Xi Jinping addresses a Chinese Communist Party meeting
China in Global Capitalism is a new book that’s thoroughly researched and well written. It focuses on the inter-imperialist rivalry between China and the United States.
The authors argue that the system built by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not, as its defenders believe, a socially progressive alternative to capitalism and anti-imperialist.
Rather, “China is capitalist”—the title of chapter one. Understanding China as one of many national variants of capitalism allows them to reject the common misunderstanding of the clash between China and the West as “an ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism”.
The US and China are locked into an inter-imperialist rivalry because of their common roots in a system dominated by competition. Recognising this will help the international left to avoid “analytical and strategic dead-ends”.
The US is no longer the pre-eminent global superpower, but its ruling class is determined to maintain the US imperial primacy. China’s rulers are equally determined to narrow the gap with the US.
As China’s power has increased the balance within the overall US strategy has shifted from engagement to containment. Today’s tariff and high-tech wars are likely to be permanent features of future US-China relations, even as the interpenetration of the two economies persists.
The authors’ analysis is not confined to the international sphere and is enriched by analysis of workers’ struggles, environmental protest and the struggles of women and feminists. And it looks at China’s national questions, including in Hong Kong, Taiwan and in Xinjiang.
The dynamics of exploitation and oppression cannot be adequately understood by a “China is socialist” perspective. Neither is it helpful to present China as simply a victim of US power.
Certainly, post-Mao China was enlisted by the US in its globalisation drive. And the resulting environmental destruction reflects in part China’s initially subordinate position as a production base for Western corporations.
But China’s rulers delivered its workers to Western—and Chinese capital—because of their own class interests. Incorporation into global capitalism has radically transformed China in recent decades.
The main beneficiaries have been China’s capitalists—whether state or private—and the foreign corporations who grasped the opportunities that the restructuring of China’s state capitalism offered them. The workers who fuelled China’s growth have also gained materially, but simultaneously experience greater relative poverty, highly coercive labour regimes and deep alienation.
Migrant workers in particular face the shocking iniquities of the Hukou internal registration system, which attaches social rights to birthplace. It is hard to imagine a more perfect model for a capitalist class. The working class is patrolled by state-controlled trade unions and differentiated between the rightless and the relatively secure.
This is unlikely to change, for as CCP leader Xi Jinping recently argued China must avoid “falling into the trap of supporting lazy people through ‘welfarism’”. It is not surprising that the architect of post-Mao reform, Deng Xiaoping, was twice named Time magazine’s “person of the year” in the early days of the global neoliberal offensive.
The corporate mega-rich who flourish under China’s version of that offensive have become deeply intertwined with the CCP leadership—the authors refer to a “revolving door” between the two. In 2018 the 153 richest members of the People’s Congress—the equivalent of parliament—and the advisory Political Consultative Congress were worth £500 billion.
Chinese capital—including state owned enterprises (SOEs), now mostly part-privatised—is also intertwined with international capital. They are listed on major stock exchanges and attract the interest of global capital as it is “convinced that there are profits to be made”.
Chinese capital is not choosy over where it makes profit and its construction SOEs have been “building the infrastructure of settler colonialism” in Israel in the last decade.
The common interest in profit entails considerable cooperation between the US and China, but it also provides the fundamental imperative towards rivalry as they compete for markets and global influence.
China has modernised its military over recent decades and become more assertive in the East and South China Seas where most states are part of the US security network—Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and others. Military brinksmanship on both sides, fuelled by the increased nationalism peddled by all the states involved, could spill over into more serious conflict.
Western media blame China for the increase in regional tensions, but are generally silent on the vast military imbalance between China and the US. China may have expanded its global military bases from zero to five.
But “Chinese expansionism” is an ideological sleight-of-hand in the context of the US’s 800 overseas bases, the US-led security pacts, and its close ties to Japan and South Korea. Neither is blameless, but the biggest threat to peace still comes from the US.
What is to be done?
China’s growth model is running out of steam, its pool of migrant workers is dwindling, zombie firms float on a sea of debt and the state’s financial injections have decreasing impact on the economy. Like the rest of the world, it faces increasing turbulence generated by capitalism’s inter-locking crises—economic, social, political and environmental.
With its legitimacy beginning to be questioned, China’s ruling class seeks to deflect anger onto others. Xi is the Chinese version of the global nationalist-populism phenomenon. What can the international left do?
Part two of the book demonstrates that struggles from below are as much a part of contemporary Chinese politics as elsewhere. Part four explores how the international left can engage with Chinese activists around common interests.
This demands that it “adopt a clear approach of building international solidarity from below against both imperial states and their ruling classes”. A key task is to challenge the idea that “our” ruling class and state are superior to others and to combat racism and ruling class efforts to divide workers along racial lines.
International solidarity is a powerful theme of the book. The interests of workers—whether in China or the West—will not be served by the international left unless, as the title of the conclusion indicates, “neither Washington nor Beijing” is a central plank of its strategy.
It is not melodramatic to say that the survival of humanity and the planet demand that socialism replace capitalism. This book makes a significant contribution to this survival and should be widely read on the left.
- China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperialist Rivalry, written by Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu and Ashley Smith, is available at Haymarket Books, £15.99
