Invent the Future

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Khalidi, Robin DG Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judith Butler, and Walden Bello, among others (although Kelley has since withdrawn his signature, and there is considerable doubt that Mumia Abu-Jamal knowingly lent his name to the venture).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.

China isn’t trapping the Global South in debt. Your pension fund is.

China is routinely accused of lending recklessly to poor countries, waiting for them to default, and then seizing strategic assets. A major new study of the Belt and Road Initiative finds the opposite: infrastructure construction is associated with falling debt risk, stronger state capacity and improved governance.

This video examines that research alongside the independent evidence. It revisits Hambantota – the Sri Lankan port that China supposedly “seized”, although Sri Lanka retained ownership and received 1.12 billion dollars for the lease – as well as the false claims concerning Entebbe airport and Mombasa port.

It also looks at how Chinese lending actually works – lower interest rates, longer maturities and grace periods, and none of the “structural adjustment” conditionality attached to IMF and World Bank programmes. And it asks the question largely absent from Western coverage: who actually receives the bulk of debt payments from lower-income countries, and what has the neoliberal debt system done to sovereignty, public services and development across the Global South?

Sources and further reading:

Mao Weizhun and Zeng Qingming, “Measuring the Political Effects of Belt and Road Infrastructure (2013–2023)”, Quarterly Journal of International Politics, vol. 11 no. 2, 2026, pp. 1–40 (in Chinese) – link

Nearly 200-country study shows China’s Belt and Road Initiative cuts debt and corruption (South China Morning Post)

Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri, Debunking the Myth of “Debt-trap Diplomacy” (Chatham House)

Deborah Bräutigam and Meg Rithmire, “The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth”

Rhodium Group, “New Data on the ‘Debt Trap’ Question”

Boston University Global Development Policy Center, China–Africa Lending in 2024: Concentration and Retooling

Debt Justice, “Debt payments to private lenders three times higher than to China”

Why Chinese “debt trap diplomacy” is a lie (Friends of Socialist China)

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

A new study of the Belt and Road Initiative has found that, far from driving participating countries into debt distress, Chinese-financed infrastructure actually tends to reduce their debt burden.

That cuts directly across one of the most successful anti-China narratives of the last decade — the claim that Beijing deliberately pushes poor countries into unsustainable debt, waits for them to default, and then takes control of their ports, their railways, their power stations and other strategic assets.

The phrase “debt-trap diplomacy” has been repeated by Western politicians, think tanks and media organisations so often that it’s now widely treated as a matter of record. But the specific claim is rarely even defined, never mind backed up with evidence.

The claim is not simply that Chinese banks have made loans that went wrong. Every large creditor has obviously done that. It’s not that some Belt and Road projects have been badly planned or overpriced or tainted by corruption. Some, of course, have. And it’s not that Chinese banks are charitable institutions unconcerned with getting their money back. They’re not.

But the debt-trap thesis makes a much more serious allegation: that China knowingly creates unpayable debts in order to seize assets or extract strategic concessions. If that’s true, there ought by now to be a visible pattern — of reckless lending, of engineered defaults, of confiscated infrastructure, of political submission.

Holding the line: Jiang Zemin at 100

Monday 17 August marks the centenary of the birth of Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989 to 2002 and President of the country from 1993 to 2003 – the leader of the People’s Republic whom much of the Western left finds it easiest to write off as a “capitalist roader”.

The following article by Carlos Martinez argues that the charge rests on a false premise: that the realistic alternative available to China between 1989 and 2003 was some purer or more advanced form of socialism. It was not. Jiang took office six months before the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe fell, and two years before the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and the working assumption in most Western capitals was that China would be next.

The article weighs the real costs of the period – a Gini coefficient rising from around 0.32 to over 0.42, state enterprise employment falling from 77 million to 42 million, corruption and ideological decay – against what was achieved, and against what happened in Russia over the same decade, where economic output halved and male life expectancy collapsed to around 57. It also examines the admission of private entrepreneurs to the Party, the Theory of the Three Represents, and Jiang’s record of solidarity with Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam and Laos.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

Monday 17 August marks the centenary of the birth of Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989 to 2002 and President of the country from 1993 to 2003. Of all the leaders of the People’s Republic, he is perhaps the one that many on the Western left find it easiest, at least according to their own paradigm, to dismiss as a “capitalist roader” and revisionist.

Such labels are applied because Jiang presided over a period of extraordinarily rapid economic growth and integration into the global economy; the dismantling of the “iron rice bowl” of job security for life, steady income and public benefits; and because he allowed suitably qualified private entrepreneurs to join the Communist Party.

But the charge as usually made rests on the assumption that the realistic alternative available to China between 1989 and 2003 was some kind of pure or more advanced socialism. It was not. The alternatives on offer at that moment in history were rather more brutal, as we discuss below.

A revolutionary life

Jiang was born in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, in 1926, into a country under warlord rule and, before he reached his teens, under Japanese occupation of much of China. His uncle and adoptive father, Jiang Shangqing, died fighting Japan in 1939. Jiang took part in the anti-Japanese student movement, and joined the CPC in 1946 while studying electrical engineering – three years before liberation, at a time when Party membership under Kuomintang rule was an extremely risky business; in many instances a death sentence.

He then spent three decades as an industrial cadre rather than a politician. He organised the production of canned food for the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Korea. He trained at the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow in 1955, and also worked as an engineer in Romania for several years in the 1970s. He oversaw the design of China’s first domestically produced turbo-generator. He was Minister of the Electronics Industry, then mayor and Party secretary of Shanghai. He came to the leadership as an engineer who had spent his working life building things and making them work.

The most difficult period of world socialism

Jiang became General Secretary in June 1989. Within six months, the people’s democracies of Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania had fallen; another two years later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The first socialist state in history, which had defeated fascism at a cost of some 27 million lives, was dismantled by its own leadership. It was the working assumption of most Western politicians and analysts at the time that China would be next. The task that fell to Jiang Zemin was to ensure that it was not.

He was explicit about how. He upheld the Four Cardinal Principles – adhering to the socialist road, the people’s democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought – and refused the path of political liberalisation and historical nihilism that had destroyed the CPSU. The CPC under Jiang refused to follow the path of Gorbachev, refused to disown the Party’s own history, refused to disown the legacy of Mao Zedong, refused to supply the West with mechanisms for effecting regime change, and refused to tread the path of neoliberalism. As a result, there was no colour revolution in China.

The charge sheet

The economic reforms that took place under Jiang’s leadership were not without cost. Inequality rose sharply. China’s Gini coefficient surged from roughly 0.32 in 1990 to over 0.42 by 2002, transforming a relatively egalitarian society into one marked by sharp disparities. Corruption grew to a degree where it risked becoming uncontrollable; bureaucratism spread; there was undoubtedly real ideological decay as the pursuit of economic growth crowded out other considerations. Under the restructuring driven by Jiang’s premier Zhu Rongji, state enterprise employment fell from 77 million in 1995 to 42 million by 2003.

The other side of that coin is that hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese were lifted out of poverty, and the country’s economy was transformed into a global powerhouse. A few people became very wealthy indeed, but the poor were also on average far better off in 2003 than in 1989. China’s economy more than tripled in size under Jiang’s period at the helm. Annual wage growth exceeded 10 percent. The proportion of peasant households whose per capita net income was less than 1,000 RMB decreased from 97.69 percent in 1985 to 13.22 percent in 2001. Average life expectancy increased from 67 to 73. Adult literacy increased from around 78 percent to over 90 percent. Alongside the restructuring of the state-owned enterprises, China built a basic living guarantee for laid-off workers, an unemployment insurance system, the urban minimum living allowance, and waged sustained campaigns against wage arrears and for re-employment.

For Marxists, this improvement of human wellbeing should not be a trifling concern.

Compare this with Russia, where the same decade produced a halving of economic output, mass destitution and a collapse in male life expectancy to around 57. The two countries faced a structurally similar problem. One kept the commanding heights in public hands, kept capital controls, kept the Party’s authority over capital and put a safety net under the people who lost out. The other did not. The difference is measured in tens of millions of lives.

Perhaps most controversially, on 1 July 2001, during a speech marking the 80th anniversary of the CPC, Jiang Zemin announced that private entrepreneurs and business owners could join the party:

The main criterion to judge the nature of a political party is its theory and program. If it is Marxist and represents the correct orientation of social development and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people, the party is an advanced one and the vanguard of the working class… Since China adopted the policy of reform and opening up, the composition of China’s social strata has changed to some extent. There are, among others, entrepreneurs and technical personnel employed by scientific and technical enterprises of the non-public sector, managerial and technical staff employed by foreign-funded enterprises, the self-employed, private entrepreneurs, employees in intermediaries and freelance professionals… Under the guidance of the Party’s line, principles and policies, most of these people in the new social strata have contributed to the development of productive forces and other undertakings in the socialist society through honest labour and work or lawful business operations. They join workers, farmers, intellectuals, cadres and PLA officers and men in an effort to build socialism with Chinese characteristics. They, too, have made contributions to this cause.

This change reflected a recognition that the private sector had become a material reality in China, and that the Party needed to engage with it rather than ignore it. The question was whether it would develop as an organised political force outside and against the Party, or be brought under the Party’s discipline. Chinese capitalists remain a small minority of the membership, and they are expected to abide by its rules and objectives just like any other member; meanwhile they are legally prevented from forming their own political party and organising around their specific class interests.

The Three Represents

The theoretical charge against Jiang centres on the Theory of the Three Represents, written into the Party constitution in 2002: that the CPC must represent China’s advanced productive forces, the orientation of its advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people.

Noting its relative downgrading of domestic class struggle, the Three Represents has been read by some as a betrayal of socialism. With hindsight, it reads as a fairly orthodox application of historical materialism to the problem of a Communist Party governing a country in the primary stage of socialism – a party that must lead the development of the productive forces rather than stand aloof from it, while holding to the interests of the majority as the criterion by which that development is judged. It sits alongside the formulation Jiang’s leadership established as the basic economic system of that stage: public ownership as the mainstay, with diverse forms of ownership developing alongside it.

It is worth asking those who regard the formulation as a betrayal what the alternative is supposed to be: that a Communist Party should represent backward productive forces, backward culture, and the interests of a small minority?

The internationalist

Jiang Zemin devoted considerable effort to solidarity with the other remaining socialist countries – the DPRK, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba. Indeed, in the case of the latter three, it was under Jiang’s leadership that relations were fully restored, on the level of fraternal party relations as well as the normal one between states. In 1993, at the depth of the Special Period, when Washington was sitting back and waiting for Cuban socialism to expire, Jiang went to Havana, the only foreign head of state to do so that year. Fidel Castro (just four days Jiang’s senior) awarded him the Order of José Martí, Cuba’s highest honour, for his services and faithfulness to the cause of socialism, and used the occasion to say that “only socialism could have been capable of the miracle of feeding; clothing; providing with jobs, education, and healthcare; raising life expectancy to 70; and providing decorous shelter for more than one billion human beings in a minute portion of the planet’s arable land.”

He visited Cuba again in 2001 and always sought to put the two countries’ relations on a practical footing that would deliver tangible benefits, for example in biotechnology, nickel mining, telecommunications and electronics, and energy and transportation.

Jiang was committed to consolidating the traditional friendship between China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), visiting Pyongyang in 2001 and hosting the final overseas visit of the DPRK’s founding leader Kim Il Sung.

He visited Vietnam in 1994 and 2002 and Laos in 2000.

Nor did Jiang bend to imperialist aggression. He held firm through the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, through the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and through the Hainan spy plane incident of 2001. He presided over the return of Hong Kong in 1997 and Macao in 1999, closing the book on a century and a half of European colonial rule on Chinese soil.

The verdict

It is undoubtedly the case that significant problems accumulated in the period of Jiang Zemin’s leadership. But the fact that the People’s Republic still exists and remains on the socialist path; the fact that it hasn’t succumbed to “peaceful evolution”; the fact that the CPC retains the capacity to engage in its historic campaigns against corruption, extreme poverty and the uncontrolled expansion of capital; the fact that China is now emerging as a global science and technology powerhouse; all this highlights the fundamental correctness of the path that was taken.

Jiang Zemin was a lifelong communist. On his watch the People’s Republic survived the worst decade world socialism has known, and emerged stronger. A hundred years after his birth, with socialism once again a live proposition for hundreds of millions of people who had been told history was over, that is no small legacy.

Hawks dressed as doves: the Guardian’s case for a harder line on China

In the following article, written for the Morning Star, our co-editor Carlos Martinez takes apart a recent Guardian column by Simon Tisdall whose complaint, running through every paragraph, is not that the West has been too aggressive towards China but that it has not been aggressive enough.

Carlos works through the column point by point: the claim of Western “debilitating fatalism” towards a country already facing a tariff war, semiconductor export bans, AUKUS, the Quad, RIMPAC and a chain of US bases from Japan to Australia; Tisdall’s unfortunate choice of Wales as an analogy for language rights; the assertion of “brutal re-education camps” offered without evidence, source or argument, resting on the discredited work of Adrian Zenz and the arms-industry-funded ASPI; and the verdict that Xi is an “unelected autocrat”, delivered without reference to the five levels of People’s Congresses, the consultative apparatus that precedes their votes, or the satisfaction ratings that no Western government has approached in living memory.

The article’s conclusion is that this is liberal hawkishness in its purest form – deploring Trump in one paragraph and demanding his policy in the next – and that it is more dangerous than the honest belligerence of the right, because it recruits people of genuine conscience to a war they would otherwise oppose.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

Simon Tisdall’s latest column in the Guardian is a remarkable document. Its complaint, running through every paragraph, is not that the West has been too aggressive towards China, but that it has not been aggressive enough.

“A debilitating fatalism has taken hold in the west about China’s behaviour”, Tisdall writes. It is “as though Xi’s China is now seen as simply too big, too economically powerful and too militarily threatening to influence, let alone contain or control”. Britain, “culpably silent on human rights”, has failed to articulate a coherent China policy.

Sunlight against the blockade: China and Cuba’s solar revolution

China has delivered a second consignment of 5,000 photovoltaic systems to Cuba, destined for rural communities, health centres, day nurseries and bank branches – the latest instalment in what has become one of the fastest energy transitions anywhere in the world. With Chinese equipment, finance and technical support, Cuba has installed around 1,000 MW of new solar capacity in two years, with 92 medium-sized parks due for completion by 2028, while Chinese solar exports to the island have risen from $3 million to $117 million in as many years. All of this is taking place against a grid pushed towards collapse by Washington’s energy siege, with available capacity at times barely a third of peak demand.

The following article by Carlos Martinez sets out why this amounts to considerably more than an infrastructure project: oil tankers can be intercepted, suppliers threatened and banks sanctioned, but sunlight cannot be blockaded.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

China has delivered a second consignment of 5,000 photovoltaic systems to Cuba, destined for rural communities, health centres, day nurseries and bank branches. Receiving them, President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Cuba “deeply appreciates this gesture by the Chinese people and government, which adds to the efforts Cuba is making to change its energy mix, amid the genocidal blockade”.

The donation is a small part of what has become one of the fastest energy transitions anywhere in the world. Over the past two years, with Chinese equipment, financing and technical support, Cuba has installed around 1,000 MW of new photovoltaic capacity. This forms the first half of a programme to construct 92 medium-sized parks, each generating approximately 21.8 MW, with a combined capacity approaching 2,000 MW by 2028. Alongside this credit-financed programme, China is donating a further 120 MW through a network of smaller parks. Solar supplied roughly 10 percent of Cuba’s electricity over the course of 2025; during daylight hours its contribution is now considerably higher, at times approaching half of national generation around midday.

The scale of this expanding cooperation can be read in the trade figures. Chinese exports of solar equipment to Cuba came to $117 million in 2025, against just $3 million two years earlier. Havana furthermore has scrapped tariffs on photovoltaic systems, solar water heaters, wind turbines, biodigesters and renewable-powered air conditioning.

What was so special about Fidel Castro?

Fidel Castro was born on 13 August 1926. On the centenary of his birth, Carlos Martinez asks: what was actually so special about Fidel? Not the myth, but what he concretely did and understood that so few others did.

This video looks at four aspects: the unswerving revolutionary, who saw the possibility of overthrowing a US puppet dictatorship, defeated a CIA invasion in 72 hours, and then refused to follow Gorbachev when 85 percent of Cuba’s trade vanished overnight. The principled and undogmatic Marxist, who insisted that Marxism could not be conceived of as a church with its Rome and its Pope, who backed Allende’s peaceful road and the Bolivarian governments alike, and whose 1993 assessment of Chinese socialism put him decades ahead of most of the Western left. The consummate internationalist, who sent 375,000 troops to help defeat apartheid South Africa in Angola and took nothing in return, and whose “army of white coats” has now put more than 600,000 Cuban health workers into 165 countries. And the man of the people – the literacy campaign, the confrontation with racism, the early warning at Rio in 1992.

Then the video turns to why this centenary matters so urgently. Cuba is facing the gravest threat since 1959: a Trump administration reportedly working to bring the government down by the end of the year, a fuel blockade that has produced six national grid collapses in 2026 alone, a reported plan for a naval blockade, and an assault on the Cuban medical missions. Honouring Fidel means giving Cuba our firm solidarity.

Sources and further reading:

To honour Fidel Castro means to continue his work of fighting imperialism and building socialism

Fidel Castro on Chinese socialism (1993) – the full text of the remarks quoted in this video

Cuba: siege socialism or barbarism – earlier video

Cuba Solidarity Campaign

Cuba is not a failed state – it is a besieged state (Morning Star)

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

This Thursday, 13 August, Fidel Castro would have been a hundred years old. Cuba has designated this the Year of the Centenary of the Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, and there are events taking place all over the world to mark the event.

So, what was so special about Fidel? What, concretely, did he do and understand that so few others did?

The question matters particularly now, when Cuba faces its gravest threat since 1959.

When Engels stood at Marx’s graveside in Highgate Cemetery in 1883, he said that Marx was “before all else a revolutionist”, whose real mission in life was to contribute to the overthrow of capitalist society and to the liberation of the modern proletariat. And that description fits Fidel just about as well as it has ever fitted anybody.

What he attempted was extraordinary. In the 1950s, Cuba was ninety miles from the United States — economically dominated by it, politically supervised by it, culturally saturated by it, and ruled by Washington’s man, Fulgencio Batista. This was the height of McCarthyism. There was no model of revolution to copy. There was no collapsing empire leaving a power vacuum, no Red Army arriving over the border.

Cuba’s existing communist party, the Popular Socialist Party, was a serious organisation with real roots in the working class, but it didn’t believe that the moment had come. Its leader, Blas Roca, was honest about this afterwards. For a long time, he admitted, the party “failed to take any practical steps” towards armed struggle, because it assumed that the struggles it was leading would culminate in insurrection more or less spontaneously. Fidel recognised the potentially revolutionary situation and then did the practical work: preparing, training and assembling people who were prepared to fight.

Responding to left criticisms of China’s foreign policy

In this discussion with Radhika Desai, Carlos Martinez confronts the charge, common even on parts of the left, that Beijing does far too little for Palestine, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

The conversation traces China’s foreign policy from the internationalism of Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement, through its rapprochement with Washington and entry into the world economy, to its pursuit of a Global Community of Shared Future.

Transcript

Radhika Desai: Hello, viewers and listeners. Welcome to the Geopolitical Economy interview, a series in which I speak with prominent intellectuals, scholars, politicians, journalists, activists and public figures to illuminate the fast-changing political economy and geopolitical economy of our times.

I’m Radhika Desai and you’re watching Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economist. Today’s topic is China’s foreign policy towards the United States and the West on the one hand, and the oppressed — and I should say oppressed and embattled — nations such as Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran on the other, in the broader context of rising multipolarity. How should the left make sense of it, particularly given that sections of the left have criticised China for not doing enough for precisely these countries?

I can think of few people better qualified to address this question than Carlos Martinez, who joins me today. Welcome, Carlos.

Carlos Martinez: Hi, Radhika. Lovely to see you. Good to be with you.

Radhika Desai: It’s really great to have you today, Carlos. Let me tell our audience that you are an independent scholar and researcher, co-editor of the increasingly important and influential Friends of Socialist China website, and author and editor of many books on China and on socialism — including the one on China, which is called The East Is Still Red, and the wonderfully titled book on the demise of the USSR, The End of the Beginning. You meant, of course, that this was just the end of the beginning of world socialism.

Carlos, can you begin by addressing the criticisms of China’s foreign policy that are quite widespread in some sections of the left — in a sort of overall, summary fashion — before we go on to investigate its particular aspects, and China’s foreign policy towards particular countries?

Carlos Martinez: Sure. I think there are a couple of broad strands of criticism of China’s foreign policy on the left. One of them is more or less hostile; one of them is more or less friendly and sympathetic. The hostile one is that China is an imperialist country, that it’s a state-capitalist country, that its companies pursue private profit as their central motive, and that China’s foreign policy reflects that. This is essentially the United States State Department position, adopted by parts of the left.

So there’s lots of talk about debt traps. There’s lots of talk about expansionism. There’s lots of talk about China being an imperialist power and engaging in inter-imperialist rivalry with the US, with the West. That’s the position of the Greek Communist Party. That’s the position you’ll typically find in Jacobin and other elements of what might be referred to as the compatible left. Then you’ve got a sort of sympathetic critique.

Radhika Desai: And sorry, just to clarify — compatible with what?

Carlos Martinez: Compatible with capitalism.

Radhika Desai: Continue, please.

Carlos Martinez: I mean, I’m painting in very broad strokes there, and perhaps being a little bit unfair, but we can get into that later if you want. And then there’s a sympathetic critique, which comes a lot of the time from people who are pretty close to us politically, who accept China’s socialist foundation, but who express a disappointment that China’s foreign policy isn’t good enough — that China’s not aggressive enough in pursuit of justice, that it’s not doing enough for oppressed nations, that it’s not doing enough for countries under attack.

And they compare it unfavourably with the Soviet Union in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. They compare it unfavourably with, for example, Cuba’s intervention in Southern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. In terms of this first strand — that China is an imperialist country — I think we don’t need to dwell on it too much here. That’s quite an easy question to deal with, and it’s dealt with at some length in a chapter in a forthcoming book on China’s foreign policy that Keith Bennett and I have put together, and that you very kindly wrote an endorsement for. That should be out in August.

Who opened the border at Ceuta?

In late July, tens of thousands crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, and at least 72 died. Carlos Martinez asks who really opened the border – and why the resulting crisis fitted so neatly into a wider campaign to punish Spain for its independent stance on Palestine, Iran and China.

This article was first published in the Morning Star.

On 30 and 31 July, something in the region of 60,000 Moroccans crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. At least 72 died on the Spanish side of the border, drowned in the Mediterranean or crushed in the attempt. Within days, the great majority had returned to Morocco, many of them voluntarily, on account of Ceuta having no work, food or shelter to offer them.

They were overwhelmingly young, poor and unemployed. “Everyone came because there is no work in Morocco”, one 24-year-old told the New York Times. They were not “invaders”; they were workers looking for work, and dozens of them died for it. They deserve our sympathy and our solidarity.

But this was no ordinary movement of people. Tens of thousands do not converge on one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders in a matter of hours by coincidence. The immediate spark was a flood of online messages falsely claiming that a Spanish Supreme Court ruling meant anyone reaching Ceuta by sea would receive papers and employment. The ruling said no such thing.

Besides, rumours alone do not open a militarised border. The decisive factor was the conduct of the Moroccan state. Its normally formidable border apparatus stopped functioning; the authorities failed to warn Madrid about the online mobilisation; and numerous accounts suggest that Moroccan officers actively encouraged people to cross. Indeed, Spanish intelligence has reportedly concluded that Rabat permitted and exploited the crossing.

There is a precedent. In 2021, Morocco relaxed its border controls and thousands entered Ceuta after Spain admitted Brahim Ghali, leader of the Polisario Front (Western Sahara’s liberation movement), for medical treatment. Rabat was using desperate people to punish Madrid over Western Sahara.

The provocation this time was very similar. On 20 July, just ten days before the crossing, Pedro Sánchez travelled to Algiers to announce a “new phase” in relations with Algeria, Morocco’s principal regional rival and the main supporter of the Sahrawi struggle for self-determination. Algeria is also Spain’s largest supplier of natural gas this year, giving the rapprochement considerable economic and strategic weight.

Rabat, then, had reasons of its own to open the border. But the resulting crisis fitted seamlessly into a wider campaign against Spain’s increasingly independent foreign policy.

Madrid recognised the Palestinian state in May 2024 and intervened in support of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. It has described the destruction of Gaza as genocide, imposed an arms embargo, banned imports from illegal settlements and repeatedly called for European sanctions against Israel.

Spain also refused Washington the use of the jointly operated Rota and Morón bases for attacks on Iran, subsequently closing its airspace to US aircraft involved in a war it described as illegal. It was alone within NATO in rejecting Donald Trump’s demand for military spending to rise to 5 percent of GDP. And on China it has been almost alone in Europe in resisting the tariff war, opposing the EU’s duties on Chinese electric vehicles and treating Beijing as a partner rather than a threat. For a medium-sized member state, this is a remarkable degree of insubordination – and it has not gone unpunished.

Washington’s response has been explicit. Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain over its refusal to facilitate the attack on Iran. After the Ceuta crossing, he and JD Vance immediately presented the episode as an “invasion” caused by “weak and very liberal laws”, instructing the US right to turn the deaths into a domestic political weapon. Italy’s quasi-fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni suspended Schengen arrangements with Spain and demanded its expulsion, regardless of the fact that Ceuta and Melilla are not part of the Schengen zone.

The Israeli response was also revealing. Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, used the crisis to taunt Spain over its “colonial enclaves”. Pro-Israel commentators had already advocated a new Moroccan “Green March” into Ceuta and Melilla as a means of punishing Sánchez and strengthening an ally controlling the entrance to the Mediterranean. Such interventions demonstrate how neatly the resulting crisis aligned with the strategic interests of Israel and the United States.

Morocco has been drawn ever more deeply into that system of strategic interests. In December 2020, it normalised relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. The price was US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over occupied Western Sahara, overturning decades of international consensus. Israel followed with its own recognition in 2023, while Israeli drones, air-defence systems and surveillance technology have become pillars of Morocco’s armed forces.

Washington has now begun applying pressure directly to the status of Ceuta and Melilla. In April, a US House appropriations committee described them as cities “under Spanish administration” but “located in Moroccan territory”. This was not the adoption of a new US policy, still less an outbreak of anti-colonial principle. The same administration recognises Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara and maintains its own colonial possession at Guantánamo Bay – not to mention a global empire of military bases, alliances and client states.

It is of course the case that Ceuta and Melilla are colonial enclaves, relics of the Iberian conquest of North Africa. Like the six counties of the north of Ireland, the Malvinas and the Chagos Islands, they are unfinished business that will eventually have to be settled. But the colonial question must not be reduced to an instrument for disciplining a government that has broken ranks over Palestine and Iran.

The external pressure, moreover, has a domestic twin. For two years the Spanish right has sought to bring the Sánchez government down by means other than the ballot box. A judiciary that the country’s transition to democracy left substantially intact – the same courts that pursued Catalonia’s elected leaders into prison and exile – has opened a cascade of investigations into the prime minister’s wife, his brother and his attorney general, on transparently political charges. The neo-fascist Vox party has made common cause with an international far right movement which cannot tolerate the kind of independent, mildly redistributive government that Sánchez represents. A “mass immigration crisis” is the perfect tool for presenting the government as weak, incompetent and incapable of protecting Spain’s borders.

Morocco has shamelessly exploited the poverty of its own people for its immediate geopolitical purposes, while the US, Israel and the European right are exploiting the resulting spectacle against Spain. None of them care about the lives of the young workers who died in the Mediterranean, nor about the thousands that have lost their lives in the wars the Sánchez government has stood up against.