the US is no longer open. By the time Lenin was writing –
a century ago – the world was already “completely divided up, so that in the
future only redivision is possible”. That is, country A can only dominate
country B by displacing country C; the means for this process is war and
military conquest. Since China’s record remains remarkably peaceful, it’s
evident that inasmuch as China has a path to becoming an imperialist power, it
is by no means the “well-travelled” one. Noam Chomsky, by no measure an
ideological adherent of the CPC, pokes fun at the idea that China would become
an aggressive military power on the order of the US, “with 800 overseas
military bases, invading and overthrowing other governments, or committing
terrorist acts… I think this will not, and cannot, happen in China… China is
not assuming the role of an aggressor with a large military budget, etc.”34
Further, the structure of the Chinese economy is such that it doesn’t impel the
domination of foreign markets, territories, resources and labour in the same
way as free market capitalism does. The major banks – which obviously wield a
decisive influence over how capital is deployed – are majority-owned by the
state, responsible primarily not to shareholders but to the Chinese people. The
key industries are dominated by state-owned companies and subjected to a heavy
regulation that doesn’t have private profit maximisation as its primary
objective. Arthur Kroeber, an expert in China’s economic system, describes “an
economy where the state remains firmly in command, not least through its
control of ‘commanding heights’ state enterprises, but where market tools are
used to improve efficiency.”35 In summary, the Chinese economy fulfils much the
same function now as it did in 1953, when Mao described it existing as “not
chiefly to make profits for the capitalists but to meet the needs of the people
and the state”.36
Li Zhongjin and David Kotz assert that while “China’s capitalists have the same
drive toward imperialism of capitalists everywhere,” but further note that any
such drive is restrained by a CPC government which “has no need to aim for
imperial domination to achieve its economic aims.” While capitalists are
represented within the CPC, there is “no evidence that capitalists now control
the CPC or can dictate state policy”; hence “the Chinese capitalist class lacks
the power to compel the CPC to seek imperial domination.”37
As such, the prospect of foreign domination does not have the same
gravitational pull on the Chinese economy as it did/does on the economies of
Britain, the US, Japan and others. Nor do the objective conditions exist for
China to establish even an informal empire without direct military
confrontation with the existing imperialist powers. The CPC was serious when it
declared at its 17th Party Congress in 2007 that China “will never seek to
engage in hegemony or empire expansion.”38 The Chinese government actively
positions itself in the Global South, as a socialist country that stands in
solidarity with the developing world, and this outlook structures its foreign
policy.
Nevertheless, China stands accused of imperialist behaviour on several fronts,
notably its economic relationship with Africa, its economic relationship with
Latin America, its vast Belt and Road infrastructure programme, and its
behaviour in the South China Sea. I will address each of these.
China And Africa
In recent years there has been a seemingly endless stream of articles about
Chinese imperialism in Africa. Western journalists and politicians tell us that
China has become a new colonial power; that China is attempting to dominate
African land and resources; that Africa is becoming entangled in a
Beijing-devised debt trap; that Chinese investment in Africa only benefits
China. I’ve written in some detail on this question39 and will therefore only
include a brief sketch here.
Deborah Bräutigam, Professor of Political Economy and Director of the China
Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced
International Studies, has done extensive research on the question of China’s
engagement with Africa. On the basis of this research, she is able to
authoritatively debunk some of the most popular myths. For example in response
to the trope that Chinese companies only employ Chinese workers, Bräutigam
notes: “Surveys of employment on Chinese projects in Africa repeatedly find
that three-quarters or more of the workers are, in fact, local.” Meanwhile,
“Africans are being invited to Chinese universities. China is offering
scholarships. When Africans are thinking about technology and skills, they are
thinking of China as a valid option.”40
Regarding the so-called debt trap, Bräutigam’s research team found that “China
had lent at least $95.5 billion between 2000 and 2015. That’s a lot of debt.
Yet by and large, the Chinese loans in our database were performing a useful
service: financing Africa’s serious infrastructure gap. On a continent where
over 600 million Africans have no access to electricity, 40 percent of the
Chinese loans paid for power generation and transmission. Another 30 percent
went to modernising Africa’s crumbling transport infrastructure… On the whole,
power and transport are investments that boost economic growth. And we found
that Chinese loans generally have comparatively low interest rates and long
repayment periods.” Indeed the reluctance of Western development banks to take
on risky loans means there’s major demand for Chinese loans. And China tends to
be more flexible with debt relief, restructuring and cancelling unsustainable
payments.41
And on the ‘land grab’, the various stories about wealthy Chinese buying up
large tracts of African land in order to grow food for China “turned out to be
mostly myths… China is not a dominant investor in plantation agriculture in
Africa, in contrast to how it is often portrayed.”42
Western establishment figures enthusiastically embrace the idea of China being
an imperialist power, for the obvious reasons that it diverts attention from
their own imperialism and helps promote disunity and mistrust within the Global
South. Hillary Clinton says China is engaged in a “new colonialism” in
Africa.43 John Bolton believes China is using “predatory practices” to stunt
Africa’s growth.44 Yet these ideas are not exclusive to the professional
defenders of imperialism. Adrian Budd, writing in Socialist Review (purveyors
of finest Third Camp ideology since 1950), states unequivocally that China is
imperialist and complains that “Chinese investment in Africa, long dominated by
Western imperialism, was $36 billion in 2016 against the US’s $3.6 billion,
Britain’s $2.4 billion and France’s $2.1 billion.”45
But there’s no equals sign between investment and imperialism – Angola is not
an imperialist power in Portugal, in spite of its extensive investments
there.46 China’s investments in Africa are welcomed in the recipient countries,
because they serve to address critical gaps in infrastructure and finance.
Deals are conducted on the basis of sovereignty and equality, without coercion.
Progressive Greek economist and former government minister Yanis Varoufakis
notes that “the Chinese are non-interventionist in a way that Westerners have
never managed to fathom… They don’t seem to have any military ambitions…
Instead of going into Africa with troops, killing people like the West has
done… they went to Addis Ababa and said to the government, ‘we can see you have
some problems with your infrastructure; we would like to build some new
airports, upgrade your railway system, create a telephone system, and rebuild
your roads.’”47 Varoufakis – who prefaces his remarks by noting that he is by
no means a fan of the Chinese Communist Party – posits that the reason for this
offer was not pure charity but rather to build trust with the Ethiopian
government so as to be well positioned to be awarded oil contracts.
Nonetheless, it is a fundamentally different approach to doing business than
that adopted by Europeans and North Americans over the course of centuries.
Chinese loans are not conditional on countries imposing austerity or
privatisation. Indeed the availability of alternative sources of funding means
that debtor countries are not forced to accept the unfair terms that have been
imposed by Western financial institutions for so long. As former South African
minister of trade and industry Rob Davies put it, China’s expanding presence in
Africa “can only be a good thing … because it means that we don’t have to sign
on the dotted line whatever is shoved under our noses any longer … We now have
alternatives and that’s to our benefit.”48
Martin Jacques addresses this issue in his book When China Rules the World:
“Chinese aid has far fewer strings attached than that of Western nations and
institutions. While the IMF and the World Bank have insisted, in accord with
their Western-inspired ideological agenda, on the liberalisation of foreign
trade, privatisation and a reduced role for the state, the Chinese stance is
far less restrictive and doctrinaire.” Jacques points out that the Chinese
emphasis on respect for sovereignty is “a principle they regard to be
inviolable and which is directly related to their own historical experience
during the ‘century of humiliation’”.49
The expanding infrastructure investment is enabling development of countries
that have been forcibly underdeveloped by the imperialist powers (Walter
Rodney’s work on this topic is required reading).50 For example, Chiponda
Chibelu notes that “in the last decade, African countries have largely turned
to China to help them build and expand their digital infrastructure,” having
“received little support from Western governments for technology
infrastructure.”51 China is actively encouraging the ICT revolution in Africa.
Meanwhile Chinese companies are investing in green development projects
throughout the continent – and indeed the world. China has been the top
investor in clean energy for nine out of the last ten years, according to the
Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.52 The Chinese Academy of Sciences
is heavily involved in supporting research projects in Africa, including
agronomic research aimed at ending food shortages.53 Tens of thousands of
African students attend universities in China, which now offers “more
university scholarships to African students than the leading western
governments combined”.54 Mohamed Hassan, president of the World Academy of
Sciences, says that China is “doing better than any other country for Africa”
when it comes to training scholars.55
Overall, rising Chinese investment and trade has been welcomed by African
countries and is playing an important role in the continent’s development.
China has adhered firmly to its ‘five-no’ approach as outlined by President Xi
at the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation: “No
interference in African countries’ internal affairs; no imposition of our will
on African countries; no attachment of political strings to assistance to
Africa; and no seeking of selfish political gains in investment and financing
cooperation with Africa.”56 Africa has known imperialism, and it doesn’t look
like this.
So China’s engagement with Africa bears very little resemblance to the
“well-travelled road” of Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany and the
US. Under European colonialism and neocolonialism, Africa remained in much the
same state as was described by Marx in 1867: “A new and international division
of labour springs up, one suited to the requirements of the main industrial
countries, and it converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural
field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently
industrial field.”57 As Liberia’s former Minister of Public Works W Gyude Moore
writes, under European colonialism “there has never been a continental-scale
infrastructure building program for Africa’s railways, roads, ports, water
filtration plants and power stations”; meanwhile “China has built more
infrastructure in Africa in two decades than the West has in centuries.”58
Mozambican independence leader Samora Machel, president from 1975 until his
death in 1986, made a similar point about neocolonial underdevelopment: “They
need Africa to have no industry, so that it will continue to provide raw
materials. Not to have a steel industry. Since this would be a luxury for the
African. They need Africa not to have dams, bridges, textile mills for
clothing. A factory for shoes? No, the African doesn’t deserve it. No, that’s
not for the Africans.”59
On this question, the Senegalese-American musician Akon demonstrates a far
greater insight than the third campists when he states that “no one has done
more to benefit Africa than the Chinese.”60
China And Latin America
Chinese firms have also been investing heavily in infrastructure projects in
Latin America, as well as becoming the continent’s largest creditor and lead
trading partner. Max Nathanson observes that “Latin American governments have
long lamented their countries’ patchy infrastructure” and that China has
“stepped in with a solution: roughly $150 billion loaned to Latin American
countries since 2005.”61 The emergence of Chinese economic involvement in Latin
America inspired then-US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson – not widely known
for his boundless anti-imperialist spirit – to accuse China of being a “new
imperial power … using economic statecraft to pull the region into its orbit.”62
However, China’s role in Latin America is not considered to be ‘imperialist’ by
the representatives of the working class and oppressed masses in that
continent. For example, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez visited China
six times over the course of his 13 years as President of Venezuela and was a
strong proponent of China-Venezuela relations. He considered China to be a key
partner in the struggle for a new world, memorably stating: “We’ve been
manipulated to believe that the first man on the moon was the most important
event of the 20th century. But no, much more important things happened, and one
of the greatest events of the 20th century was the Chinese revolution.”63
The Chávez government and its successor have always encouraged Chinese economic
engagement with Venezuela, and have never considered it to be imperialist. On
the contrary, Chávez considered that an alliance with China constituted a
bulwark against imperialism – a “Great Wall against American hegemonism.”64
Chinese financing has been crucial for development projects in energy, mining,
industry, technology, communications, transport, housing and culture,65 and has
thus played a key role in the improvement in the living conditions of the
Venezuelan poor over the last two decades. Kevin Gallagher writes in The China
Triangle that Venezuela’s unprecedented anti-poverty programmes were made
possible by a combination of “the high price of oil in the 2000s and … the
joint fund with China.”66 Across the continent, the “China Boom” from 2003-13
“helped erase the increases in inequality in Latin America that accrued during
the Washington Consensus period.”67
A crucial difference between Chinese and Western investment – between Latin
America’s “China Boom” and the Washington Consensus – is that “when Chinese
banks do come, they do not impose policy conditionalities of any kind, in
keeping with their general foreign policy of nonintervention.”68 Rather,
Chinese investors treat borrower countries as equals and work to design
mutually beneficial deals. Since Chinese loans don’t come with punishing
conditions of austerity and privatisation, Latin American governments have been
able to leverage China’s investment and purchase of primary commodities to
spend at an unprecedented rate on reducing poverty and inequality.
Chávez spoke plainly about the difference between China and the imperialist
powers: “China is large but it’s not an empire. China doesn’t trample on
anyone, it hasn’t invaded anyone, it doesn’t go around dropping bombs on
anyone.”69 This dynamic continues. Comparing the attitude taken towards
Venezuela by the US and China, Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza stated that “our
country is under permanent attack and aggression from the United States of
America… Thank God humanity can count on the People’s Republic of China to
guarantee peace or at least less conflict.” Arreaza described the trade and
investment deals between China and Venezuela as being set up in a “just, fair
and equal manner.”70
Fidel Castro – no slouch in the anti-imperialist department – thoroughly
rejected the notion that China was an imperialist power. “China has objectively
become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World
countries … an important element of balance, progress and safeguard of world
peace and stability.”71 China’s assistance and friendship has proven invaluable
to socialist Cuba; China is now the island’s second largest trading partner and
its main source of technical assistance.72
China also established strong relations with Bolivia under the progressive
government of Evo Morales. Speaking at a recent event of the No Cold War
campaign, Bolivian journalist Ollie Vargas talked about China’s role in
launching Bolivia’s first telecoms satellite: “Bolivia is a small country, it
doesn’t have the expertise to launch a rocket into space, so it worked with
China to launch the satellite which now provides internet and phone signal to
all corners of the country, from the Amazon to the Andes, and here in the
working class areas of the big cities.”73 Vargas said that the project had been
a positive model of mutually beneficial cooperation, as China brought expertise
and investment but it didn’t seek to take ownership of the final product; the
satellite belongs to the Bolivian people.
As with Africa, accusations of Chinese imperialism in Latin America don’t stand
up to scrutiny. China trades with Latin America; China invests in Latin
America; but China is not attempting to dominate Latin America or compromise
its sovereignty.
Belt And Road
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a global infrastructure development
strategy proposed by China in 2013. Unprecedented in scope, the BRI seeks to
revive the original Silk Road – a vast trading network that arose during the
Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and which connected China with India, Central Asia
and further afield. The BRI seeks to promote global economic integration and
cooperation via the construction of vast numbers of roads, railways, bridges,
factories, ports, airports, energy infrastructure and telecommunications
systems, all of which will enable deeper integration of markets and more
efficient allocation of resources.
As of early 2021, 140 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and
the Caribbean have joined the BRI by signing a Memorandum of Understanding with
China.74 BRI investment projects “are estimated to add over USD 1 trillion of
outward funding for foreign infrastructure” in the ten years from 2017.75
The basic economic motivation of the BRI is to drive growth through expanding
cooperation and coordination across borders. As Chinese economist Justin Yifu
Lin puts it, “the greater the division of labour, the higher the economy’s
productivity. But the division of labor is limited by market size. So the
larger the market, the more specialised the labour.”76
Politically, the project fits into China’s longstanding approach of using
economic integration to increase the cost (and thereby reduce the likelihood)
of confrontation. Peter Nolan writes that “China is in a position to make use
of its rich experience in domestic infrastructure construction in order to make
a major contribution to the development of the Silk Road in Central and
Southeast Asia.” A key political byproduct of this is “stimulating harmonious
relations between the countries.”77
China is uniquely well placed to be the driving force of such a project, given
its size, its location, and the nature of its economy. The Portuguese
politician and academic Bruno Maçães observes that the essentially planned
nature of the Chinese economy, with the state “firmly in charge of the
financial system”, has enabled China to act quickly and decisively, directing
immense financial resources towards BRI projects.78 Chinese engineering
expertise is already opening up some of the most difficult terrains in the
world for roads and railways, for example.
Ashley Smith and Kevin Lin, writing in the DSA’s Socialist Forum, consider that
the BRI is “unmistakably imperialist”, picking items out of the Imperialism,
the Highest Stage of Capitalism grab bag in order to prove their case. China is
attempting to “export its vast surplus capacity, secure raw materials for its
booming economy, and find new markets for its products.”79 They claim that the
BRI is locking entire countries into “dependent development”, even
“de-industrialising some countries like Brazil and reducing all to serving the
needs of Chinese capitalism.”
This latter critique is more Mike Pompeo than Vladimir Lenin, and connects to
an emerging New Cold War policy of blaming all economic problems on China. It’s
certainly the case that more open markets render some businesses unviable, but
overall China’s emergence as Brazil’s largest trading partner has been
beneficial for the people of both countries. Indeed Brazil’s foreign minister
in the Lula government, Celso Amorim, considered the blossoming China-Brazil
relationship to be at the heart of a “reconfiguration of the world’s commercial
and diplomatic geography.”80
If the BRI truly seeks to impose “dependent development”, it’s perhaps
surprising that nearly every country in the Global South has signed up to it –
including 42 of Africa’s 56 countries. Surely not all turkeys are voting for
Christmas? In reality, most countries are highly favourable towards the BRI
because it offers exactly what they need, and exactly what global imperialism
has been impeding for centuries: development. Currently, for example, just 43
percent of people in Africa have access to electricity.81 The road and rail
networks are badly underdeveloped. Hundreds of years of a European ‘civilising
mission’ in Africa have brought all of the misery of modern capitalism with
very little of the progress.
Belt and Road projects are establishing an essential framework for economic
development and are thereby creating the conditions for formerly colonised
countries to break out of dependency, to evade the economic coercion
perpetrated by the US and its allies. The larger part of the reason that the
Washington Consensus – the imposition of ‘shock doctrine’ economics – has been
broken is the availability of alternative financing, particularly from Chinese
or China-led development banks; even the IMF and World Bank have had to scale
back their loan conditionalities, as debtor countries now have better options.
Kevin Gallagher notes that, for example, Latin American leaders “have been
reluctant to further bind their economies to Washington Consensus policies—in
large part because they believe they have an alternative in China.”82
Furthermore, the trajectory of BRI investment is towards
environmentally-friendly projects – for example, wind, solar and hydropower
made up 57 percent of BRI energy investments in 2020, up from 38 per cent in
2019.83
While much noise has been made in the West in relation to “debt trap diplomacy”
along the Belt and Road, the actual situation is that “virtually every study
that looks at the terms of developing country debt sees developed country
lending as more onerous than that of China.”84 Responding to accusations that
China had created a Belt and Road ‘debt trap’ in Pakistan, the Chinese
ambassador noted that 42 percent of Pakistan’s debt is to multilateral
institutions and that Chinese preferential loans only constitute 10 percent.85
Writing in The Atlantic, Deborah Braütigam and Meg Rithmire debunk the debt
trap narrative, forensically examining its canonical example: that of the
Hambantota port in Sri Lanka.86 Braütigam and Rithmire comment that the idea of
a cynical China hoodwinking naïve governments in the Global South “wrongfully
portrays both Beijing and the developing countries it deals with”; indeed it
contains an element of racism, the idea that the majority of countries in
Africa, Asia and Latin America are lining up to be bamboozled by a Chinese
colonialism that’s so cunning as to not even require gunboats.
The BRI unquestionably promotes globalisation, but globalisation and
imperialism are not the same thing. The original Silk Road was “the epicentre
of one of the first waves of globalisation, connecting eastern and western
markets, spurring immense wealth, and intermixing cultural and religious
traditions. Valuable Chinese silk, spices, jade, and other goods moved west
while China received gold and other precious metals, ivory, and glass
products.”87 This is evidently a form of globalisation, but without the
domination and coercion that characterise imperialism. The development of
trade, building of infrastructure and expansion of friendly cooperation are all
in the interests of the peoples of the participating countries. To compare such
a process to imperialism as practised by Western Europe, North America and
Japan is an insult to the hundreds of millions throughout Africa, Asia and
Latin America that have endured the misery of colonial and neocolonial
subjugation. The Western powers are certainly concerned about the Belt and
Road, given its “practical significance of shifting the world’s centre of
gravity from the Atlantic to the Pacific”, in the words of Henry Kissinger.88
But that ought not to be anything for socialists to be afraid of.
South China Sea
China’s “military expansionism” in the South China Sea is the other oft-cited
example of Chinese imperialism. China claims sovereignty over the bulk of the
South China Sea, and in recent years has stepped up its naval operations and
its construction of artificial islands in the area. Chinese claims overlap in
several places with those of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and
Vietnam.
Amitai Etzioni points out that China’s claims in the South China Sea, while
extensive and ambitious, are not particularly unusual. For example, “Canada,
Russia, Denmark, and Norway have made overlapping claims to the North Pole and
the Arctic Ocean, and have conducted exploratory expeditions and military
exercises in the region to strengthen their positions.”89 Even in the South
China Sea itself, other countries put forward ambitious claims and engage in
military construction. Jude Woodward observed that China’s island-building was
carried out largely in response to the actions taken by other states in the
region: “In its actions on these disputed islands, China can with justice argue
that it has done no more than others… It [is] rarely mentioned that Taiwan has
long had an airstrip on Taiping, Malaysia on Swallow Reef, Vietnam on Spratly
Island and the Philippines on Thitu.”90
China’s interest in the South China Sea islands isn’t new, nor is it linked to
the discovery of natural resources on those islands, as is often claimed.91
These are uninhabitable islands that have been important stopping points for
Chinese ships for at least 2,000 years; China has regarded the islands as its
own since the time of the Han Dynasty.
The purpose of China’s assertion of sovereignty over much of the South China
Sea has nothing to do with “expansionism” and everything to do with ensuring
its economic and military security. Robert Kaplan writes that the South China
Sea is “uniquely crucial” for China’s interests – “as central to Asia as the
Mediterranean is to Europe”.92 Its bases at sea have no impact on shipping or
ordinary peaceful activities, but are aimed at reducing its strategic
vulnerability and preventing any attempt by hostile powers to impose a
blockade. Given the continued US militarisation of the region,93 and its open
attempt to create a Pacific alliance against China, this is more than just an
abstract hypothetical issue. For example, the only major shipping route from
the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean is through the Malacca Strait; if the
US were allowed the unadulterated control of the oceans that it seeks, it would
be in a position to quickly cut off China’s energy supplies.
Peter Frankopan writes: “China’s present and future depends on being able to
ensure that it can get what it needs, safely, securely and without interruption
– and ensuring that those who are keen to manage or curtail economic growth are
prevented from being able to threaten routes to and from markets elsewhere in
the world.”94
Concerns about Chinese expansionism in the Pacific are misplaced and
hypocritical, given the rights asserted by the US, Britain, France and others
in the region. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
(UNCLOS), passed in 1992 – but which, notably, the United States has refused to
sign – each nation is awarded an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of 200 nautical
miles around its territory. An EEZ accords special rights regarding the
exploration and use of marine resources, including energy production from water
and wind. Peter Nolan observes that, under this system, China’s undisputed EEZ
is just under a million square kilometres.95 Meanwhile France has 10 million,
the US 10 million, and the UK 6 million square kilometres’ EEZ, the result of
persisting colonial outposts. Britain’s overseas territory includes the
Falklands (Malvinas), Sandwich Islands, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands,
Monserrat, British Indian Ocean Territory and the Pitcairns – all many
thousands of miles away from Britain. The Pitcairn Islands, a group of four
volcanic islands in the South Pacific, with a combined population of 70 people,
provide Britain with a similar EEZ to that of China – with a population of 1.4
billion people. Inasmuch as there’s a pressing issue of maritime colonialism
that we should take a stand on, surely this is it.
There are several thorny longstanding territorial issues in the South China
Sea, which will take time and goodwill to resolve. They can only be resolved
primarily by the countries in the region themselves. The increasing US-led
militarisation of the region, the deliberate stoking of relatively dormant
disputes, and the US Navy’s ‘freedom of navigation’ patrols – totally
unnecessary given that “more than 100,000 vessels pass through the South China
Sea every year [and in] no single case has freedom of navigation been
affected”96 – only serve to escalate tensions, increase China’s perceived
threat level, and delay resolution. Indeed the US’s actions (fully supported by
Britain,97 needless to say) are creating one of the most complex and fragile
flashpoints in the world today. To complain of Chinese expansionism in the
South China Sea is to wade into dangerous waters precisely on the side of US
hegemonism. The key demand for the peace movement and for anti-imperialists
must be for an end to US-led militarisation of the region, along with support
for peaceful dialogue between the countries with competing territorial claims
(an example of this is the negotiating framework for a code of conduct in the
South China Sea agreed by China and ASEAN in 2017).98
Multipolarity Is A Prerequisite For Socialist Advance
The slogan Neither Washington nor Beijing, but international socialism is an
emphatic statement that the global working class can’t hope to advance towards
socialism by associating itself with either the US or China; that the rivalry
between the two is inter-imperialist in character; that both countries promote
a model of international relations designed solely to further their own
hegemonic interests.
However, since a closer evaluation indicates that China is not imperialist,
Marxists should make some effort to analyse its strategy and assess the extent
to which it offers an opportunity for global socialist advance. Perhaps the
correct slogan is closer to Not Washington but Beijing, and international
socialism. This is not simply a matter of idle curiosity for the radical left.
We are agreed that humanity faces a set of intractable problems that cannot be
solved within a framework of capitalism; that eliminating the fundamental
contradiction of social production and private appropriation is the sine qua
non condition for securing humanity’s future. If there’s a chance that China’s
strategy can contribute to the building of a socialist path, it should be
studied and taken seriously.
In the 1950s and 60s, revolutionary China pursued an unambiguously
revolutionary anti-imperialist foreign policy, providing crucial support for
liberation movements in Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.99
Just a year after the declaration of the PRC, the Chinese People’s Volunteer
Army crossed the Yalu River in order to aid the people of Korea against the
genocidal war launched by the US and its allies.100 Three million Chinese
fought in that war, and an estimated 180,000 lost their lives. Although the
fierce ideological dispute between China and the Soviet Union led to some
objectively reactionary positions (for example in Angola and Afghanistan), the
guiding principle of Chinese foreign policy was militant anti-imperialism.
In the early 1970s, after over two decades of intense hostility, a window of
opportunity opened for improved China-US relations. This laid the ground for
China to regain its seat at the United Nations in 1971 and, at the end of the
decade, the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with the US. With the
start of the economic reform in 1978, China urgently sought foreign investment
from, and trade with, Southeast Asia, Japan and the US. The need to create a
favourable business environment led to the adoption of a “good neighbour
policy”, which included dialling down support for leftist armed struggle in
Malaysia, Thailand and elsewhere. Deng Xiaoping’s recommendation to “hide our
capabilities and bide our time” meant, in essence, China minding its own
business and focussing on its internal development.
Over the last 20-plus years, and the last decade in particular, however, China
has become more active in its foreign policy, with a strong focus on
multipolarity: “a pattern of multiple centres of power, all with a certain
capacity to influence world affairs, shaping a negotiated order.”101 Such a
world order is specifically non-hegemonic; it aims to transition from a
US-dominated unipolar world order to a more equal system of international
relations in which big powers and regional blocs cooperate and compete. The
interdependence between the different powers, and their comparable levels of
strength, increases the cost and risk of conflict, thereby promoting peace.
Although the multipolar narrative doesn’t make explicit reference to
anti-imperialism, it’s clear that a multipolar world implies the negation of
the US hegemonist project for military and economic control of the planet. As
such, its basic character is anti-imperialist, which is why it is treated with
such contempt in US policy circles; it represents a world that looks very
different from “global American leadership”102, a world where the US is no
longer “without peer in its ability to project power around the world.”103
As discussed above, the very fact that China exists as a source of investment
and finance is a major boost to the countries of the developing world (and
indeed parts of Europe), which no longer have to accept punishing austerity and
privatisation as conditions for emergency loans. Jenny Clegg writes that
“developing countries as a whole may find, in the opportunities created by
China’s rise, more room for flexibility to follow their own mix of state and
market, and even to explore the socialist experiments they were forced to
abandon by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1980s.”104 This is an
important point. Multipolarity opens a path for greater sovereignty for
developing countries; it breaks the stranglehold of the imperialist core (US,
Europe, Japan) over the periphery and, in so doing, “provides the framework for
the possible and necessary overcoming of capitalism”, in the memorable words of
Samir Amin.105 Through forums such as BRICS (an international alliance of five
major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), FOCAC
(Forum on China-Africa Cooperation), China-CELAC (Forum of China and the
Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) and others, China is strongly
promoting South-South cooperation and helping to advance the interests of the
developing world in general.
Clegg notes that “what is at stake with China’s rise is … a real choice over
the future model of the international order: the US strategic goal of a
unipolar world to uphold and extend existing patterns of exploitation, or a
multipolar and democratic one for a more equitable, just and peaceful
world.”106 For the left to issue a plague on both these houses would be nothing
short of a farce.
‘Neither Washington Nor Beijing’ In Reality Means Support For Washington
In this article, I have attempted to prove that the basic character of global
politics in the current era is not that of inter-imperialist rivalry between
the US and China, but rather a struggle between the US-led push for its
continued hegemony and the China-led push for a multipolar world order. I have
further attempted to demonstrate that multipolarity provides greater
opportunities for peace and development, and a more favourable context for
humanity’s advance towards socialism. If Marxists do indeed “point out and
bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat,
independently of all nationality,”107 they should support the movement towards
multipolarity. China is leading this movement, and the US is leading the
opposition to it.
If there existed a thriving political movement to the left of the Chinese
Communist Party which sought to continue China’s progressive global strategy
but to reverse the post-Mao market reforms and transition to a system of
worker-run cooperatives (for example), Western leftists would have to assess
the relative merits of supporting such a movement in its struggle against the
CPC government. But this is sheer fantasy. Opposition to the CPC government in
China comes primarily from pro-Western pro-neoliberal elements that seek to
undermine socialism and roll back the project of multipolarity. Meanwhile,
Chinese workers and peasants by and large support the government, and why
shouldn’t they? In the four decades from 1981, the number of people in China
living in internationally -defined absolute poverty fell from 850 million to
zero.108 Living standards have consistently improved, at all levels of society.
Wages are rising, social welfare is improving. According to an extensive study
conducted by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, 93 percent
of Chinese people are satisfied with their central government.109 Even former
MI6 director of operations and intelligence Nigel Inkster grudgingly admits
that “if anything, objective evidence points to growing levels of popular
satisfaction within China about their government’s performance.”110 The basic
conditions that inspire people to rise up against their government simply do
not prevail.
Regardless of what one thinks of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, anyone
on the left must support China against US-led imperialist attacks and the New
Cold War. The prominent Belgian Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel was by no
means a supporter of Soviet socialism, but he insisted firmly that the Soviet
Union must be defended against imperialism. Arguing against Tony Cliff’s slogan
of Neither Washington nor Moscow, he wrote: “Why, if it is conceivable to
defend the SPD [German Social Democratic Party] against fascism, despite its
being led by the Noskes, the assassins of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg,
is it ‘inconceivable’ to defend the USSR against imperialism?”111
Let the latter-day third-campists answer the same question in relation to China.