In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez examines the Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which adopted a resolution on persevering with full and rigorous Party self-governance.
Starting from Mao Zedong’s 1945 conversation with Huang Yanpei on how to escape the historical cycle of rise and fall, Carlos traces the problem of bureaucratism and privilege in socialist states from Lenin’s warnings to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and shows how the CPC’s commitment to self-reform – together with the people’s oversight of government and the mass line – has become a permanent feature of its governance and a profound contribution to the theory and practice of Marxist party building.
This is an expanded version of an article written for CGTN, which appeared on 31 October.
In July 1945, the educator Huang Yanpei visited Yan’an and put a question to Mao Zedong. Throughout Chinese history, he observed, dynasties had emerged only to decay over time – their rulers growing complacent, their bureaucracies bloated, their people alienated. Could the Communists escape this historical cycle? Mao replied that they had found a new path: that of people’s democracy, supervision and accountability. “Only when the people are allowed to supervise the government will the government not slacken”.
Eighty-one years later, the same question was the central theme of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which closed in Beijing on 29 October. The plenum adopted a resolution on persevering with full and rigorous Party self-governance, its communiqué stating that the Party “has found two answers to the question of how to escape the historical cycle of rise and fall”: “the people’s oversight over government and the Party’s self-reform”.
A longstanding challenge
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously wrote in the Communist Manifesto that communists “have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole”. Maintaining that unity of interests in practice, over the course of more than a century of socialist governance, has thrown up numerous challenges. How can a ruling communist party prevent the emergence of bureaucratism, corruption and privilege; how can it stay in touch with the masses? It is noteworthy that the plenum communiqué consciously echoes the founders of scientific socialism: “The Party tolerates no corruption, as it has no special interests of its own besides the interests of the working class and the greatest possible majority of the people.”
As early as 1919, just two years after the October Revolution, Lenin was already warning that the new Soviet state faced a serious danger: that reactionary elements were “assuming the colouring of communists and, to succeed better in their careers, procuring membership cards of the Russian Communist Party”. Such people quite clearly had interests separate and apart from those of the working people, namely, increasing their personal wealth and advancing their careers. Lenin’s writings in the final years of his life return again and again to the problem of bureaucracy and to the gap opening up between the party and the masses. In a speech on 30 December 1920 – somewhat ironically, a sharp rebuttal of ideas advanced by Trotsky and Bukharin – he famously said that “ours is a workers’ state with a bureaucratic twist to it”, sometimes translated as “a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations”.
And indeed, in the last decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, a privileged layer of officials did emerge; there was a certain fusion of wealth and power; and the masses did become alienated. Things reached a point, as Xi Jinping has observed, where the Communist Party’s 19 million members did little to resist the dissolution of their party and state in 1991.
China’s trade union federation has grown faster than any union federation in history – from 134 million to around 300 million members in two decades, with union density of around 75 percent, compared with around 20 percent in Britain and 10 percent in the US. Yet in the West, including on much of the left, Chinese unions are routinely dismissed as fake or as tools of an authoritarian state.
In this contribution to a Critical Theory Workshop panel on Immanuel Ness’s new book on the dialectics of Chinese labour, Carlos Martinez explains why. Trade unions work differently under socialism: workers are not struggling against the state as an agent of capital, but with the state against capital. And China is still a developing country, where modernisation is essential to escaping dependence on the imperialist core. Seeing only the “sweatshop” snapshot, Carlos argues, is a fundamentally undialectical way of looking at Chinese labour, and it misses the whole trajectory.
Thanks so much, Gabriel, for that extremely generous introduction and to Critical Theory Workshop for inviting me to speak here, in spite of the fact that I know substantially less about this topic than the other panellists.
But mainly, thanks go to Manny for writing a very useful, a very important, and I think a very brave, courageous book. And you yourself note in the book that challenging the consensus in the West on Chinese unions is a taboo, right? You’re right that we risk being excluded from the field of Western labour studies.
What I want to talk about is the anti-China consensus in relation to trade unions seems a little bit bizarre if you look at the numbers as the book explains, and as Manny has talked about in his introduction, for the last half century, trade unionism has been in decline, practically everywhere in the world. Meanwhile, in China, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions has grown faster than any union federation in history. In the last two decades, it’s gone from 134 million members to around 300 million today, representing union density of around 75 percent. Now, here in Britain, union density is around 20 percent. In the United States, it’s around 10 percent. So 75 percent seems pretty fantastic, right?
But in the West, all of this, including, sadly, among much of the left, is dismissed as kind of state propaganda or manifestation of authoritarianism or fake unions, et cetera. So what I want to talk about in the few minutes that I’ve got is, why don’t people get it? What’s so difficult about understanding trade unions in China?
I think the first reason, and the most important reason, and something that’s explored a fair amount in the book is trade unions simply work differently under socialism. And that should be fairly obvious, right? Trade unions under socialism work differently to how they work under capitalism. And, of course, the labour studies field is concentrated primarily in the West, and it’s based on the experience of unions in the West, i.e. in capitalist countries.
What does it mean to be a capitalist country? It means a society in which the capitalist class, the people who own and deploy capital, constitute the ruling class, and the state primarily serves their interests, right? So in that context, the trade union, which is a vehicle for the working class to organise against capital, should have an essentially antagonistic relationship with capital, with the state, right? That’s what you expect: independence from the state is indispensable for trade unions in capitalist countries and Western countries. And that’s one of our demands as leftists, as Marxists, as communists, right? We rightly demand that, while noting that trade unions being organised as part of the capitalist state and controlled by the interests of capital has traditionally been one of the features of fascism. That’s what you have with the German labour front in Nazi Germany. That’s what you have with the so-called syndicates in Mussolini’s Italy.
But in a socialist state, the working class and its allies, by definition, are organised as the ruling class. In China, the trade unions, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, was part of the coalition that took power in 1949. The Communist Party of China and the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese state, didn’t set up the Chinese Trade Union Federation. The ACFTU predates the formation of the People’s Republic of China by around 25 years. Upon the capture of power and upon liberation, upon the incorporation of the People’s Republic, the trade unions were immediately brought into the state structure. And as Manny’s mentioned, what was established in 1949 was defined as a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on an alliance of workers and peasants.
So, a people’s democratic dictatorship, which is probably a pretty obscure expression for non-Marxists, but Marxists will be familiar with it. It creates democracy for the working class and peasantry and imposes dictatorship on the forces of feudalism, imperialism and comprador capitalism. There’s no need for trade unions to be independent of that sort of arrangement. So we’re talking about working class organisations in a workers’ state. And Manny writes in the book, under socialism, workers are not struggling against the state as an agent of capital, but with the state against capital.
And that’s been the case in every socialist country. This isn’t actually something that’s unique to China. You find a very similar arrangement in Cuba. You find a very similar arrangement in Vietnam. You found a very similar arrangement in the Soviet Union, in the German Democratic Republic, et cetera. In each case, the union federation was linked to the governing Communist Party. And that’s actually a little reminder that the modern Western critique of trade unions in China is, in many ways, just a revival of the old critique of the Soviet trade unions. And that’s a reminder that you’ve got a pretty clear, continuous line from Cold War propaganda through to new Cold War propaganda.
I think there’s additionally, in the case of China, perhaps a racial element that means the critique is a bit more extreme when it comes to China than it was for the USSR. Somehow it’s easier for us to think of China’s rulers as uniquely sinister. We’ve got this Fu Manchu stereotype of cynical, inscrutable Chinese, hell-bent on world domination. And that sort of stereotype and that sort of image is only just beneath the surface of mass consciousness in the West, generally speaking.
So none of which is to say that there’s no problems or contradictions in terms of Chinese labour and Yan Pan has enunciated some of those very ably. The fact is that building socialism has never been a simple process, largely because the world remains dominated by imperialist powers. Socialism with Chinese characteristics has many contradictions. It’s a very complex and a very new process that hasn’t yet, something that hasn’t been done before.
The most obvious contradiction is that while capital is subordinated to the state, the dictatorship that’s imposed on the capitalist class is basically pretty benign these days. People who own and deploy capital may not be able to form their own political party. They may not be able to organise in their specific class interest. They may not be able to organise to restore capitalism, but they can make a lot of money. They can exploit human labour. They can live very well.
And furthermore, alongside that, China’s whole framework of development relies partly on capital to help develop the productive forces in order to create a material basis for a more advanced socialism. As such, you’ve got this sort of fragile class alliance which creates a complex dual role for an organisation like the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which is both defending workers against capital and helping the country to develop, to develop its productive forces, to modernise, to move towards a more advanced socialism.
And actually, I think the ACFTU these days, at least, does a great job in defending the interests of the working class. It takes up the demands for higher wages, for better conditions, for social insurance, for pensions and so on. And one example of that is that no company in China is allowed to ban union activity, which is a situation which we in the West can only be envious of. And with ACFTU help, workers win around 95 percent of labour cases in court.
And Manny pointed out in his opening remarks about this sort of Catch-22 analysis from the West about Chinese trade unions, but that if workers go on strike, it shows that they reject the state, they reject authoritarianism. But if there’s peace, if there’s labour peace, if they don’t go on strike, that supposedly shows repression and that the critic always wins. And it reminded me of a classic quote from Michael Parenti’s book, Blackshirts and Reds, where he said: “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 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 they lacked freedom.”
So the second reason, a second very important reason, I think people in the West and including on the left struggle to understand Chinese trade unionism and its differences with Western trade unionism is that China is a developing country. It’s still in the process of modernisation, yes, over the last few years, it’s emerged as a science and technology powerhouse, but its productivity is still a fair way behind that of the imperial core. Its per capita income is perhaps 20 percent of the US’s. It still has literally hundreds of millions of people who live in relative poverty, albeit they enjoy a standard of living far above what their counterparts enjoy in the other countries of the Global South.
Modernisation probably doesn’t feel that important to a lot of people in the West. It doesn’t feel that important to a lot of people in the US or in Canada or in Britain or in Europe because we’ve been reaping its fruits for a long time now. But for a country in the Global South, it means becoming more prosperous, it means creating a better life. And it also, very importantly, at a political and a geopolitical level, means escaping from the position that the West would like to hold China in as a peripheral country dependent on the imperial core, vulnerable to imperialist pressure, vulnerable to intervention.
So modernising and developing the productive forces is an entirely necessary process, and it involves a lot of hard work. There’s no way around that.
And, yeah, I was on a delegation in China three or four years ago, and it was a delegation of communist parties. And someone from Northern Europe asked the vice chair of the ACFTU, well, what do you think of fighting for a six-hour working day? That’s what we’re fighting for in the union movement in our country. And this vice chair, this official, waited for the question to be translated, allowed himself the briefest of chuckles and said, listen, we’re a developing country, and if our working class, if our 400 million workers went down to a six-hour working day, we wouldn’t develop. That would slow down China’s development. What we do instead is we fight to ensure that the 40-hour week is respected, that workers are properly compensated when they do do overtime, they only do overtime if they want to do overtime, they have social insurance, they have pensions, they’re not abused and exploited, that they have a voice in the workplace.
And sorry, Gabriel, I’m aware I’ve gone overtime, so I’ll just finish up by saying that much of the Western left looks at Chinese labour conditions, and they just see this. It’s a caricature or a snapshot, which is the sweatshop, right? And that misses the whole trajectory. It’s a fundamentally, actually, undialectical way of seeing it. Yes, there is a history of brutal exploitation of labour in China, particularly by the likes of Apple and by the likes of Nike, by basically Western multinationals.
And the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, working with the state, has been in the lead of the fight against that exploitation and has had remarkable successes, successes that are basically without parallel elsewhere in the world. So, yeah, thank you. I’ll leave it at that.
China is planning to spend 25 trillion yuan ($3.7 trillion) over the next five years on what it calls “the six networks”: water, electricity, computing, communications, logistics and urban pipelines. In the following article, Carlos Martinez looks at what the programme involves – and at the millions of jobs it is designed to create – and asks why China can organise its economy along such rational lines while Western capitalist countries cannot.
Drawing on Michał Kalecki’s “Political Aspects of Full Employment” and Marx’s observations on the “general conditions of production”, Carlos argues that the answer lies not in Keynesian technique but in political economy: in China, capital lacks the power to veto public investment. Meanwhile in Britain, privatised water companies haven’t built a major reservoir in over three decades.
This article was first published in the Morning Star.
In a recent briefing, the Economist reports that China is planning to spend 25 trillion yuan ($3.7 trillion) over the next five years on what it calls “the six networks”: water, electricity, computing, communications, logistics and urban pipelines. That corresponds to roughly 3 percent of China’s cumulative GDP between now and 2030.
Six networks
The proposal was set out in the outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–30), and is already being implemented. The National Development and Reform Commission expects investment to exceed 7 trillion yuan this year alone.
The water network will receive more than 6 trillion yuan for reservoirs, canals, flood defences and ecological restoration. China’s water network already covers 80 percent of the country’s land area, and the first phase of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project has delivered 88 billion cubic metres of water, benefiting 195 million people.
The power grid will receive more than 5 trillion yuan, much of it spent by China’s two state-owned grid companies. The aim is to carry solar and wind power from the deserts of the north-west to the cities of the east through a network of ultra-high-voltage lines – already over 50,000km long – backed by battery storage and smart distribution.
In the following article, Carlos Martinez responds to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s designation of Confucius Institutes as a threat to national security – the culmination of a years-long campaign that has seen the number of institutes at US universities fall from around 100 to fewer than five.
Noting that Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the US itself all promote their languages and cultures abroad, Carlos argues that the war on Confucius Institutes is a form of cultural decoupling, rooted in the long tradition of McCarthyism – which was itself born in the hysteria over the “loss of China” – and designed to sever the ties of language, culture and friendship between young people in the West and China. But it is a losing battle: young Americans are increasingly discovering China for themselves.
It appears the Pentagon has finally won its long war on Mandarin lessons and calligraphy classes.
On 23 October, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced in a video posted on social media that his department had added Confucius Institutes to its list of institutions that threaten US national security. Describing them as “sleeper organisations” operating “under disguise of US universities”, Hegseth claimed that “80 new propaganda cells across 30 universities had popped up using different names and different charters, but with the same mission: to steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students”. Over the past two months, he said, the Pentagon had “systematically dismantled every single one of these organisations”.
It remains unclear how classes in Chinese language, tai chi and calligraphy, Lunar New Year celebrations and the occasional dumpling-making workshop are threatening anyone’s national security. Hegseth offered no evidence of intellectual property being stolen or minds being “infiltrated”.
Carlos Martinez speaks to Jason Smith on The Bridge to China Podcast about the Communist Party of China’s anti-corruption drive and its capacity for self-revolution; why socialism with Chinese characteristics is still socialism; what China’s poverty alleviation campaign actually achieved; why so much of the Western left remains sceptical of China; and how China is helping the Global South break the chains of underdevelopment.
Carlos argues that the anti-corruption campaign is, above all, a campaign to prevent capital from buying political power – “the dividing line between a socialist and a capitalist state” – and that in China, “billionaires answer to the state, not the other way around”.
Jason Smith: In The East Is Still Red, you argue that the party’s priorities – living standards, poverty reduction, territorial integrity, environmental protection – line up with the will of the people, to use an old term. How do you see that relationship working in practice?
Carlos Martinez: Right. I think the core political point is around China’s political system, its system of democracy – which probably sounds strange to Westerners, because we’ve been told for so long that China isn’t a democracy, that it’s an authoritarian state, that it’s a dictatorship, et cetera, et cetera. But the main thing to understand about China as a state, as a political entity, is that the working class and its allies – the peasantry, the intellectuals and the patriotic elements of the capitalist class – constitute the ruling class. And they’ve got a system that brings them democracy. It’s very different to the West. It’s very different to what we in the West think of as democracy, which is basically the Westminster parliamentary system – which essentially comes down to what Marx referred to as working people getting to choose every four or five years which class enemy misrepresents them in Parliament.
The Chinese have what they call whole-process people’s democracy, which involves the ongoing, everyday participation of ordinary people in decision-making. That happens via the people’s congresses, at five levels – the national level, the provincial level, the city level, the town level, the village level – and the consultative committees, local congresses, village committees and so on. And all of this adds up to what I would say is an elaboration or formalisation of what was the CPC’s policy during the Mao Zedong period and the early revolutionary period: the mass line. You go to the people, understand their concerns, come back from the people, synthesise those concerns with Marxism, with Chinese traditional thought, and then take that back to the people. And the result is a system of priorities that I think still – after 105 years of the Communist Party of China, after 77 years of the People’s Republic of China – continues to meet people’s aspirations and priorities in the short term and the long term.
You can compare that with the West. In the United States, Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, has recently announced that the next US budget is going to be 1.5 trillion dollars. So that’s what the West is prioritising. Britain, all the countries of the European Union, or nearly all of them, have agreed to Trump’s target that they reach 5 percent of GDP on defence spending, which is an unbelievable quantity of money. If you think in terms of percentage of fiscal revenue – of the money that the government has actually got to spend on things – it’s probably more like 25 or 30 percent. So we’re talking about diverting incredible resources into the military-industrial complex, into the merchandise of death and destruction. What a waste, in basic humanist terms. What a ridiculous waste.
So what’s prioritised in China? Poverty alleviation is prioritised. Improving people’s living standards is prioritised. Green energy is prioritised. Infrastructure development is prioritised – rolling infrastructure out across the whole country, across the centre of the country, across the west of the country, the traditionally less developed parts of the country. So it’s a democratic system based on the power of the working class and its allies that produces results which are far more consistent with the will of the people than what we have in the West.
Jason Smith: Sometimes when I’m online and I’m sharing stories of China’s poverty alleviation with Western people, they like to say that it’s propaganda. So what does your personal experience of travelling in China tell you about how the party organised that work, and who benefited? Did they eliminate poverty?
Carlos Martinez: Well, if poverty alleviation is propaganda, then frankly I wish the West would engage in more of that propaganda. I live in North London. I can walk outside my apartment and within a few seconds I’ll see someone living on the street. I’ll come across someone begging. I will see massive inequality. I will see desperate poverty in the course of my ordinary day. Unprecedented levels of unemployment; millions of people living from food banks; millions of people unemployed or underemployed or in very precarious work and experiencing very precarious living conditions. And the winter’s coming, and you’re going to have millions of pensioners, older people aged 70, 75 and up, who are literally having to choose between heating and eating every day for the next six months. So please, British government, let’s have some of this anti-poverty propaganda.
Now, my own experience of poverty alleviation in China is relatively limited. I’ve only been to a few places. I went to China for the first time in 2019. But what I can say is that what I’ve witnessed is a surprisingly high standard of living – for someone who lives in the West and goes to countries of the Global South. You go with certain expectations of what you’re going to see. I’ve been to India before; I’ve been to various countries in Asia and Africa, and that frames my expectations when I go to another country of the Global South. And China completely bucks those expectations. You go to Beijing, you go to Shanghai, you go to Guangzhou, you go to Xi’an, et cetera, and you don’t see homelessness. You don’t see people living on the streets. You don’t see people begging on the streets. You see extremely clean and well-maintained streets. You see parks everywhere, extremely well used – young people, older people playing, singing, dancing, doing tai chi, et cetera. And obviously there’s substantial inequality, and people experience very different levels of living standards, but on the surface at least, from what you can see, everyone experiences a basically dignified, reasonable standard of life.
Aside from the big cities, I’ve also been to some smaller cities, some villages – places like Jiayuguan and Dunhuang, Guiyang, Zunyi in Guizhou. And these are thriving smaller cities with really impressive infrastructure, lovely-looking schools, great hospitals, et cetera. I went to Dunhuang for the first time in 2020, and that was the first place I’d been in my life where they had a fully electric bus fleet. So on all of those sorts of things – public transport, green energy, electric vehicles, electric transport – China’s so far ahead of the West, even in small towns and villages.
As for what the record shows on poverty alleviation in China, I think hopefully most of that is reasonably well known by now: the World Bank figure of 800 million people lifted out of poverty since the 1980s, and the targeted poverty alleviation campaign since 2013, whereby they’ve actually eliminated absolute poverty. So in a country of 1.4 billion people, you’ve got no people below that level of extreme absolute poverty. In monetary terms that maybe doesn’t seem like much – you’re above that $2.10 a day, or whatever it is, of cash income, and $2.10 doesn’t get you much. But what comes with it is what they call the seven guarantees, which means that aside from your level of cash you’ve also got guaranteed housing – a roof over your head; guaranteed clothing – clothes on your back; guaranteed decent, dignified food; electricity piped into your home; water piped into your home; your children go to school for a minimum of ten years – mandatory, free, universal education; and if you get sick, you see a doctor. You’ve got access to healthcare. So on that basis, if you’re out of extreme poverty in China, in most places of the world you’d be doing pretty well.
And what that doesn’t capture is that you very likely – a 90 to 95 percent chance – own your own home. You are 100 percent not in intergenerational debt bondage, like your counterparts might be in India or Pakistan or many, many other places in Asia or Latin America. If you’re in the countryside, if you’re a rural worker, you have your own plot of land. So even if you’re in relative poverty, compared to your counterparts nearly everywhere else in the Global South, you’re doing very well. You’ll probably be classified as middle class if you’re in Bangladesh, et cetera.
And the other very interesting thing in relation to poverty alleviation that a lot of the time people don’t talk about – and it relates to your first question about priorities – is the level of priority this project has received, the incredible commitment of the government and of the Communist Party. Three million cadres, over the course of eight or nine years, were deployed to the countryside to work with villagers, with families, with individuals, with communities at a very concrete level, to figure out their problems, figure out what factors were keeping them in poverty, and figure out customised and sustainable solutions, so that they were lifted sustainably out of poverty – so that they went above that line and stayed above that line. And that’s an ongoing commitment. You still have people working at the village level to ensure that communities and families don’t fall back into poverty. And that could be fixing roofs on schools; it could be connecting farms to online digital markets on the eastern seaboard, et cetera. There’s a million different solutions to a million different problems. But it represented the most unbelievable level of commitment to meeting the needs of the poorest people in society. And if we could achieve that in the West, well, that would be a great day.
Jason Smith: Yeah. If we look at the exact poverty standard according to the World Bank, in the United States we have 1.25 percent of the population living below that poverty line – not the US poverty line, which is much higher, but the official international poverty line. And it’s close to zero in China, and I wish the United States would learn. Obviously a lot of people are hoping that the rest of the Global South – the underdeveloped world, or the over-exploited world, as Parenti called it – would learn from China’s example, but I think the developed West can also learn from some of the programmes and strategies that China deployed.
But I’ve also noticed there’s a change in the online zeitgeist. Over the last five years, people have gone from “China’s really poor” to accepting that that’s not really the case anymore, to now arguing: is China capitalist, or is it socialist, or is it communist? And you’ve said that socialism with Chinese characteristics is still socialism. What makes you say that?
Carlos Martinez: Well, for one thing, if it’s capitalism, you have to explain how it’s achieved all the things that other capitalist countries haven’t achieved. India is a capitalist country. Pakistan is a capitalist country. China is surrounded by capitalist countries. And you’ve got countries like India, which achieved their liberation at a very similar time to China, that are the same size in terms of population, and that were back in the late 1940s at a very similar level of development. India has made impressive progress in many ways, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t compare with where China’s reached. China’s life expectancy is 79 now, touching 80. It’s part of the 15th Five-Year Plan that average life expectancy will get to 80, which is going to put it in a very exclusive club, and it’s really quite incredible for a population of 1.4 billion. Its GDP per capita is around $13,000, and its literacy rate is essentially 100 percent. By comparison, India’s life expectancy is in the high 60s, its per capita GDP is more like $3,000, its literacy rate is under 80 percent, and it still has hundreds of millions of people who live in extreme poverty, whose children don’t go to school. Either they live in desperately poor conditions in the countryside, in intergenerational debt bondage, or they’re living in peri-urban slums on the outskirts of Mumbai, on the outskirts of Delhi, et cetera.
So why has China been able to achieve the things that it has achieved, and India hasn’t? For that matter, why has China been able to basically end homelessness and Britain hasn’t? Why is China the world leader in green energy and electric vehicles and the United States isn’t? Why has China got great infrastructure throughout the whole country, while it would take me probably four hours to get to Manchester – which is maybe the same distance as you going from Beijing to Tianjin? There’s no way of explaining that if China’s just another capitalist country – a country where the class of people that own and deploy capital is the ruling class.
And furthermore, people sort of object to this idea of China as a socialist country by saying: okay, the working class is the ruling class, but what does that actually mean if you’re someone who’s working in a factory? Well, I think it means a couple of things. In the short term, it means that your life is getting better. You can see over the years, and over the course of decades and generations, that life is getting better for ordinary working-class people. That means wages are going up, working conditions are improving, your social security coverage is expanding, your health insurance is expanding, your children are going to school for longer and getting a better education. The higher-education enrolment rate in China is extremely high – 60–70 percent, far higher than it is even in Britain. You can get medical treatment without going bankrupt. You’ve got trade union representation. And this is something people don’t realise: union membership covers 75 to 80 percent of workers in China, whereas in the US it’s barely touching 10 percent. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions’ penetration rate is among the highest in the world. So if you’ve got a problem with your boss, if you’re not getting paid enough, or you’re getting exploited, or you’ve got issues with your working conditions, you’ve got an organisation that will engage in collective bargaining on behalf of you and your comrades. You most probably own your own home, which is not something that working-class people can say in most capitalist countries. If you’re in a rural household, your home belongs to you. You’ve got access to clean water, to electricity, to the internet, to public transport. So these are lots of things that are quite enviable, certainly for working-class people in the Global South. And as I say, it’s all on a positive trajectory. It’s all going in the right direction. Whereas in most of the rest of the world, wages and conditions are going down in real terms. The working class in Britain, the working class in the United States, earn less than their forefathers did 50 years ago.
In the long term, what does it mean to be a member of the working class or the peasantry in a socialist country rather than a capitalist country? Well, you’re part of an epoch-defining and revolutionary process. You’re contributing to the building of socialism, which in historic terms is still a pretty novel and interesting project. You’re in the vanguard of figuring out what an advanced socialism of the future is going to look like. At a national level, you’re contributing to the process of Chinese modernisation, to the project of what they call the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. And at a global level, you’re contributing to – hopefully – the construction of a better, more peaceful, more equal, more prosperous and sustainable world. So I think there is a substantial difference between being a worker under socialism and being a worker under capitalism.
Jason Smith: Another issue is governance and corruption. There are a lot of charts that come out of Western think tanks and institutions that say China is a very corrupt government. But this is what I see. In the United States, the Epstein files come out; not one client on that list is prosecuted, and we know a lot of them are related to the political class. We have lobbying, which pays off our politicians to write laws in favour of the wealthiest people. And then we have wealthy oligarchs deciding what candidates are available at the state level, at the local level, at the national level. So we have the richest people in the United States determining how our government operates. That looks like corruption to me. I don’t know how it is in Great Britain, but when I look at China’s system, I don’t see corruption. I see a political class that is above the capitalist class, and punishes the capitalist class when it goes awry. Like the Evergrande CEO, who is now serving life imprisonment for his deceitful figures, which hid tens of billions of dollars from the public and invented tens of billions of dollars that his company wasn’t actually making. So in your opinion, when you look at the anti-corruption drive that has taken place since 2012–2013, how is it that the Communist Party of China has made rooting out graft a central priority, and what does that mean?
Carlos Martinez: I mean, the scale of this anti-corruption drive over the course of the last 15 years or so is really something to behold. Last year alone, there were over a million corruption cases opened, and nearly a million people punished. You had over 100 provincial- or ministerial-level officials investigated. And since 2012 you’ve had over 7 million people disciplined. And it reaches the very top: we’re talking about former Politburo members, top generals, financial regulators. Xi Jinping often talks about tigers and flies – the biggest and the strongest, and the smallest and the weakest. And actually, in terms of what matters to ordinary people living their everyday lives, the flies matter a lot. Last year you had nearly 150,000 township-level officials investigated.
I remember when I first came to China in 2019, speaking to a friend in Beijing who was born and raised there. He said that a few years previously he’d started to really worry about levels of corruption. It had got to a point where it was just so frustrating in the course of daily routine existence. If the boiler stopped working in your apartment, you’d have to bribe someone to get it fixed – things like that, just annoying things, where people were enriching themselves even in a very small-scale way and costing you time and costing you money. And the unfairness of it all was really impacting people’s confidence in the system as a whole. So he was quite concerned for China’s future.
So I think the CPC, and especially Xi Jinping and his administration, really understood this problem and decided to tackle it in an absolutely comprehensive and systematic way. Xi Jinping said right back in 2012 that corruption could doom the party and the state. At that time it was in danger of becoming uncontrollable. And it’s kind of inevitable that some level of corruption is going to appear in a market system, even if it’s a market socialist system. This is a side effect of the rapid growth of the market reforms that took place, particularly during the Jiang Zemin era, where there was incredibly rapid growth – well over 10 percent per year on average for those ten or so years. And at the end of that period, people were by and large living an awful lot better than they were at the beginning. So I don’t say we should just throw away all of that GDP growth and the increase in wealth, in cash income, in the commodities that people had available to them. However, it did come with some side effects. And controlling those side effects – controlling the uncontrolled expansion of capital, controlling corruption – was a basic demand of the people. It was consistently one of people’s top concerns. And the anti-corruption campaign was, and remains, hugely popular.
And I think there’s an element of learning the lessons of the Soviet Union as well. The CPC has made a very serious, very detailed, ongoing study of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And one of those lessons is that you had this fusion of money and power within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Officials became a sort of privileged layer with their own interests, and then they cashed in when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But above all, this is a campaign about preventing capital from buying political power – preventing this correlation between money and power, which is essentially the dividing line between a socialist and a capitalist state. So in that sense the anti-corruption campaign is very much a socialist and anti-capitalist campaign.
And what does it tell us about the system? It tells us that the party is capable of – in fact, is very good at – self-revolution: disciplining itself, constantly reforming. And this is something that goes back to the very beginnings of the history of the CPC. It tells us there’s a highly capable, highly mobilised state apparatus able to tackle problems at an incredible scale. And it’s also interesting that this anti-corruption drive has become an institutionalised process. It’s like the reform process in China, which kicks off in 1978 and has now been in place for coming up to 50 years. Similarly, the anti-corruption campaign is a never-ending process. If you’re not vigilant about it, corruption will re-emerge. So it’s institutionalised, it’s not one-off, it’s continually evolving – for example, the eight-point regulation on frugality among leaders, the National Supervisory Commission that was introduced a few years ago, and so on. And all of this just reminds us that in China billionaires answer to the state – not the other way around, as is the case in the United States, as is the case in Britain.
Jason Smith: I actually wanted to ask you specifically about Britain, because obviously you must have a lot of personal experience there. How would you compare how Britain deals with political corruption and how the CPC deals with political corruption?
Carlos Martinez: Well, as you’ve alluded to a bit earlier, a lot of what China calls corruption is, in the West – in Britain, in the US – perfectly legal. It’s a regular part of everyday life. This correlation between wealth and power is normal. That’s how capitalism works. That’s how the West works. In Britain it’s not as bad yet as in the US, although that’s the direction things are going. But in the US you’ve got unlimited corporate money in elections; lobbying reaching, I think, over four billion dollars a year. And we’ve increasingly got it here in Britain now as well: the revolving door between big business and government; politicians trading stocks, et cetera. The whole system is essentially legalised bribery. And when scandals do break, you might have a resignation here and there, an inquiry here and there, a legal settlement or an out-of-court settlement here and there. But rarely do you get prosecution of powerful people. You’ve just got a certain amount of making a show.
Famously, it’s very dangerous to be a billionaire in China. Your chances of getting investigated, incarcerated, put on death row in China are orders of magnitude higher if you’re a billionaire. But very wealthy people in the West are basically untouchable. They can buy politicians, they can buy journalists, they can buy the courts. In China, they’re subject to the laws of a socialist state. A good number of the people who receive the death penalty in China are unbelievably rich people who made their wealth through corruption, which means at the expense of ordinary people. Who’s on death row in the United States? It’s people like Mumia Abu-Jamal, who spent nearly 30 years on death row – a political prisoner, a freedom fighter. It’s poor people, it’s Black people, it’s Indigenous people.
And you brought up the example of Jeffrey Epstein. Here you’ve got an international, massively widespread campaign of flagrant corruption, extortion, bribery, political favours, human trafficking, sexual slavery and so on. Everyone knew this was happening. And furthermore, it’s increasingly clear that it was coordinated with intelligence services, including the Israeli intelligence services, and has been used for purposes of compromise, et cetera. Epstein was protected by the system. He was untouchable. He was close friends, close colleagues with some of the most powerful people in the world, including the president of the United States. People knew about this for decades. And finally someone blows the whistle – but, as you said, who’s been brought to justice as a result of this whole campaign and the release of the Epstein files over the course of many months?
So in terms of the key differences between the West and China in dealing with corruption: in the West, corruption is structural. Money buys policy. It’s not a matter of a few bad apples. It’s a matter of the capitalist class being the ruling class and owning the political process. In China, corruption is treated as an existential threat to the system, and the system therefore mobilises against it. Which is not to say that China has solved it once and for all. As Xi Jinping says, the fight is always on the road. But you’ve got a direction of travel which is completely different to the direction of travel in the West.
Jason Smith: I assume your outlook is like mine: it’s not about praising China – that’s kind of a dead end. It’s about looking at China’s example and hoping that there are lessons there for our home countries, for other countries around the world, that some of the successes coming to fruition in China can become models to some extent. And you’ve written that “so long as socialism holds in China, it holds ground in the world.” From your perspective, what practical lessons can organisers in your country and mine take from China?
Carlos Martinez: Right. This quote – “so long as socialism holds in China, it holds ground in the world” – that’s me citing Deng Xiaoping, speaking to the then Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere in 1989. Which was a very poignant thing to say in 1989, just as socialism was collapsing in Europe. Between 1989 and 1991 socialism collapsed in, obviously, the Soviet Union, but also the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and so on. And it’s interesting what Deng says alongside that, to expand on it a bit. He says: some countries have suffered major setbacks, and socialism appears to have been weakened, but don’t panic. Don’t think that Marxism has disappeared. Feudalism replaced slavery, capitalism supplanted feudalism, and after a long time socialism will necessarily supersede capitalism. This is a road with many twists and turns.
So he’s really zooming out on the historical process and telling us not to worry: this is a process with setbacks, because all processes have setbacks, and history doesn’t move in a smooth straight line. That doesn’t mean we’ve got it wrong. That doesn’t mean the socialist path is wrong, or that Marxism is wrong, or that Mao Zedong Thought is wrong, or that the whole socialist project has suffered some kind of final defeat. So that’s the first practical lesson for the people of the world: don’t give up.
Lots has changed since the start of the socialist era – since Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, since the Russians had their revolution in 1917. The ruling classes have developed lots of ways to defend the status quo, to keep capitalism in place. But the fundamental laws of history haven’t changed. The contradictions of capitalism haven’t gone away. The working class – the class of people that sell their labour power in order to survive – constitutes something like 80 to 90 percent of the global population, depending on how you count it. The contradiction between social production and private appropriation, the very basis of Marx’s analysis of capitalist economics, remains in place. Brutal poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression still inspire people to resist – as we’re currently seeing on the streets of New Delhi, on the streets of Paris, of Madrid, of Lisbon, in Albania and elsewhere. So that’s a very important historical lesson: historical materialism hasn’t ended just because a few countries have suffered reverses.
The second practical lesson, I think, is that defending socialist China is a crucial task for the Western left. If socialism is holding its ground in the world in large part because of the existence of the People’s Republic, then socialists should support the People’s Republic. If we support socialism, we should support the socialist countries. We should oppose the new Cold War as part of that. We should oppose the campaign of encirclement and containment of China. We should oppose the drive to hot war. We should oppose the propaganda war, the constant demonisation of China. And we should recognise and spread understanding of China’s achievements – be it on poverty alleviation, on infrastructure rollout, on green energy, on improvement in people’s well-being, and so on. And we should understand China’s role in the world – multipolarity, Global South development, peace and stability – and generally creating space for a post-imperialist future. We should celebrate China’s successes as our successes, as the successes of the global socialist movement.
What can be learned from China’s model? Obviously it’s not some kind of template that can just be applied at will. It’s not a magic wand that movements around the world can wave. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is based on China’s traditions, China’s culture and China’s concrete conditions. Obviously the construction of socialism in the West is going to be very different. One thing I think we can learn from China is that there is no one model; that Marxism has to be applied creatively to concrete conditions. As Lenin said, the concrete analysis of concrete conditions is the core of Marxism.
I think China also teaches us that organisation is important. The CPC went from around 50 people in 1921 to over 100 million people now, and has maintained its organisational coherence and its organisational discipline, and has protected those as the apple of its eye for a period of 105 years. That’s been a decisive factor in China’s success, in the history of the People’s Republic. The mass line, I think, is something that’s basically always applicable: starting from people’s actual needs and aspirations. Having patience, having a long-term strategy, measuring goals in decades and generations, not in terms of shareholder returns or electoral cycles. And then the concept of the united front, which was really pioneered by the Chinese, first in the early 1920s with the united front with the Kuomintang, and then from 1937 with the united front against the Japanese invasion: this idea of building broad alliances and isolating the main enemy. In the West there’s a clear need, and clear space, for the construction of some kind of united front against war, against imperialism, against racism, and in the fight against climate breakdown.
So there’s a huge amount to learn from the Chinese experience. I don’t think there’s a template. I don’t think there’s an easy formula that can just be applied in different conditions. But there’s a tremendous amount of experience to be gathered, and a tremendous amount of inspiration to be taken.
Jason Smith: We also see a kind of left – I can’t speak to the experience of living in Britain, but in the United States the left is largely comprised of liberals, and then there’s a very small sliver of people who call themselves socialists, and I think to some extent there is a little bit of socialism there, not a lot. But when the so-called left in the United States looks at China, there’s a lot of criticism. The Western left, if we want to call it that, remains sceptical of China – especially in media, especially in legacy media, even among people like Jon Stewart, for example. Do you think this is Cold War conditioning just echoing through the zeitgeist, or do you think the liberal media in the United States and elsewhere is preparing the public for long-term confrontation?
Carlos Martinez: Look, I think people in the West are exposed to non-stop anti-China propaganda. And at the end of the day the ruling class, for all their talk of freedom of speech, basically enjoys an information monopoly of one sort or another. In Britain we have the BBC and the Guardian and the Independent and the Daily Mail and the Telegraph and all the rest of it. In the US you have the New York Times and you have Fox News, and you’ve got a certain amount of variation – a spectrum of news from liberal to conservative or kind of semi-fascist. But all of these news sources represent the needs and interests and aspirations of a single social class, which is the capitalist class, the group of people who own and deploy capital. And they’re united, in the US as well as in Britain, in considering China as an enemy.
So what do people hear about China? They hear what they read or see in the news media, and that’s: there’s a genocide in Xinjiang; there’s repression in Tibet; there’s suppression in Hong Kong; the Chinese are trying to take over their own territory in Taiwan; the Chinese are spying on us; the Chinese are buying up land in Africa; they’re engaging in debt-trap diplomacy, et cetera. So people are exposed to all of this all the time. I think today, in 2026, it resonates less than it did five or ten years ago, but it’s there. That’s what people come to absorb, because they’re exposed to it so much.
And then all of that rests on a foundation of Sinophobia, which never really goes away. You can trace it back to the Fu Manchu racism of the nineteenth century, which essentially is an outgrowth of British colonialism and is connected to the Opium Wars and the capture of Hong Kong and the concessions in Shanghai and so on – which treats Chinese people as fundamentally inferior and untrustworthy and cynical and inscrutable, et cetera. So you’ve got this idea of inscrutable Chinese leaders plotting and scheming for world domination. That’s obviously not what we think at a conscious level, but in the collective Western subconscious it’s never too far from the surface.
And then, in terms of the Western left’s analysis of China, you’ve got an ideological component, and a lot of it comes down to what Domenico Losurdo, the Italian Marxist philosopher, called Western Marxism, which is historically suspicious of any socialism that actually holds power. And Michael Parenti talked about these movements that support every revolution except the ones that succeed. People love a romantic, heroic defeat, but not a successful socialist state with all the problems and contradictions that come with it. If you actually build a socialist state – in a country like China that’s been a socialist state for 77 years, with a population of 1.4 billion people and a Communist Party of 100 million people – it’s almost unimaginable, the number of contradictions, the number of problems, the number of things that one can rightly criticise. And people get caught up in all of that, and then they forget about the extraordinary achievements.
And I think there are some issues with Eurocentrism: people maybe find it difficult to accept that you’ve got this huge East Asian country that’s actually leading the way in the development of socialism worldwide, leading the way in terms of finding a future path for humanity. At some level I think we feel in the West that surely that’s a European thing, surely that’s a North American thing; surely we’re the thought leaders in this process, as in all others.
Yes, I think real disagreements exist at the ideological level. I would hope these are things that could be discussed in a comradely way, on the basis of equality and dignity. Maybe some people don’t think that you can have markets under socialism, or that you can have private capital, or that you can have inequality. I think China’s lived experience and its practice – practice being the sole criterion of truth – has kind of answered that question and settled it. But it’s not something that should be beyond debate and discussion and criticism. Sure, we can talk about that as comrades. People might disagree with the way China’s trade unionism works. They might disagree with China’s forms of democracy. So there are lots of legitimate debates to be had. And you live in China, and you know that within the Communist Party of China and within Chinese society more generally, there’s fierce debate about all of these topics.
But debate and disagreement should be conducted in a comradely way, and it can’t become a reason for siding with imperialism because you disagree with this or that aspect of Chinese policy. It can’t be a reason to end up in a position of “neither Washington nor Beijing”, because at the end of the day what “neither Washington nor Beijing” means is: not Beijing, yes Washington. It’s objectively a position of siding with Washington, because Washington is the aggressor in all of this. It’s kind of an unwelcome return to Tony Cliff’s “neither Washington nor Moscow”. Tony Cliff was the leading light of a British Trotskyist organisation called the Socialist Workers Party, and that was essentially a position of opposing actually existing socialism.
So if we’re going to oppose the drive to war, if we’re going to oppose this campaign of containment and encirclement and destabilisation of China, then we must engage with it on the basis of dignity and respect and equality, and we must be very careful not to side with imperialism against it. And also, when we’re judging it, when we’re criticising it, let’s judge it against the real alternatives: what China could have been if it wasn’t led by a Communist Party; if that Communist Party wasn’t brought to power by a revolution of the peasantry and the working class; if it didn’t operate in the interests of ordinary working people; if it was controlled by a capitalist class. The real alternative isn’t some imagined utopia. The real alternative is what you would see in the Philippines or in India or in Bangladesh. Judge China against those places, not against a utopia. If you’re a Marxist, well, be a materialist. That’s the very basis of Marxism.
Having said all that, I think the narrative is shifting. I think the younger generation in particular is far more open to China, far more curious about China, far more willing to learn for themselves about China, far less willing to just absorb the propaganda that’s thrown at them. Gaza is a huge factor in that. It’s really destroyed the credibility of governments and the media in the West – the same governments and the same media that have been demonising China all this time. So when people have upped their critical thinking skills as a result of Gaza, they’re also applying those critical thinking skills in relation to China, in relation to Iran, in relation to Russia, in relation to Cuba or Venezuela or Nicaragua or Zimbabwe, or any of the other classic enemies of the West.
And that’s combined with the whole “China maxing” phenomenon: influencers going to China, YouTubers, TikTokers, et cetera. The whole Xiaohongshu phenomenon of people in the West engaging in a very nice grassroots way with people in China, seeing their ordinary living conditions, seeing what it’s like to go to the hospital with a problem, or what it’s like to go to the grocery store and buy some fruit and vegetables. I think all of that has served to humanise China a little bit, and that filters into the political discussion, including on the left to some degree, so that people are more open to China.
And then there’s the simple fact that China’s progress is undeniable. China’s made undeniable progress that the Western media can’t even hide, in relation to poverty alleviation, in relation to green energy. Young people again tend to be more concerned about the prospects of climate breakdown, because they’re the ones who are going to actually experience it. A lot of older people think, well, summer’s a bit warmer, that’s great, what are you complaining about? So it’s younger generations who are going to have to deal with the consequences of large swathes of the planet becoming uninhabitable. And they’re seeing that China is unquestionably the only renewable energy superpower, the only electric vehicle superpower, the only afforestation superpower, the only biodiversity-protection superpower, et cetera. That’s another thing that’s causing them to think a little bit differently about China.
So I think the conversation in Western society in general is changing about China. I think the conversation in the Western left is changing in relation to China. But of course these things are a long process.
Jason Smith: I want to talk about the Belt and Road Initiative – and not just the Belt and Road Initiative, but China’s engagement generally with the rest of the developing world, the over-exploited world. Because what I see when I look at projects, and I do this often, is China building hospitals, roads, schools, parliamentary buildings, the African Union headquarters, the Africa CDC, ECOWAS headquarters for Africa – all kinds of institutions that are necessary for modernity, throughout a world that has not had the opportunity to have those. Special economic zones, like TEDA in Egypt, or the special economic zones in Cambodia and Laos and other places, to allow them to develop, to allow companies to come in, to add more manufacturing. Sometimes it’s loans that are very low interest – most of the time 2 percent or 0 percent – and sometimes it’s just grants from the Chinese government, or from various state-owned banks. What is China doing, in your opinion, with the developing world, in helping them develop in a way that the West really didn’t?
Carlos Martinez: I would say that what it comes down to is China helping the rest of the Global South to break out of underdevelopment – to break the chains of underdevelopment. And these are chains that were forged and imposed by the Western colonial powers over the course of several hundred years. The colonial period obviously ended in most of Latin America mainly in the nineteenth century, and in Africa mainly in the middle of the twentieth century. But in most instances the colonial relationship was replaced with an imperialist or neo-colonial relationship that was enforced through debt traps, through austerity, through privatisation, through structural adjustment programmes and so on.
The structural adjustment programmes of the IMF are the canonical example of how desperate conditions of poverty were used and abused by the Western powers to hold African countries in a condition of enduring poverty and backwardness, and to reinforce the international division of labour – to reinforce this imperialist hierarchy where you have what Samir Amin called the triad – the United States, Europe and Japan – at the top, and the rest of the world at the bottom. Or, as he defined it, a core–periphery relationship.
So under structural adjustment programmes – for example, when Zimbabwe applied to the IMF for an emergency loan because of a drought year, where there was a risk of famine, the IMF gave a loan, but with substantial loan conditionality. And the conditions were things like: okay, you have to privatise your water system, and you have to spend 50 percent less on education, and you have to prevent this or that trade union from organising, and you have to deregulate your energy, et cetera. So if we’re going to help you save hundreds of thousands of people from dying of famine, you have to commit to the consolidation and the expansion of imperialism in your country. It’s like a legalised protection racket.
So China’s engagement with the Global South has been very different. And of course there are lots of slanders and slurs thrown at China on the basis of this engagement – on the basis of the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, China’s exports and imports. But China is giving countries what they’ve been needing and asking for for decades. It’s not charity, it’s business. China makes investments and it hopes to get returns on its investment. But as you say, it’s building hospitals, it’s building schools, it’s building railways, roads, ports. It’s gifting government buildings – the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, the Africa CDC headquarters. Forty percent of Chinese loans to Africa are for power, in a continent where 50 percent of homes don’t have access to modern energy. Thirty percent of Chinese loans to Africa are for transport, which obviously improves people’s lives and enables economic development and growth.
As for the whole debt-trap myth and the slander that’s constantly thrown at China: people have done this research. They’ve proven that African governments actually owe three times more to Western private lenders than they do to China, and that China’s interest rates are typically around 50 percent of those of Western lenders. And there’s a very interesting study done recently at Nanjing University that showed, across 197 countries and regions between 2000 and 2023, that the more Belt and Road infrastructure was built, the further debt falls – and corruption reduces too.
In addition to all of that, China has introduced zero-tariff access on all product lines for all the African countries with which it has diplomatic relations – which is all African countries with the exception of Eswatini, which still recognises Taiwan. China is engaged in technology transfer. China is helping countries to rise up the value chain – not just extracting lithium or different minerals from countries in the Global South, but helping them to process them locally as well. China’s also very much involved in renewable energy development in Latin America, in Africa, in the Caribbean, in the Pacific, in Central Asia and Southeast Asia. So this is a matter of meeting these countries’ and regions’ needs for development.
And of all the accusations of debt trap, of neo-colonialism and imperialism and all the rest of it, none of these accusations actually come from the countries themselves. Nearly every African country has signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative. No one forced them to do that. There are no private armies. There are no assassination squads. China’s not fighting any wars. It’s not fighting any proxy wars. It’s not organising assassinations. It’s not applying coercive measures. So are you telling me that every African country has signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative even though it’s a colonial project? If that’s the case, then you’re saying that all Africans are stupid, which would be a fairly racist thing to say.
So what do the countries of the Global South say? The countries of the Global South very much appreciate the way that the Chinese operate and the opportunities that China’s growth creates. And from speaking to people in China, they genuinely do think in terms of the global community of shared future. That’s not just a nice-sounding slogan or a catchphrase. The idea is: we’ve learned some lessons in our development over the course of 77 years. We think we’ve got some ideas, and some ways to help you. We think you can benefit from this and that technology. We’ve learned that when we build more roads, we have more economic development, more growth. We’ve invested a lot in education; we’ve invested a lot in scientific research and technological development, and those things have all helped us. And we think you can learn from those lessons. As the English idiom goes, a rising tide lifts all boats, and the Chinese are very willing, very enthusiastic, to contribute to that rising tide. They don’t think of the global economy or international politics as a zero-sum game with winners and losers. They think of it as an extended family, where if you’re doing well, I’m doing well, and if I’m doing well, you’re doing well. And as the Cambodian Deputy PM put it in 2025, the Belt and Road isn’t a debt trap for our people, it’s a lifeline. And that’s a sentiment that’s expressed throughout the Global South.
With just a few days to go before Brazil’s presidential runoff on 25 October, Invent the Future reporter Sara Vivacqua speaks to Isabel dos Anjos Leandro – Brazilian political scientist, long-standing Workers’ Party (PT) activist and political educator from Minas Gerais – about what’s at stake.
They discuss the open campaign of US pressure on Brazil’s election and its links to the Bolsonaro family; the surprise first-round result, in which Flávio Bolsonaro edged ahead of Lula; where Lula can find the votes to win, from the undecided to the millions who abstained; the grassroots campaign spreading beyond the party and onto social media; what is really driving the Bolsonaro vote; and why a Flávio Bolsonaro victory, alongside a far-right Congress, would threaten the 1988 Constitution and the independence of the Supreme Court.
The interview is in Portuguese with English subtitles; an English translation of the transcript is below.
Sara Vivacqua: Today I’m here with Isabel dos Anjos Leandro, a Brazilian political scientist with a doctorate and post-doctorate, and a long-standing activist in the Workers’ Party, with a background in political education, party strategy and programme development.
Isabel is currently coordinator of Lula’s presidential campaign in Minas Gerais, and also works as a parliamentary adviser in Minas Gerais.
Isabel, thank you for joining us today here on Invent the Future.
Brazil goes to the polls on 25 October in a presidential runoff between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro. In this contribution to an International Manifesto Group webinar on the Brazilian elections, Carlos Martinez argues that the outcome matters far beyond Brazil’s borders: the election is a front line in the struggle between a declining US-led imperialist system and a rising multipolar world.
The talk sets out the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine and Washington’s campaign of tariffs, sanctions, terrorist designations and alleged foreign financing against Lula’s Brazil; contrasts it with China’s partnership in trade, investment and industrial development; and looks at what a Bolsonaro government would mean for BRICS, for Palestine and Iran, and for the Global South.
Other speakers know far more than I do about Brazil’s domestic dynamics, so I’ll focus on what this election means for the wider Latin American region, for China, for BRICS, and for this overall, historic struggle between a declining US-led imperialist system and a rising multipolar world.
It’s my view that, of all the elections in the Americas this year, this is the one whose outcome matters most to the Trump regime, which is why it has been so flagrantly interfering, as we’ve been hearing. And the election is of critical importance to the Global South as well, essentially for the same reasons: Brazil is currently on the front line in this war between imperialism and multipolarity.
The Donroe Doctrine
The US National Security Strategy, published last December, promises to “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”, and to “reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy”.
A few analysts interpreted this document as a sort of retreat into the US’s traditional backyard. But the criminal war on Iran, launched a couple of months later, in February this year, shows that the US is not retreating from anywhere. The document is about consolidating the Americas as a secure rear base for a long campaign against China, against Russia, against Iran, and against the peoples of the Global South more generally.
We’ve already seen what this ‘Trump Corollary’ looks like in reality. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been kidnapped, along with First Combatant Cilia Flores. The US is attempting to impose control over Venezuela’s abundant oil resources.
A talk given by Carlos Martinez to the Young Communist League’s Harry Pollitt School, on China’s international strategy on climate and the environment.
Carlos looks at what’s actually happening on the ground: China’s solar capacity has overtaken coal for the first time, its carbon emissions have been flat or falling for nearly two years, and it’s now exporting that green transition to the Global South – financing solar and wind projects across Africa, helping Cuba keep the lights on through a brutal US blockade, and making clean energy cheap enough for the rest of the world to actually use. The talk sets this against the record of the imperialist powers, and makes the case that China’s record isn’t an accident, but the product of a planned, socialist economy.
Transcript
Comrades, thank you very much for inviting me, and thanks to the Young Communist League for organising this year’s Harry Pollitt School – and for supporting the Socialist China Conference last weekend.
I’ve been asked to talk about China’s international strategy in relation to the environment.
Starts at home
China’s international role rests on what it has done at home, so let me start there briefly.
For years we were told that China was the world’s greatest climate villain – the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases; building coal plants left, right and centre.
It’s true, China is overall the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases – albeit it’s a very large country with a population of 1.4 billion people, and a manufacturing powerhouse that engages in a great deal of industry, and its per capita emissions are half those of the United States or Canada.
It’s also true that China still burns more than half the world’s coal.
But there is an unmistakeable direction of travel. In July, China’s installed solar capacity overtook coal for the first time, reaching 1,286 gigawatts – around ten times Britain’s entire generating capacity from all sources. Coal has gone from around 80 percent of China’s energy mix a few decades ago to under 50 percent today, and this number continues to fall. Where new coal stations are built, these are typically to provide backup capacity for intermittent renewable sources, which means they’re playing an important role in the energy transition. In 2025, China added more solar than the rest of the world combined.
China’s carbon emissions have now been flat or falling for nearly two years. And last year, for the first time, China committed to an absolute cut in emissions: 7 to 10 percent below peak by 2035.
As is well known, China is by far the world leader in electric vehicles, electric buses, high-speed rail, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and other clean energy technologies.
None of this happened by accident. Carbon Brief recently went through the 72 thematic five-year plans published by Chinese ministries this year, and found that 54 of them – three quarters – include policies or targets related to climate change and energy. Decarbonisation in China runs through the whole system of economic planning.
That’s possible because the commanding heights of the economy are in public hands, because the major banks are state-owned, because even the private economy is regulated and incorporated into the planning system, and because economic priorities are connected to the long-term needs of society rather than the pursuit of short-term profit.
Affordable and renewable
The single biggest contribution China has made to the global fight against climate breakdown is something fairly prosaic: it has made clean energy cheap.
Over the last 15 years, the global cost of solar power has fallen by more than 80 percent, and wind by around 60 percent, almost exclusively the result of Chinese investment, innovation and scale. As Kevin Tu of Columbia University put it, “if the Chinese manufacturers had not brought down the cost of panels by more than 95 percent, we could not see so many installations across the world.”
This is a game changer for the Global South. Africa has 60 percent of the world’s best solar resources – meaning that it’s exposed to a hell of a lot of solar radiation – but until recently it was too expensive to leverage that. Now it isn’t.
Africa’s solar installations rose by 54 percent last year. And when the criminal US–Israeli war on Iran sent oil and gas prices through the roof this spring, countries across Asia and Africa responded by buying Chinese solar.
In March, according to Ember Energy, Chinese solar exports hit an all-time record of 68 gigawatts, equivalent to Spain’s entire solar capacity. Exports to Africa nearly tripled in a single month, and Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya each imported more than a gigawatt for the first time.
So every target in China’s five-year plan is also manifested in the green transition in the Global South.
Global cooperation
In 2021, Xi Jinping announced at the UN General Assembly that China would build no new coal-fired power plants abroad. Today, 59 percent of China’s energy projects in Africa are solar and wind.
Chinese companies have built the Benban solar park in Egypt, wind farms in Ethiopia and South Africa, hydroelectric stations in Zambia, and a battery-backed solar plant is going into every one of Zambia’s 156 constituencies.
And this is not about creating a relationship of dependency. China is helping countries in the Global South to build their own renewable energy industries. For example, when Zimbabwe decided to stop exporting raw lithium, a Chinese company committed 400 million dollars to building a processing plant there.
The most moving and most poignant example is Cuba. Facing a barbaric – let’s say it, genocidal – energy siege imposed by the Trump regime, with the national grid collapsing again and again, and tens of thousands of patients waiting for operations, China has helped Cuba install around 900 megawatts of solar power. At the Socialist China conference last Saturday, First Secretary at the Cuban Embassy Pablo Ginarte told us this had taken the renewable share of Cuba’s electricity from around 3 percent to 21 percent in a single year. As he put it: “The United States cannot blockade the sun”.
Bizarrely, there are some in the West, and in the Western left, who see all this progress and call it “green imperialism”. These modern-day Lenins have come up with a new definition of imperialism that doesn’t include domination or coercion; where a country can become an imperialist power without wars, coups, military bases, destabilisation campaigns, unilateral sanctions, economic coercion, unequal exchange or structural adjustment. Apparently China has become imperialist through building solar farms in Zambia. Either this is a stunning and important theoretical development, or it’s utter nonsense; I’ll leave it to you to decide.
Defending multilateralism
China has also been the most consistent defender of the international framework for tackling climate change. It insists on the Paris Agreement, and on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities – the idea that the rich countries, which caused the problem, should take the lead in cutting emissions and should provide technology and financial resources for sustainable development in the Global South.
Although, as an aside, in reality it’s China that’s doing the lion’s share of this work!
Meanwhile, Trump has pulled out of the Paris Agreement for a second time, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, and made “drill, baby, drill” the official energy policy of the most powerful country on Earth.
Not to mention waging war on Iran and supporting a genocide in Gaza, both of which are having devastating environmental consequences.
Meanwhile, Washington and Brussels slap tariffs on Chinese solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles – the very things the world needs most – and accuse China of “overcapacity” for making too many of them.
Why this matters
What does all this mean for us in Britain?
First, it means that the New Cold War is not only a threat to peace; it’s a threat to the planet. Every tariff on Chinese solar panels and every attempt to cut China out of supply chains makes the green transition slower and more expensive, in Britain as much as anywhere. A Britain that cooperated with China on renewable energy, on electric transport, on grid technology, would be doing far better on its climate commitments, and furthermore would bring down energy bills.
Second, it’s a reminder that socialism works. The West has had more than 30 years of climate summits, and we’ve been told the whole time that the market will sort it out, or that we can save the planet if only we take shorter showers and make sure we put our packaging in the right bin. China has shown that a green transition happens when a socialist state plans for it, invests in it and puts the long-term needs of humanity ahead of short-term profit.
And third, many people who care about the environment are starting to look at China with fresh eyes, and to ask why it is succeeding where our own rulers are failing. As young communists, you are well placed to help them find the answer.
Xi Jinping said last year that “however the world may change, China will not slow down its climate actions, will not reduce its support for international cooperation, and will not cease its efforts to build a community with a shared future for mankind.”
Let’s do what we can to support that, and to build a world where cooperation, not coercion, is the guiding principle of international relations.
In a result that defied the pre-election polls, Flávio Bolsonaro took first place in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election on 4 October, edging out President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of a runoff on 25 October. In the following article, Carlos Martinez and Sara Vivacqua examine why the far right did so well – a ruling class in crisis, the politics of fear and faith – and what is at stake in the second round.
They argue that a Bolsonaro victory would threaten the 1988 Constitution itself, hand Washington its biggest prize yet under the so-called Donroe Doctrine, and do enormous damage to the multipolar project and to the Amazon. Yet they also show why the material basis of China–Latin America cooperation is too strong to be disrupted on purely ideological grounds.
This article was first published in the Morning Star.
In a surprise result that defied pre-election polls, the far right had a very good night in Brazil last Sunday. Flávio Bolsonaro – son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup – took first place in the presidential election with 47 percent of the vote, against 45.2 percent for the incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. With neither candidate passing the 50 percent threshold, the two will meet again in a runoff on 25 October.
The bad news does not end with the presidential elections. Of the 54 Senate seats contested, 34 went to the right or far right, among them Michelle Bolsonaro and Carlos Bolsonaro, the former president’s wife and second son. Jair Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) is now the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies, with 121 seats to the Workers’ Party’s (PT) 70. The PT held on to its traditional strongholds in the north-east (the poorest region, with the highest proportion of Afro-Brazilians), but the overall picture is of a significant shift to the right.
A ruling class in crisis
Capital quickly delivered a favourable verdict: the Financial Times reports that the Brazilian real rose 4.2 percent against the dollar and the São Paulo stock exchange jumped almost 8 percent to a record high, as investors bet on a Bolsonaro government that would “mount rapid spending cuts” and dismantle environmental regulations. That should surprise nobody: always hostile to Lula and the PT, Brazil’s ruling class and its media stenographers have led a frenzied demonisation campaign against the left, portraying the PT as corrupt and incompetent.
The country is running a budget deficit of close to a tenth of GDP, with some of the highest interest rates in the world, and Lula has governed since 2023 alongside an obstructive, conservative-dominated Congress. In spite of these severe economic and political constraints, the PT government has taken Brazil off the UN Hunger Map, restored and expanded Bolsa Família, made bold commitments on environmental protection, and refused to subordinate the country’s foreign policy to Washington.
In the following article, Carlos Martinez draws on a recent visit to Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, to examine how the city has become at once a centre of frontier technology – home to DeepSeek, Unitree Robotics and Alibaba – and a testing ground for ecological civilisation.
Carlos traces both transformations back to Zhejiang’s “Eight-Eight Strategy”, launched in 2003 when Xi Jinping was provincial Party secretary, and shows how public institutions have created the conditions for innovation while directing it towards wider developmental goals. He sets out the material record of the green transition – distributed solar overtaking coal, clean rivers and a restored West Lake, a metro network that has grown fivefold in seven years – while also confronting the contradiction at its heart: the AI and cloud-computing industries that make Hangzhou a technology leader are among its fastest-growing sources of electricity demand.
The direction of technological change, he concludes, is a political choice, requiring “long-term planning, public investment and institutions capable of subordinating private profit to the common good”. The article complements Gary Wilson’s recent analysis of the US chip blockade and the discussion on AI and the new quality productive forces at the recent Socialist China Conference.
A version of this article first appeared in Beijing Review.
Visiting Hangzhou in April, the signs of change were everywhere: electric vehicles crowding the roads, an extensive metro system, e-bikes as a default mode of transport for millions, and well-maintained residential communities built around shared green space and public amenities.
Hangzhou has emerged simultaneously as a centre of frontier technology and a testing ground for ecological civilisation. It is home to DeepSeek, Unitree Robotics and Alibaba; it is also a city of restored waterways, expanding wetlands, distributed solar power and extensive low-carbon transport.
Both of these development threads have common roots in a strategy laid down more than two decades ago.
A twenty-year harvest
Hangzhou is now a megacity of 12.7 million people. Its economy reached 2.3 trillion yuan ($330 billion) in 2025, while the core industries of its digital economy account for 29.5 percent of GDP. This is not a small technology enclave surrounded by an otherwise traditional economy. Digital development has become one of the city’s principal productive forces.
The Western media discovered Hangzhou’s technology sector in early 2025, after the success of DeepSeek and the emergence of the so-called “six little dragons”: DeepSeek, Unitree, Game Science, Deep Robotics, BrainCo and Manycore Tech. The label is journalistic rather than official; what matters is the ecosystem beneath it.
Three of the six have founders who studied at Zhejiang University, which has established itself as one of the world’s leading research institutions. Those companies have also benefited from dense manufacturing supply chains, a large pool of engineers, competitive domestic markets and a local government willing to build institutions around emerging industries.
This is a story of public institutions creating the conditions in which innovation can occur, then attempting to direct that innovation towards wider developmental goals.
The origins lie in Zhejiang’s “Eight-Eight Strategy”, launched in 2003 when Xi Jinping was provincial Party secretary. The strategy combined advanced manufacturing, regional integration and scientific development with the construction of an “ecological province”.
Unitree tells a related story. The launch price of its humanoid robots fell from around $90,000 in 2023 to $5,900 in 2025, reflecting the depth of China’s component suppliers and manufacturing infrastructure.
Ecological civilisation in material form
Hangzhou’s green transformation has followed the same pattern: targets, infrastructure, experimentation and adjustment.
The city of Hangzhou itself reached 7.55 gigawatts of solar capacity by June 2026, already exceeding its 2030 target of 6.5 gigawatts. The provincial energy big-data centre monitors energy systems in real time, while virtual power plants coordinate batteries, electric vehicles and commercial buildings to help balance supply and demand. The energy transition is therefore not simply a matter of installing panels; it involves constructing a more flexible and intelligent electricity system around them.
By 2025, 99.7 percent of the province’s nationally and provincially monitored water sections were at Grade III or better. All eight major river systems, together with the Grand Canal, reached that level for the first time. In Hangzhou, monitored surface-water sections and drinking-water sources have achieved full compliance for five consecutive years.
The municipal response has been to impose a power-usage-effectiveness ceiling of 1.2 on new large data centres, while expanding solar power, storage and smart-grid management. This is the real content of a green transition: not the absence of contradictions, but the capacity to identify and manage them.
The city’s experience suggests that future technology and ecological development cannot be separated. Artificial intelligence can help integrate renewable energy, manage transport, monitor pollution and use resources more efficiently; but it also consumes electricity and materials on an enormous scale. The task is not to choose between becoming “smart” and becoming green. It is to ensure that technological development remains subject to social and ecological goals.
Hangzhou does not offer a finished model, still less a future without contradictions. What it does show is that the direction of technological change is a political choice. Markets can generate new products, but they cannot by themselves coordinate energy systems, restore waterways, build public transport or ensure that the costs and benefits of innovation are shared. Bringing future technology into line with ecological civilisation requires long-term planning, public investment and institutions capable of subordinating private profit to the common good.
