Invent the Future

China isn’t imperialist – here’s the proof

Is China simply another imperialist power, differing from the US only in degree? It’s a claim heard increasingly often on the left, from the Communist Party of Greece to Jacobin. This video sets out why that claim doesn’t survive scrutiny.

Working from Lenin’s classical definition of imperialism, Carlos Martinez examines whether China exhibits the super-exploitation of foreign labour that has always been imperialism’s economic core – and finds the opposite: China has been on the receiving end of value extraction by Western capital, not a source of it. The video looks at the real record of the Belt and Road Initiative against the “debt trap” accusation, at China’s strikingly peaceful military record since 1949, and at whether the underlying class dynamics of Chinese society could ever produce an imperialist foreign policy. And it closes by asking what China’s promotion of a multipolar world order means for the long-term prospects of overcoming imperialism altogether.

The video is based on Carlos’s chapter in the newly-released book China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World, co-edited by Keith Bennett and Carlos Martinez, available now from Praxis Press.

More on the Belt and Road “debt trap” claim: China isn’t trapping the Global South in debt.

Transcript

Hello and welcome. This video is based on a chapter I’ve written for a newly-released book, co-edited with Keith Bennett: China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World, out now from Praxis Press – link in the description.

In this video I want to work through the core of that chapter, which addresses a question that comes up again and again on the left: is China imperialist?

That China is an imperialist power is a fairly widespread claim, at least in the West. China is after all a major player on the world stage, with a large economy, a powerful military and expanding global influence, and it routinely faces accusations of “debt trap diplomacy” and other forms of economic coercion.

Some go even further: China has been described as “a rising imperialist power… that increasingly exploits Third World countries in pursuit of raw materials and outlets for its exports.” The Communist Party of Greece says China is “an integral part of the international imperialist system”, with its disputes with the US amounting to nothing more than a quarrel over “the division of the loot”.

In this framing, China is just another imperialist power, differing from the US and Western Europe only in degree, and all the talk of multipolarity is a veneer over the ambitions of a rising hegemon.

The strategic implication of that for the left is clear: if China is an imperialist power, it must be opposed and exposed like any other imperialist power. That’s the line of Neither Washington nor Beijing, which picks up where the old – and unlamented – Neither Washington nor Moscow left off.

I want to show why that’s wrong – that China has never been engaged in the type of economic, political and military domination that the word ‘imperialism’ implies; that its internal class dynamics and the actual geopolitical reality militate against it becoming imperialist, and that the multipolar world order it’s working to build provides a way out of imperialism for everyone.

What is imperialism?

Let’s start with a definition. In his classic pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin put forward what he called the “briefest possible definition” – that imperialism is “the monopoly stage of capitalism” – and then set out five basic features: the concentration of capital into monopolies; the rise of a financial oligarchy, essentially the banks, as the driving force of the economy; the export of capital as a key engine of growth; international combines that carve up the world between them – the modern multinational; and the complete territorial division of the world among the major capitalist powers.

That still holds up pretty well. But there’s one important development Lenin couldn’t account for at the time: a few months after he published that book, the Russian working class overthrew the tsarist system and founded the world’s first socialist state, which went on to back national liberation struggles and socialist movements around the world.

That set in train a new phase of human development: the phase of the transition to socialism.

Today’s world still has imperialist powers and it still has oppressed countries, but it also has socialist countries and countries – for example India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico – that are fairly deeply integrated into the global economy, that export capital like the vast majority of the world’s states, and yet they don’t dominate other countries. That’s a crucial difference from Lenin’s time: since the start of this transitional phase, it’s possible to actively engage in the global economy – to trade and invest on your own terms – without being an imperialist power.

So I’d argue that the most useful working definition of imperialism today is this: a system of economic, political and military domination of some countries over others, driven by the dominant countries’ pursuit of raw materials, land, markets and cheap labour, in which value flows continuously from the periphery (the oppressed countries) to the core (the imperialist countries) through structures that have been put in place and are held in place by means of coercion. That’s a bit of a mouthful, admittedly. More pithy perhaps is the definition by economists Li Zhongjin and David Kotz: “Imperialism is… the economic and political domination of one country by the ruling class of another aimed at extracting economic benefits for that ruling class.”

Super-exploitation is the core of it

The core concept for understanding the reality of imperialism is the super-exploitation of labour in the oppressed countries.

Marx wrote that capital goes abroad “because it can be employed at a higher rate of profit in a foreign country.” The Russian Marxist Nikolai Bukharin identified exactly this dynamic – capital is exported in search of a higher rate of profit, drawn above all from the higher rate of exploitation in poorer countries – as the defining feature of imperialism.

The economist John Smith has done a detailed and useful investigation of what this looks like in the 21st century. He notes that the major imperialist powers have spent decades outsourcing production to low-wage economies, reinforcing a hierarchy in which the US, Western Europe and Japan – what Samir Amin called the “imperialist triad” – remain the core of the global economy, while the Global South is relegated to the periphery.

Eighty-three percent of the world’s manufacturing workforce now lives in the Global South, often exposed to forced labour, illegal overtime and relentless downward pressure on wages and safety. This reflects a process starting in the 1970s where, facing a chronic crisis of overproduction at home, Western capital turned to what Smith calls “global labour arbitrage” as a survival tactic. Paying starvation wages in the Global South is how Western capitalism has propped up its own declining profitability for decades.

Is China a super-exploiter, or the super-exploited?

Where does China fit into all this? Clearly, not on the side of the exploiters. Like South Asia, Africa and Latin America, China has been on the receiving end of huge capital inflows from the imperialist triad, as multinationals leveraged its vast, highly-educated and relatively low-wage workforce.

Certainly throughout the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, value was created in China and captured by the West. John Smith’s 2008 study of Apple’s iPod found that the 12,250 Chinese workers making it earned just six percent of the average US retail wage – and while a similar number of workers were employed on each side, the total US wage bill was 719 million dollars against a Chinese wage bill of 19 million.

The economists Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, analysing this kind of unequal exchange, conclude that “there is a clear transfer of surplus value from China to the bloc of imperialist countries, averaging five to ten percent of China’s GDP since the 1990s… China is not an imperialist country by our definition; on the contrary, it clearly fits into the dominated bloc.”

Now, Chinese wages have been rising fast and clearly things have changed since 2008. Chinese companies do invest abroad. But there’s no evidence of systematic super-exploitation of foreign labour by Chinese capital – actually the biggest recipients of Chinese investment are the US, Britain and Australia, and it’s hard to see how those flows could be described as exploiting Western labour.

As for China’s lending to the Global South, this is typically composed of mutually beneficial deals, rather than deals designed to extract superprofits. China is offering developing countries an alternative to the predatory lending of the IMF and World Bank – and that’s a challenge to the imperialist system, not a reinforcement of it.

No imperialism without domination

The word ‘imperialism’ comes from the Latin for command, to rule; obviously it’s very closely connected to the word ‘empire’.

It isn’t just about concentration of capital or foreign investment – fundamentally, it’s about domination. So: does China assert economic, political or military domination over other countries? Has it joined Lenin’s “handful of exceptionally rich and powerful states which plunder the whole world simply by clipping coupons”?! Quite obviously not.

And yet the Belt and Road Initiative is routinely condemned as neocolonialism – China luring developing countries into debt traps to dominate them. This doesn’t stand up, and I’ve got another video on this topic that I’ll link in the description. But even the reliably reactionary Economist admits debt-trap accusations are “largely unfair”, noting that China “has financed roads, ports, railways and other needed infrastructure, when private lenders and other countries were often unwilling to do so.”

Chinese interest rates typically run at about half those of Western banks, without the austerity conditions the IMF attaches. Tim Jones of the charity Debt Justice calls the whole debt trap narrative a distraction by Western countries, and asserts that “their own banks, asset managers and oil traders are far more responsible”.

Of Chinese loans to Africa, 40 percent has gone to power generation and 30 percent to transport – addressing Africa’s infrastructure gap.

The people actually living with these loans agree. Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister, responding to debt-trap accusations last year, said: “The Belt and Road Initiative is not a debt trap… it is a lifeline for our social and economic development.” Angola’s Minister of Energy and Water says that “China has never imposed any projects on us; each project was selected by us… Nobody offered us support except China.”

And China is actively sharing technology the West has always hoarded – payment systems, satellite networks, telecoms, renewable energy – opening up a pathway out of Western dependence.

Is there such a thing as peaceful imperialism?

Another thing is that China is remarkably peaceful for an imperialist power.

As Hugo Chávez put it: “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.”

This directly connects to the political theory. Bukharin observed that the struggle to invest capital abroad “is always reinforced by military pressure”, and Rudolf Hilferding argued that finance capital needs a state strong enough to “intervene in every corner of the globe”.

The entire imperialist system was built through military force – Britain’s empire on naval supremacy over sea lanes on which, famously, the sun never set and the blood never dried; Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian imperialism were all built on brutal conquest; the US itself was built through war against Indigenous nations, against Mexico, and then across Latin America and the Pacific. And even after formal colonialism ended, the imperialist powers carried on using force to maintain their dominance – the wars on Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and today Iran; the proxy wars on Syria and Yemen; the sanctions strangling Cuba, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua and other countries.

As Thomas Friedman famously put it in the New York Times, with remarkable candour: “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas”.

China’s record simply looks nothing like this. China participated in the Korean and Vietnam wars on the side of the victims of imperialism. Then it had a brief border war with Vietnam in 1979. In the nearly half-century since, China hasn’t dropped a single bomb on foreign territory. Its per-capita military spending is around one-twentieth of the US’s; it holds roughly five hundred nuclear warheads to the US’s five thousand, and it’s maintained a no-first-use policy since its first nuclear test in 1964.

So if we’re saying that China has become an imperialist power without recourse to military force – without coercion, without war – then we are throwing Lenin’s theory of imperialism out the window.

Could China become imperialist?

So China isn’t imperialist today. But could it become imperialist in future? For a country to go down that road, three things have to be true: 1) it has to be capitalist, in the sense that profit maximisation is the core motive of its economy; 2) its capitalist class has to exercise control of the country’s foreign policy; and 3) the objective conditions have to exist for it to actually dominate other countries.

Let’s take these in turn.

In China, the profit motive is certainly important, but it isn’t the principal factor driving economic strategy – after all, a huge share of the economy is directed by the state, the major banks are state-owned and answerable to the Chinese people, and infrastructure and technology projects go ahead regardless of short-term returns. As economist Arthur Kroeber puts it, China is “an economy where the state remains firmly in command… but where market tools are used to improve efficiency.”

Meanwhile, People’s China has never experienced economic contraction. Chinese capital simply doesn’t face the crises of profitability and overproduction that have historically driven Western capital abroad.

Nor is capital the main driver of China’s foreign relations, which are built on the UN Charter, the principles of peaceful coexistence, the principles of non-interference, and the construction of a multipolar world.

Back in 1974, at the UN General Assembly, Deng Xiaoping said that if China ever turned into a bullying superpower, “the people of the world should expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.” Xi Jinping reiterated this idea at the 20th Party Congress: “China will never seek hegemony or engage in expansionism.”

So the Chinese state has a consistent foreign policy, based on the long-term interests of the Chinese people. Even if private companies in China wanted to subvert it in the interests of making a quick buck, they lack the political power to do so.

And even if the Chinese state did harbour imperialist ambitions, the objective conditions for pursuing those ambitions simply don’t exist. Some writers on the left have claimed that China is walking the same “road well-travelled” as Britain, Germany and the US. What they haven’t noticed is that road isn’t actually open any more. Lenin noted, over a century ago, that the world was already “completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible” – and redivision means displacing existing imperialist powers by force. That was the whole logic of the First World War.

China’s peaceful record indicates very strongly that it’s not pursuing such a path.

In summary, the only way China could become an imperialist power is through capitalist counter-revolution – which is, ironically, exactly what the existing imperialist powers would love to see happen.

Multipolarity and overcoming imperialism

The last point I want to make is about the global order China is trying to build.

China rarely frames its foreign policy in overtly revolutionary language these days, but it stands at the core of an objectively anti-imperialist trajectory: the push towards a multipolar world, described by Jenny Clegg as “a pattern of multiple centres of power… shaping a negotiated order”.

That’s by definition a shift away from a US-dominated unipolar order towards a more equal and democratic system in which all countries – including those of the Global South – have a voice; in which all countries can assert their sovereignty and choose their own development path free from hegemonism.

Time and time again, the imperialist powers have blocked the development of the Global South, and have worked to crush socialist movements and governments, from Chile to Indonesia to Grenada to Angola to Iran to Nicaragua. Through the structures of the UN, BRICS, the G77+China, the Non Aligned Movement, the Forum on China Africa Cooperation, China-CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China is actively advancing the interests of the developing world.

So multipolarity offers real opportunities for peace and development, and a more favourable context for humanity’s advance towards socialism.

China is not an imperialist power. Rather, it’s an anti-imperialist power, and its foreign policy is directed towards a fundamental transformation of the global order – away from hegemonism, towards multipolarity, sovereignty, cooperation and peace.

At a moment when the imperialist powers, led by the US, are resorting to ever more desperate violence to maintain their dominance, China’s promotion of multipolarity, and its vision of a global community of shared future, matter more than ever.

There’s a lot more detail and a full set of sources behind the points I’ve made in this video – you can find that all in the chapter in China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World, out now from Praxis Press, link in the description.

Thanks very much for watching. Do give it a thumbs-up for the sake of the algorithm, and see you next time.

Sunlight and sovereignty: the Chinese technology behind Africa’s solar boom

Africa’s solar installations rose by a record 54 percent in 2025, and 15 major African markets imported more than $400 million worth of solar panels in the first quarter of 2026 alone – more than two-thirds of the total for the whole of the previous year. In this article, Carlos Martinez looks at what lies behind those numbers.

The projects driving the continent’s green transition are overwhelmingly built and financed by China, from the Benban Solar Park in Egypt and the Adama wind farms in Ethiopia to De Aar in South Africa and a solar plant with battery storage in every one of Zambia’s 156 constituencies. What has made them viable is two decades of sustained Chinese public investment, which has driven the global cost of renewable energy down to a fraction of what it was 15 years ago.

Carlos also takes on the charge, increasingly fashionable in parts of the Western left, that this amounts to a new “green imperialism”. Market share, he argues, describes a trade relationship, not domination and coercion – and the function of the accusation, whatever the intention behind it, is to manufacture consent for the New Cold War.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

A report in the South China Morning Post on 7 September highlights the contrast in energy policy between the United States, where, particularly under the present administration, the watchword is “drill, baby, drill”, and China, where the national strategy is to “walk towards the light”. Two energy behemoths, two approaches to the future of the planet, and the resulting choice facing the people of Africa.

The SCMP article observes that, for African governments seeking to expand access to electricity, the principal deciding factor is cost. And on cost, the argument is now over.

Africa’s solar installations rose a record 54 percent in 2025, adding 4.5 gigawatts of new photovoltaic capacity, and that record is likely to be broken again this year. The International Energy Agency reports that 15 major African markets imported more than $400 million worth of solar panels in the first quarter of 2026 alone – against $600 million for the whole of 2025.

“Africa’s solar revolution is here,” says Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council. “Growth is spreading to new markets across the continent, and rooftop and distributed systems are putting power directly into the hands of households and businesses.”

Reds under the bed and in the tractors

In the following article, Carlos Martinez surveys a burst of anti-China stories in the British right-wing press – the Telegraph’s warning that Chinese chips in GPS-guided tractors could be used to spy on farmers and fitted with kill switches; the Times’ claim that Chinese-made wind turbines could be used to shut down Britain’s electricity supply; and the Telegraph’s discovery of a hotel near RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus with a good view of the runway.

In each case, he notes, the evidence is absent and the motive is never explained. Meanwhile every documented instance of weaponised supply-chain hardware – Stuxnet, the NSA’s intercepted routers, Nord Stream, the booby-trapped pagers in Lebanon – belongs to Britain’s Western allies rather than to China.

He also points to an instructive contradiction: in the same week that Chinese industrial policy was being described as a threat to national survival, both the Guardian and the Financial Times carried pieces arguing that Britain should be learning from it. The purpose of the hysteria, Carlos argues, is not to inform economic policy but to build support for the US-led New Cold War.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

If the right-wing media is to be believed, Britain is facing a systematic attack by the Communist Party of China.

On 4 September, it emerged that the perennial evil-doers in Beijing are hacking our tractors. The Coalition on Secure Technology, headed by the Labour MP Graeme Downie, warns that Chinese-made chips are standard in GPS-guided tractors, farming drones and irrigation systems, and that around 70 percent of the world’s cellular internet-of-things modules are made in China.

Beijing, we are told, could use this fearsome capability to harvest data on crop yields, production forecasts and livestock populations. All of this information is, of course, published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), but it’s understandable that the Chinese would rather spend their time compromising combine harvesters in Lincolnshire.

We are further informed that the Chinese will likely have fitted kill switches to these tractors, albeit without any evidence or indeed any suggestion of a possible motive.

There is, as it happens, a documented case of a tractor manufacturer installing software locks: the US firm John Deere builds them into its machines, chiefly to stop farmers repairing their own equipment. That threat comes not from Beijing but from Moline, Illinois.

Just days earlier, the Times warned that those same sneaky Chinese communists may have inserted spying devices in our wind turbines.

Slander over solidarity: the BBC reports a Himalayan disaster

The following article by Carlos Martinez examines the BBC’s coverage of the catastrophic glacier collapse of 26 August, which sent a wall of ice, rock, mud and water down the river valleys straddling the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet (Xizang) Autonomous Region, killing well over a thousand people.

Rather than report on the disaster itself, or on its underlying cause in the accelerating warming of the world’s highest mountain range, the BBC’s China correspondent chose to run a story alleging that Beijing was suppressing footage of the event – footage which, as Carlos points out, had been released by the Chinese port authorities at Gyirong and was circulating widely on Chinese platforms. A massive rescue operation, with the direct involvement of China’s top leadership, becomes a “muted response”; Communist Party members being asked to assist their neighbours becomes evidence of authoritarian anxiety.

The article also takes apart the BBC’s assertion that Tibet was “annexed” by Beijing in the 1950s – a formulation at odds even with the declared position of the British government, which abandoned the colonial-era doctrine of “suzerainty” in 2008.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

On August 26, a glacier collapsed high on the Nepali side of the Himalayan range, sending a wall of ice, rock, mud and water down the river valleys straddling the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet (Xizang) autonomous region. Some 42 kilometres of road were wiped out, leaving helicopters as the only means of reaching survivors. At the time of writing, Nepal’s death toll has since passed 900, with more than 4,000 people missing; on the Chinese side, 16 have been confirmed dead, and 546 are reported missing.

This is the disaster that Laura Bicker, the BBC’s China correspondent, chose to report as follows: “Shocking footage isn’t being shown in China – and we know little about victims there.”

Numerous people in China immediately pointed out that the footage is, in fact, all over Chinese platforms. Indeed, the very video used in the BBC’s own report was released by the Chinese port authorities at Gyirong. So the sequence runs: the Chinese state published the clip; the BBC ran the clip; the BBC then published a story about how the Chinese state is suppressing the clip.

Several commentators have made another significant point: Chinese media does not operate on the principle of “if it bleeds, it leads.” You will not see grieving relatives and footage of bodies looped for 24 hours. The BBC treats the absence of disaster pornography as evidence of a cover-up rather than a different editorial culture.

The West wrote the book on forced assimilation. Now it’s accusing China.

On 1 July, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress came into force – the country’s first comprehensive national law on ethnic affairs. Within days came denunciations from Washington and Brussels, a European Parliament resolution, and a wave of headlines announcing that China had ordered its minority peoples to “assimilate”. CNN’s version: “China tells its ethnic minorities to integrate or face consequences.”

In this contribution to the international webinar China’s National Unity vs US Social Hierarchy, Carlos Martinez looks at the distance between what the law actually says and what we have been told it says. The law prohibits discrimination against any ethnic group, explicitly reaffirms the right of all peoples to use and develop their own languages, and requires the state to direct infrastructure, industry and public services towards minority regions. It continues a framework that in the West would be called affirmative action – preferential university admissions, bilingual education, protected minority-language broadcasting, autonomy arrangements, and exemption from the one-child policy throughout its existence.

“Assimilation”, meanwhile, is not a neutral word. It names specific and well-documented crimes: the residential schools of Canada and the United States, the stolen generations in Australia, forced adoption and conversion, languages beaten out of colonised peoples – including generations of Welsh schoolchildren punished for speaking their own. Applying that word to China takes an association rooted in Western colonial history and lets it do the work that evidence cannot.

The video also goes through the record the coverage leaves out – life expectancy in Xinjiang rising from around 30 in 1949 to 77 today, Uyghur population growth of 16 percent between 2010 and 2020 against 2 percent for the Han population, 420 poverty-stricken counties in ethnic autonomous areas lifted out of absolute poverty, minority-language publishing and schooling, and central government transfers flowing towards the periphery rather than away from it – along with the documented history of CIA and National Endowment for Democracy sponsorship of separatism, the strategic reasons Xinjiang and Xizang matter, and the warning of Yugoslavia.

The article this contribution is based on: Manufactured outrage: the truth about China’s ethnic unity law (Friends of Socialist China).

The webinar was organised by Friends of Socialist China, the United National Antiwar Coalition and the International Manifesto Group, with contributions from Chen Weihua, Jason Smith, Jacqueline Luqman, Arnold August and Sara Flounders.

Transcript

Comrades, thank you very much for inviting me, and thanks to the organisers for putting this event together.

Brazil’s October election is a front line in Washington’s war on the multipolar world

The Trump administration is reportedly considering fresh Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who presided over the case that sent Jair Bolsonaro to prison for plotting a coup – the latest move in a sustained campaign of US interference timed to Brazil’s electoral calendar.

In the following article, Carlos Martinez and Sara Vivacqua argue that October’s election has become a front line in Washington’s war on the multipolar world: a sovereign election treated as Washington’s own affair, alongside the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, the energy siege of Cuba and a hard right installed across the continent. They also set out why Brazil – a BRICS charter member that now trades more with China than with the United States – is not an easy nut for Washington to crack.

This article was first published by the Morning Star.

The Financial Times reports that the Trump administration is considering fresh Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who presided over the case that sent Jair Bolsonaro to prison for plotting a coup. Brazil heads to the polls again in October. President Lula’s principal challenger is Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former president, whose campaign has become entangled in the Banco Master affair, one of the largest banking frauds in the country’s history.

The official justification for the proposed sanctions is human rights and press freedom. Yet one of the FT’s own US sources endorses Trump’s interference outright: De Moraes has “gone after the supporters of Trump. Not just Elon Musk, but Maga types in Brazil. Even if we want a good relationship with Brazil, obviously this guy is an enemy.”

The actual aim is an obvious one: to punish the justice for holding Bolsonaro to account over his attempted coup to overturn the 2022 election. After losing to Lula, Bolsonaro and figures around the military plotted to annul the result; on 8 January 2023, his supporters stormed Congress, the Supreme Federal Court and the presidential palace in Brasília in a bid to trigger a coup.

Fidel Castro: the revolutionary America couldn’t kill

On what would have been Fidel Castro’s hundredth birthday, and with Cuba under its most severe siege since 1959, Carlos Martinez joined Radhika Desai on the Geopolitical Economy Hour alongside Francisco Domínguez, a founding member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and a specialist on Latin America’s political economy.

The discussion traced Fidel’s revolutionary audacity from Moncada and the Granma landing through his personal command at Playa Girón, the internationalism that sent hundreds of thousands of Cuban troops to help defeat apartheid South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale, and his refusal to follow Gorbachev when 85 percent of Cuba’s trade vanished overnight – and asked what all of this tells us about whether the revolution can survive Washington once again.

The full auto-generated transcript is reproduced below, lightly edited for readability.

Transcript

Radhika Desai: Hello and welcome to another Geopolitical Economy Hour, the socialist and anti-imperialist conversation that illuminates the fast-changing political economy and geopolitical economy of our times. You’re watching Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economist, and I’m Radhika Desai.

The topic today is extremely socialist and anti-imperialist. It’s Fidel Castro. Last week, along with our two guests here today, I had the privilege of attending the celebration of the life of Fidel on his 100th birthday. That was on the 13th of August. It was organised by the Cuban embassy and it was a deeply, deeply moving affair. Two magnificent speeches were given by former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Cuban ambassador, Ismara Vargas Walter. And there was also a beautiful short film on the life of Fidel.

Between them, these three contributions really brought to life the awe-inspiring political feats of the great Fidel, who was known, as you all know, among Cubans simply by his first name. He made Latin America’s first socialist revolution. He defeated imperialism militarily at the height of its power. He took the revolution to great heights of human development. He practised a legendary internationalism, both militarily and, as many people will know, medically. The revolution he led survived the loss of support of the other great superpower, namely the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And Fidel also kept up an analysis of the world situation with a diamond-like clarity — and of course also of the situation, often quite dire, of Cuba itself — and shared it on a regular basis with the Cuban people in his legendary speeches, which were listened to with rapt attention even though they often went on for hours.

Appreciating all this when a new assault from the United States is endangering Cuba’s mighty revolution once again was especially poignant. So with me to discuss Fidel’s legacy, and what it means for Cuba today and for Latin America, are two intellectuals with decades of engagement with and commitment to Cuba, Latin America and revolution: Francisco Domínguez and Carlos Martinez. Welcome both.

A response to The Guardian’s open letter: Opposing the war on Iran means rejecting war propaganda

The Guardian has published an open letter to Iran’s “political prisoners”, signed by Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Rashid Khalidi, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Walden Bello and others, which presents the Islamic Republic on one side and the United States and Israel on the other as “the two blades of a scissors”, with the Iranian people crushed between them.

In the following article, Carlos Martinez argues that this manufactured symmetry between the perpetrators of an ongoing war of aggression and its victim erases both Iran’s four-decade record of anti-imperialist solidarity – from the Palestinian resistance to apartheid South Africa, Cuba and Venezuela – and the achievements of the Iranian people since 1979. In a war of aggression, he writes, the absolute priority must be to show solidarity with the country under attack.

This article was first published by Press TV.

The Guardian has published an open letter to Iran’s “political prisoners,” signed by Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rashid Khalidi, Robin DG Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judith Butler, and Walden Bello, among others (although Kelley has since withdrawn his signature, and there is considerable doubt that Mumia Abu-Jamal knowingly lent his name to the venture).

These are not people to be dismissed lightly. Many have made important contributions to the anti-imperialist and Black liberation movements, and one of them is currently writing from within a US prison. Nevertheless, the letter is wrong and serves an objectively harmful purpose.

The central metaphor employed is that of “the two blades of a scissors”: the Islamic Republic on one side, and the United States and Israel on the other, with the Iranian people being crushed between them. Such an image manufactures symmetry between the perpetrators of an ongoing criminal war of aggression and the victim of that war; between the warmongering Epstein coalition and an independent country with no record of invading anyone.

The signatories justify their position by “rejecting the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism”. But how hollow, exactly, is Tehran’s anti-imperialism?

A new McCarthyism on both sides of the Atlantic

Two stories eight days apart, both from London newspapers, both pushing a McCarthyite agenda – one aimed at Britain, one at the United States. The Telegraph announced that “China is funding pro-Palestine marches in UK”. The Times reported that members of the Democratic Socialists of America had signed a public statement of support for Chinese socialism and, worse, had travelled to China.

Neither story alleges a crime. Neither produces a document showing a payment from the Chinese state or an instruction from the Communist Party of China. Both rest on the same syllogism: people hold anti-war positions that are also held in Beijing; therefore they hold them because of Beijing; therefore anti-war campaigners are not citizens exercising their rights but instruments of a foreign power.

The following article takes the two chains apart – four degrees of hedged separation in the British case, and in the American one the discovery that socialists are interested in socialism – and sets them against how Washington and London actually operate, from AIPAC’s congressional junkets and the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program to the pro-Israel lobbyists who have donated to half of Keir Starmer’s cabinet.

It then places the episode in its proper lineage. Ellen Schrecker’s segregationists blamed “outside agitators”; the NAACP was investigated for communist infiltration; Paul Robeson lost his passport for eight years; W.E.B. Du Bois was indicted as an unregistered foreign agent in his eighties. The purpose was never to prove foreign control, but to deny that the people protesting had minds of their own.

And it examines the machinery now being assembled: 3,061 terrorism-related arrests in Britain in the year to March 2026, 92 percent of them relating to Palestine Action; the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme and the campaign to add China to its enhanced tier; and, in the United States, presidential memorandum NSPM-7, which lists “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” among the indicators federal agencies are to investigate.

The following article by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez is an expanded version of a piece that first appeared in the Morning Star. This version was published on Friends of Socialist China.

Two stories, eight days apart, both from London newspapers, pushing a McCarthyite agenda in two different countries. The Telegraph announced that “China is funding pro-Palestine marches in UK”. The Times reported that members of the Democratic Socialists of America – “the left-wing group behind Zohran Mamdani’s rise” – had signed a public statement of support for Chinese socialism and, worse, had travelled to China.

Neither story alleges a crime. Neither produces a document showing a payment from the Chinese state, an instruction from the Communist Party of China, or any kind of broken law. Both rest on the same syllogism: people hold anti-war positions that are also held in Beijing; therefore these positions are taken up because of Beijing; therefore anti-war campaigners are not citizens exercising their basic democratic rights, but instruments of a foreign power.

Britain: four degrees of separation

Take the evidence as presented by the Telegraph. US congressional investigators are examining £250,000 in “alleged” payments to a company “linked to” CodePink in the UK, from firms “connected to” Neville Roy Singham, a US businessman “accused of” financing pro-China content.

Four degrees of separation, with every link in the chain a substantial hedge, from which emerges a headline asserting that the People’s Republic of China is funding the mass movement in Britain against genocide in Gaza. Singham is a US citizen who made his money building a software consultancy and now spends it on causes he believes in. What the allegations amount to, at most, is a US businessman with left-wing opinions funding a US peace group that has a British affiliate.

And what are the recipients of this money charged with doing? Organising protests against Britain’s involvement in genocide. Campaigning for peace with Iran. Calling for the removal of British military bases in Cyprus. Visiting China and saying that it is not our enemy. Every one of those is a lawful (and obviously principled and correct) political position, and several of them are held by most of the British public. Polling by YouGov in July found that 50 percent of Britons believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza against 17 percent who believe it is not, and that 55 percent think Britain should no longer treat Israel as an ally.

Also, consider the sums under discussion. A quarter of a million pounds would barely cover the placards at London’s anti-genocide demonstrations, let alone the portaloos. Spread across the half of the country that has reached the conclusion Beijing supposedly paid for, it comes to less than a penny a head. If that is the price of British public opinion, the Chinese state has driven a remarkable bargain.

The US: socialists found to be interested in socialism

The US version of the story is, remarkably, even thinner. The Times has made the extraordinary discovery that socialists are interested in socialism.

Thirteen members of the DSA, it reports, have signed the Friends of Socialist China statement, declaring that they aim to support the People’s Republic and to promote understanding of Chinese socialism. This is a public statement, published on a public website, which anyone may sign and which has attracted just shy of 1,000 signatories to date from dozens of countries. Thirteen of them turn out to belong to a US socialist organisation. Many readers may struggle to identify a scandal.

Then comes the evidence of sinister coordination: some DSA members went to China. A provincial foreign affairs office in Guizhou helped arrange an itinerary. They attended the parade marking 80 years since the victory over Japanese fascism. According to one of them, they were – gasp – treated well.

From this, the anti-China campaigner Alexander Reid Ross concludes that the trips “exhibit fingerprints of extraordinarily high-level co-ordination by the People’s Republic of China”, and speculates that these individuals’ standing within the DSA “has been improved precisely through the efforts of foreign parties”, raising the question of “who they’re working for”. No offence is alleged and no evidence is offered.

It is probably not a coincidence that the story has surfaced just as Washington is making a concerted effort to revive its Xinjiang campaign. One of the DSA members had visited Xinjiang and reported that he found nothing to support Western accusations of forced labour. To go to Xinjiang and decline to repeat the slanders is evidently the graver offence. Better by far to be one of those who have built entire careers on Xinjiang atrocity claims and who have, for the most part, never set foot in the place.

Set this against how Washington and London actually work

The double standard is easily identified. AIPAC’s affiliate flies members of Congress to Israel as a matter of routine. The State Department’s own International Visitor Leadership Program has hosted more than 230,000 foreign leaders since 1940, over 500 of whom went on to become heads of state or government – a rate of return on hospitality that Guizhou could barely dream of. The National Endowment for Democracy funds journalists, opposition parties and NGOs across the planet and publishes the grant lists in its annual reports.

Meanwhile in London, pro-Israel lobbyists have donated to half of Keir Starmer’s cabinet, a sum considerably higher than the £250,000 that so alarmed the Telegraph.

None of that is considered “foreign interference”, but a Chinese provincial foreign affairs office booking a few hotel rooms is a matter of national security.

The New Red Scare

None of this is new.

The historian Ellen Schrecker describes how segregationists in the American South always insisted that the region’s black population was perfectly content with its subordinate status, and that demands for change were “the product of ‘outside agitators’”. Linking those agitators to the Communist Party, she writes, gave the segregationists “new allies as well as a more modern rationale” for their campaign against the civil rights movement. The same device had served US employers for decades before that: strikes were never the product of legitimate grievance but the work of outside agitators, “usually foreign-born”.

The purpose was never to prove foreign control. It was to deny that the people doing the protesting had minds and interests of their own.

So the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909 and considered the US’ oldest civil rights group), by then a decidedly moderate organisation, was investigated for communist infiltration and became, as Gerald Horne records in Black and Red, among the first targets of the red scare. Paul Robeson had his passport confiscated for eight years and was systematically denied concert venues, the object being, in Horne’s phrase, to make him “radioactive”. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped and briefed against, with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI formally designating him “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism”.

And the world-famous scholar Dr. WEB Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP, then in his eighties, was indicted as an unregistered foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The damage was not confined to the individuals named. Schrecker’s verdict is that opposition to the Cold War became so completely identified with communism that “it was no longer possible to challenge the basic assumptions of American foreign policy without incurring suspicions of disloyalty”. That is the actual purpose of an exercise like this one: not primarily to convict any particular individual, but to make a set of opinions – against war, against racism, against genocide, against the encirclement of China – too expensive and too dangerous to hold.

The machinery now being built

In Britain, Palestine Action has been proscribed under terrorism legislation, and the consequences show up in the government’s own figures. In the year ending March 2026 there were 3,061 terrorism-related arrests, an increase of 1,186 percent on the previous year, and 2,819 of them – 92 percent – related to alleged support for Palestine Action. Quite an upsurge in “terrorism” – without a single fatality or even injury. Charges under section 12 of the Terrorism Act, which covers support for a proscribed organisation, had run at around five a year between 2019 and 2023; in 2024 there were 17. A counter-terrorism apparatus built to deal with bombers now focuses nine-tenths of its arrests on a protest movement, perhaps a majority of whom are pensioners, and only a small fraction of those arrested are ever charged.

As Sara Vivacqua documents in the Canary, the same powers have been turned on journalists covering the genocide. Asa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada had his home raided in October 2024 and his devices seized, containing material capable of identifying sources in Palestine, and has never been charged. Kit Klarenberg was stopped at Luton Airport under Schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act, and says the questioning made plain that the object was his journalism rather than terrorism.

The Foreign Influence Registration Scheme went live last year; its enhanced tier, which makes it a criminal offence to act at the direction of a specified foreign power, in areas beyond just political influence, without declaring it, currently applies to Russia and Iran, and there is a sustained campaign to add China to the list. Put that together with a year of newspaper stories linking the Palestine movement to Beijing, and the state acquires a mechanism for treating anti-war protest as a hostile foreign operation.

In the United States the equivalent already exists, and it is the same statute. Presidential memorandum NSPM-7, signed in September 2025, directs federal agencies to investigate nonprofits, activists and their donors, listing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” among the indicators to be looked for, and assigning Joint Terrorism Task Forces to pursue violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. An organisation whose members are on record supporting Chinese socialism, and who may have accepted a hotel booking from a Chinese provincial government, is precisely the kind of thing that memorandum was drafted to capture.

What is actually being defended

Ordinary British people did not need the Communist Party of China to make them angry about Gaza. Nearly three years of televised mass killing, British-made components in the aircraft, RAF surveillance flights out of Akrotiri feeding information to an army facing genocide proceedings at the International Court of Justice: millions of people in Britain concluded that their government was complicit and reaching that conclusion required no assistance whatsoever from Beijing. Nor do young Americans need instructions from Guizhou to notice that they cannot afford rent, and that a country which has eliminated extreme poverty and become the world’s first green energy superpower might be worth studying.

Which is what the accusation is for. Not to show that anyone took Chinese money – nobody has shown that anyone did – but to disqualify a position rather than answer it. An argument traced back to a foreign capital need never be met on its merits. So the Times assembles a chain running from rent control in New York through the DSA and a Guizhou hotel booking to Beijing, and the Telegraph assembles one running from a march against genocide through CodePink and a US software millionaire to the same destination. And it has to be China at the end of both chains, because China is the country doing most to prove that socialism works and that a better world is possible.

It’s essential that we see through this cynical manoeuvre, defend those being targeted, and resist the creeping authoritarianism that is being normalised in the name of “security”. The people marching for Palestine are not instruments of a foreign power. They are ordinary human beings who are disgusted with their own government’s complicity in genocide. And on this issue at least they represent the views of the majority.

The antibiotics crisis and the case for socialism

Ara Darzi – surgeon, Labour peer and author of the 2024 review of the NHS – has written in the Financial Times that the West has handed China “the keys to the medicine cabinet”, warning of the “peacetime weaponisation” of pharmaceutical supply chains. China supplies around 94 percent of the key raw materials for amoxicillin and nearly half of global antibiotic ingredient exports.

The following article by Carlos Martinez takes the sinophobic framing apart. China has never withheld medicine from anyone, while the United States is currently obstructing medical supplies to Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, and held up ventilator and PPE shipments during a pandemic. However, what Darzi concedes along the way is of interest.

Darzi’s own diagnosis is that antibiotics are a permanent market failure: a drug whose value rises the less it is used cannot recoup its research costs, so Novartis, AstraZeneca and Sanofi have all quit the field, and the company that brought a new antibiotic to market in 2018 was bankrupt within a year. As former British Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies put it, a medicine that cures you in a week is a worse business proposition than one you must take for life. Meanwhile some 4.71 million deaths were associated with antibacterial resistance in 2021, with the heaviest burden falling on South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa – precisely where the market is least likely to step in.

Darzi’s conclusion is that antibiotics should be treated not as a commodity but as critical infrastructure, planned and publicly supported. The article agrees, and observes that when China applies exactly that logic – to antibiotics, solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, high-speed rail or semiconductors – it is denounced as overcapacity and distortion, and met with tariffs. Darzi has written a very persuasive argument for socialism, and appears not to have noticed.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

Ara Darzi – surgeon, Labour peer, author of the 2024 review of the NHS – has written a recent op-ed for the Financial Times, under the headline “The west has given China the keys to the medicine cabinet”.

The framing is the usual anti-China rhetoric: China supplies around 94 percent of the key raw materials for amoxicillin and nearly half of global antibiotic ingredient exports; some 700 medicines approved in the US depend on at least one chemical made only in China; a Council on Foreign Relations report calls this a threat equal to the rare earths challenge, with potential for “peacetime weaponisation”.

Darzi’s concern echoes that of the US House Select Committee on the CCP, which recently held a hearing titled “From the Science Lab to the Medicine Cabinet: How China is Cornering the Market on Our Medicines”. A British peer writing in a British newspaper is recycling the talking points of a US congressional committee established for the express purpose of manufacturing hostility towards China.

This notion of weaponisation is some combination of profound paranoia and cynical slander. China has never withheld medicine from anyone. The country that actually weaponises medical supply chains is the one currently blocking Cuba’s access to medical equipment and obstructing insulin and cancer drugs reaching Iran and Venezuela; the one that held up ventilator and PPE shipments during a pandemic. Projection remains the governing principle of Western commentary on China.