Invent the Future

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.

Solidarity is not terrorism: the persecution of Fergie Chambers

US activist and philanthropist James ‘Fergie’ Chambers is being held in Spain, facing extradition to the United States for the ‘crime’ of funding humanitarian relief in Gaza. Carlos Martinez examines a coordinated offensive – from Fergie’s arrest to the proscription of Palestine Action and the anticommunist crackdown on both sides of the Atlantic – that seeks to recast solidarity as terrorism.

This article was first published in the Morning Star.

On 10 July, US political activist and philanthropist James ‘Fergie’ Chambers was arrested by police while driving in Ibiza, Spain, with his family. He has been held without bail ever since, awaiting possible extradition to the United States on charges of “international money laundering” intended to provide “material support” to Hamas. If extradited, he could well face decades in prison.

Chambers is not the typical target of Washington’s counter-terrorism apparatus. Heir to the Cox Enterprises media and automotive empire, in 2023 he cut ties with his family, sold his stake for a reported $250 million, and set about giving much of it away to humanitarian and social causes.

Over the course of the last three years, Chambers has donated over a million dollars to humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, including a quarter of a million dollars to the Sameer Project, funding a bakery that turns out 3,600 free loaves a day, a desalination plant supplying 150,000 litres of clean water daily, and a free clinic in Jabalia treating up to 300 patients a day, with a further $100,000 for the mental-health care of orphaned children. The British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta calls him “a vital supporter for the provision of care for children wounded in the genocide”.

Closer to home, Chambers bankrolled the movement against Atlanta’s “Cop City” police mega-base, paid the bail and legal fees of jailed activists, and covered the costs of the direct-action group Palestine Action USA. This is the “material support” for which Washington now wants him locked away.

The indictment is sealed, but by the account of those who have seen it, it offers no evidence that a single cent reached any “terrorist organisation” – only that Chambers moved money from US banks to banks in Tunisia, where he lived since late 2023, and where he has invested in local businesses and even bought the Club Africain football club, one of the longest established and most popular in the north African country. It is the first time the US has sought to extradite anyone for supporting the Palestinian cause. Strip away the absurd vocabulary of counter-terrorism, and what remains is the story of a man being hunted across borders for the crime of solidarity.

A coordinated offensive

Chambers was seized on the very day US Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened ministers from more than 60 countries to confront what his administration now calls “transnational far-left terrorism” – with its counter-terror officials briefing that the entire left constitutes a single terrorist network. Days later the State Department published a hundred-page report, grandly titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, which recasts everyone from Black Lives Matter to the campus encampments against the Gaza genocide as fronts and “fifth columns” for Havana. And at home, Donald Trump reserves his ugliest language for the socialist left, calling communism a “cancer” to be “cut out” and resharing calls to deport New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani and other “hardcore communist bastards”.

All of this constitutes a single, coordinated offensive by the resurgent hard right – one that seeks to redefine dissent itself as terrorism, and solidarity as subversion.

Britain down the same road

Britain is moving down the same road. Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July 2025 – the first time a protest group has ever been so designated. Membership or support is now a criminal offence, and hundreds of people have been arrested for nothing more than peacefully holding a placard, in what the United Nations’ own human-rights chief called a “disturbing” misuse of counter-terrorism powers.

This July the government widened the net further, proscribing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an arm of a sovereign state. Meanwhile in April, Ben Jamal of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Chris Nineham of the Stop the War Coalition – organisers of the largest demonstrations Britain has seen in a generation – were convicted of breaching police conditions on a march, in what Jeremy Corbyn described as a “dark day for civil liberties”.

The test for Spain

It is against this backdrop that Spain’s position becomes so fraught. The government of Pedro Sánchez has done more than any other in Western Europe to resist this tide: not only recognising the state of Palestine but passing emergency measures against the Gaza genocide, and refusing to let Washington use Spanish soil to attack Iran.

However, the decision on Fergie Chambers will not rest with Sánchez, or the executive branch alone. It rests first with the Audiencia Nacional (high court) – and the Spanish judiciary is one institution the country’s sometimes fraught and partial transition to democracy left largely untouched. The same courts that will weigh Chambers’s fate are those that hounded Catalonia’s elected government into prison and exile for daring to hold an independence referendum. This is lawfare with a long pedigree – indeed Sánchez himself and members of his family are in the sights of just the same judicial and security establishment, as is former social democratic prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

The court has 40 days to rule. If it refuses the extradition, the matter ends there; if it consents, the final decision passes to the Council of Ministers – to the government itself. Should it reach that point, the communists and the other left and progressive forces on whose votes the Sánchez government depends for its survival would surely be right to make their continued support conditional on refusing to hand Chambers over. For Sánchez the logic ought to be fairly plain: a government that allows a largely unreconstructed Francoist judicial machine to deliver a solidarity activist to Trump does not tame that machine; it feeds it and increases its appetite.

Spanish MPs from across the left – Podemos, Sumar, Izquierda Unida, along with the CUP, ERC, and EH Bildu, from Catalonia and the Basque Country, together with others – have already written to ministers demanding that the extradition be refused, warning that solidarity with Palestine, in a context of genocide and occupation, cannot be criminalised as terrorism. If a government can extradite someone for funding a bakery in Gaza, then every donation, every convoy, every act of humanitarian solidarity becomes a potential terrorist offence.

Solidarity is not a crime. Spain should say so, and let Fergie Chambers go home to his family.

‘But at what cost?’: the Yangtze edition

The Economist has reported a striking piece of good news: fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen by more than 200 percent since 2021, reversing seven decades of decline, with a rare sturgeon spawning in the wild for the first time in two decades and finless porpoise numbers climbing again. The turnaround – confirmed by a peer-reviewed study – followed the largest freshwater fishing moratorium ever attempted, the closure of thousands of chemical factories, mass reforestation, and the compensation and retraining of some 200,000 fishermen.

Yet, as the following article argues, the magazine could not resist straining to make an ecological triumph sound sinister – branding China’s approach “eco-authoritarian”. It is the “but at what cost” genre in its purest form: the reflex of a worldview that cannot survive the admission that a socialist country is surpassing the West on both ecological and economic performance.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

The Economist has reported a remarkable and very welcome piece of news. Fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen by more than 200 percent since 2021, reversing seven decades of decline. A rare sturgeon has been observed spawning in the wild for the first time in twenty years. Finless porpoise numbers are up from a low of around 1,000 in 2017 to more than 1,400. And this is not Chinese state media talking: it comes from a study, published in the journal Science, by researchers in China, Canada, the United States and France.

How was it done? Through a ten-year commercial fishing ban across the river, its major tributaries and the lakes of its basin – the largest freshwater fishing moratorium ever attempted. Thousands of chemical factories were closed or relocated. Forests were planted on the upper reaches to hold the soil. Cities were “spongified” with artificial wetlands and permeable surfaces to absorb rainfall and filter stormwater. And some 200,000 fishermen were taken off the water, compensated and retrained for other work. A river that was being killed is coming back to life.

The Yangtze programme is one component of China’s ecological civilisation strategy – written into the country’s constitution in 2018 and pursued through the same instruments that have sustained China’s economy: long-term planning, massive public investment, and a state with the capacity to override short-term private interest in the name of a collective good. It is the same capacity that has made China the world’s undisputed leader in renewable energy, reforestation and electric transport.

But at what cost?

Having reported all this, the good people of the Economist search desperately for a way to make it sound sinister. “The Chinese Communist Party, once famous for pillaging from the natural world, has set to protecting parts of it”, the magazine concedes – before warning that the country’s “eco-authoritarian” approach, “top-down and intolerant of resistance”, “deserves scrutiny before being imitated”. This absurd framing drew an immediate backlash.

China is condemned for not listening to the fishermen – who wanted to carry on fishing – and to environmentalists – who want fewer dams. The complaint about dams is telling: hydropower is not only low-carbon but dispatchable, able to be ramped up on demand and, through pumped storage, to balance the wind and solar that cannot – which is precisely why it does work that would otherwise fall to coal. To oppose it in the abstract, without saying what should generate the electricity instead, is to lean in practice towards fossil-fuelled generation. So are we to understand the Economist would be happier with the status quo of a dying river, a collapsing fishery, a species on the brink of extinction, and a climate crisis that is accelerating because of the failure to decarbonise?

Such a line of reasoning brings to mind Michael Parenti’s observation, in Blackshirts and Reds, about the absurdity of Cold War propaganda:

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skilful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative.

If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike, this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

The article notes, almost in passing, that the fishermen who lost their livelihoods were given compensation and retraining. It does not mention that this is an awful lot better than what Britain’s coal miners got in the 1980s, or what the cod fishermen of Newfoundland got in the 1990s – communities that their own governments simply abandoned to their fate once they had ceased to be useful.

This is the “but at what cost” genre in its purest form. China eliminates extreme poverty; but at what cost. China builds the world’s largest high-speed rail network; but at what cost. China brings its greatest river back from ecological death; but at what cost. The real cost, evidently, is to Western hegemony – and to a worldview that cannot survive the admission that a socialist country is surpassing the West in both ecological and economic performance.

China has billionaires and stock markets. Is it still socialist?

After nearly half a century of market reforms – with billionaires, stock exchanges and world-famous private brands – can China seriously still be described as a socialist country? This video examines the case against, the record any serious analysis must explain, and above all the political question the sceptics too rarely ask: which class holds state power?

It is based on the notes for a talk Carlos Martinez gave on 23 July 2026 to the Croydon Morning Star Readers and Supporters Group at Ruskin House. A report of the meeting is available on the Croydon Communists site.

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

In 1989, Deng Xiaoping met with Julius Nyerere, the Tanzanian president, and told him: “So long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world.”

The implication was that the fate of socialism as a global project – the project of a world without exploitation, poverty or imperialism – was bound up with the fate of socialism in China. The reverse is also true. If socialism has collapsed in China – if the world’s largest socialist experiment has quietly dissolved itself into just another capitalist power – then the implications for the left everywhere are pretty bleak.

The question, then, is whether China is still socialist? After nearly half a century of market reforms, of billionaires and stock exchanges and branches of McDonald’s in every major city – can the People’s Republic seriously still be described as a socialist country?

It is a serious question, asked in good faith by many people on the left. Any convincing answer has to acknowledge what the sceptics get right, identify what they miss, and establish what actually determines whether a country is socialist.

The case against

If you’re a socialist in Britain, the United States, or the West in general, there’s a lot about modern China that doesn’t feel like the world we’re trying to build.

China has been carrying out market-oriented reforms since 1978 – that’s coming up on half a century. It has several hundred billionaires and significant inequality – between rich and poor, between the coastal cities and the inland countryside. It has globally famous private brands: Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, BYD. It has stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen. It has a market economy in which private capital operates, in which the profit motive operates, and in which – let’s say it plainly – the exploitation of labour takes place. Wage workers in private enterprises produce surplus value, and a portion of that surplus value is appropriated by capitalists.

None of that sounds like the socialism we signed up for. The world we’re fighting for is a world without exploitation, without poverty, without billionaires: a world based on planning, public ownership, solidarity and the common good. And when we reach for real-world reference points, we tend to think of the Soviet Union – a society that essentially did away with private capital altogether.

Should China “lessen the role of the state”?

In the latest of the Financial Times’ periodic lectures to Beijing on how to run its economy, the Brookings Institution’s Eswar Prasad urges China to reduce its reliance on public investment, move away from manufacturing and – above all – “lessen the role of the state”. In the following article, Carlos Martinez takes the prescriptions in turn.

He finds them to be not a serious diagnosis but an invitation to dismantle the socialist foundations of the most successful economic development in human history, in favour of a model that is visibly failing the countries that practise it.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

Every so often the Financial Times publishes its periodic instruction to China on how to run its economy. The latest comes from Eswar Prasad of the Brookings Institution, and it follows the established template: concede the achievements in a subordinate clause, then explain that catastrophe looms unless Beijing adopts the policy mix of the countries currently growing at a third of its rate.

China, we learn, is “in serious trouble” – while growing at about 4.3 percent, a figure no G7 economy has come close to in years, and roughly double the US rate. Inflation has turned positive after a deflationary spell; industrial profits are rebounding. In any other country this would be reported as a soft landing. For China it is presented as calm concealing catastrophe.

Let us take the prescriptions in turn.

First, China must “reduce reliance on public investment and exports”.

But since around 78 percent of China’s growth derives from capital inputs, cutting investment means cutting growth. This is simply the United States inviting China to engage in economic self-harm. Public investment is the key mechanism through which China has built its infrastructure, energy, transport and industrial base. It is also the mechanism through which it has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. And it is the mechanism through which it has built a high-tech economy that now competes with, and even out strips, the West across the board.

As the Marxist economist Michael Roberts has repeatedly shown, it is high levels of productive investment, not the debt-fuelled consumption favoured in the West, that drive sustained growth and rising living standards over time – exactly the relationship mainstream commentary is determined to invert.