Invent the Future

What would Rajani Palme Dutt have made of contemporary China?

To mark the 130th anniversary of the birth of Rajani Palme Dutt – theoretician, organiser and, for half a century, one of the foremost Marxist minds in the British movement – Carlos Martinez asks what he would have made of contemporary China, testing his 1967 pamphlet Whither China? against the verdict of history.

This lecture was delivered on 27 June 2026 at the R. Palme Dutt Memorial Lecture 2026 at SOAS University of London, organised by the Students’ Federation of India UK and the Young Communist League.

The text was first published on Friends of Socialist China.

Comrades and friends. Thank you to the Students’ Federation of India UK and the Young Communist League for organising this event, and for asking me to speak.

We gather to mark the 130th anniversary of the birth of Rajani Palme Dutt – theoretician, organiser, anti-imperialist, and for half a century one of the foremost Marxist minds in the British movement. A man whose very name – the Bengali ‘Rajani’ and ‘Dutt’ alongside the Swedish ‘Palme’ – embodied the internationalism he preached and practised.

I want to use my time to ask a particular question. Palme Dutt died in 1974. He did not live to see China’s reform and opening up, the collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s rise to becoming the second-largest economy on earth, or the New Cold War now being waged against the People’s Republic. So: what would Rajani Palme Dutt have made of contemporary China?

It might seem a strange or pointless question to pose. The most substantial thing Palme Dutt wrote about China was his 1967 pamphlet Whither China? – which is, on its surface, a sharp polemic against the Chinese leadership, written at the height of the Sino-Soviet split, a year into the Cultural Revolution.

Palme Dutt was of course very much on the Soviet side in that split. Nonetheless, his pamphlet was not a simple repetition of the Soviet line, but a careful and serious analysis from a fundamentally comradely perspective.

So the question is posed not as a parlour game, but as a way of asking what a great Marxist of the past would make of the present; of testing his analysis against the reality of history; and of separating enduring principles from contingent positions.

A pamphlet of its moment

The Sino-Soviet split was, of course, one of the greatest setbacks our global movement has ever suffered, and reading Palme Dutt’s pamphlet, you feel the weight of it on every page. He is clearly shocked and deeply saddened by the bitterness of the situation.

And with the hindsight of six decades, we can recognise that both sides were at fault and went too far. As Deng Xiaoping put it to Gorbachev in 1989, when the two parties finally normalised relations again, “there was a lot of empty talk on both sides”. Deng’s verdict – “we no longer think that everything we said at that time was right” – could stand as an epitaph for the whole dispute.

So let me look at the substance of a few elements of Palme Dutt’s critique, and subject it to the test of history.

The Cultural Revolution

Certain parts of Palme Dutt’s criticism actually resonate with the assessment the Communist Party of China itself would later reach. On the Cultural Revolution’s assault on nearly all hitherto existing culture, he wrote:

“This offensive in the cultural field repeated in the most exaggerated form the kind of trend which had been familiar in the early days of the Russian Revolution in the movement known as ‘proletcult’, and which had been soundly trounced by Lenin – the tendency to what Lenin described as ‘cultural nihilism’, of the denunciation of the whole classical heritage of pre-revolutionary culture as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘feudal’ and worthless for revolutionaries.”

The CPC’s own 1981 Resolution on certain questions in the history of our Party came to call the Cultural Revolution “the most severe setback … suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic”.

Meanwhile Xi Jinping today warns insistently against ‘historical nihilism’ – though, in a neat reversal, he deploys the term to defend the achievements of the Mao era against those who would erase them, while also championing the importance of China’s traditional culture and civilisational heritage.

Palme Dutt’s instinct – that a revolution must “take over and absorb all that was best in the entire heritage of human culture”, in his paraphrase of Lenin – is, in its essentials, the position of the Chinese leadership today. I would note in passing – just to emphasise the point that things are always complicated – that Mao himself also advocated making the past serve the present and stressed the need to “extensively and critically make use of China’s cultural heritage” and “to make the things we have inherited our own”.

So Palme Dutt’s critique of the Cultural Revolution’s excesses is, at one level, vindicated by history. One caveat I would raise, however, is that part of the motivation for the Cultural Revolution was identifying in the Soviet leadership of that era a blunting of revolutionary edge, a bureaucratisation and ossification of the Communist Party, and a degree of ideological weakening – all of which appeared to the Chinese leaders as being cause for concern.

Given the continuation of those phenomena in the ensuing decades, and given how they contributed to the tragic collapse of the Soviet Union just 24 years later, I’d argue that some of the Cultural Revolution’s impulses were not misplaced, even if the methods were often extreme and disastrous.

In my view there is still some work to be done in developing a fully nuanced and dialectical assessment of the Cultural Revolution.

Three Worlds and the principal contradiction

This brings us to what Palme Dutt called the ‘three-continent theory’ – the emerging Chinese conception, soon to be elaborated as the Theory of the Three Worlds, that the principal arena of world revolution had shifted to the national liberation struggles of Asia, Africa and Latin America, “the rural areas of the world” encircling “the cities of the world”.

Palme Dutt regarded this as a substantial departure from Marxism-Leninism; a downgrading of the working class and the socialist camp to “an auxiliary role”.

This is essentially the Soviet line, and really captures the essence of the split. The Soviet Union was the first country to build socialism, to maintain a socialist revolution. That revolution was waged primarily by the industrial working class against the primary enemy of the capitalist class. Then this socialist revolution had to defend itself against a hostile capitalist world.

The Chinese communists, on the other hand, set out to build socialism in a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society. The revolution was waged primarily by the poorer sections of the peasantry against both the big landlords and the imperialist powers. Without question the primary contradiction in the situation was not between the Chinese proletariat and the Chinese bourgeoisie, but between the Chinese people and the imperialist powers.

The Soviet leadership of the time was unable to grasp the historic significance of this difference, and that’s reflected in Palme Dutt’s critique. He writes:

“Owing to its class basis… the peasantry can never be the leading class in a revolution. Only the industrial working class, even though much smaller in numbers, can, if strongly organised and with Marxist political consciousness and leadership, successfully fulfil this role, and in alliance with the peasantry lead the revolution to victory.”

To me this reads as a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that had by that point already been decisively proven wrong by the experiences in China, Vietnam and Korea – experiences that were theorised most clearly in the writings of Mao Zedong. It’s really a framework of an advanced European Marxism: the industrial working class as the leading class, the peasantry as a problem to be managed.

Much like the Soviet leadership of the time, Palme Dutt doesn’t manage to fully get his head around a peasant-driven revolutionary process, or around the historic significance of the expansion of Marxism into the colonial and semi-colonial world.

As for the Three Worlds Theory itself, it retains real validity and applicability today. Palme Dutt correctly identifies the main thing it got wrong, that is, that the Soviet Union was part of the ‘First World’, was an imperialist power and an objective ally of US imperialism.

But the notion of the principal contradiction in global politics as being between oppressed and oppressor nations; and identifying the main arena of struggle as being in the Global South rather than in the industrialised North; and furthermore highlighting the possibility of establishing a modus vivendi with the ‘Second World’, or the ‘intermediate zone’, and helping to draw it away from a dying hegemonism – all that remains valid and useful for understanding the world today.

Peaceful coexistence

One of the strongest critiques in the pamphlet – and another of the central disagreements of the split – is around differing conceptions of peaceful coexistence.

While the entire communist movement was committed to the general principles of peaceful coexistence, the Soviet Union had developed a particular conception of it in the 1950s and 1960s, that emphasised stabilising the world situation, avoiding another world war at all costs, avoiding nuclear annihilation, and to that end attempting to arrive at some sort of lasting accommodation with the capitalist powers.

This included not being seen to overtly encourage revolutionary movements in the capitalist world, an ideological side effect of which was the downgrading of the importance of revolutionary struggle in general.

In a context of intense and bitter debate between the CPC and the CPSU, the Chinese leadership were quick to dismiss the Soviet line as wholesale capitulation to imperialism.

In reality, the differences shouldn’t have been irreconcilable.

One oft-overlooked element in the equation is that the Soviet and Chinese revolutions were at different stages of their development. The Soviet Union by the 1960s was an established superpower, seeking to consolidate its gains and arrive at some sort of stable, long-term equilibrium with the West. China was younger, poorer, still encircled, still excluded from its own seat at the United Nations, and understandably less willing to accept a settlement that seemed to freeze the world in place.

Partly also the Soviets too often did not consult the Chinese, did not treat them as equals, did not grasp the historic significance of the world revolution’s expansion into Asia. Deng Xiaoping explained to Gorbachev in 1989 that the Chinese side had felt humiliated, not treated as equals.

Beneath the doctrinal quarrels lay older, uglier residues that our movement inherited from capitalism – eurocentrism, and the assumption that the capitals of European Marxism had a natural right to lead. Russia, we should remember, had itself been one of the powers that imposed unequal treaties on China, leading to the loss of a huge amount of Chinese territory. It is not hard to see why Chinese communists were sensitive on the point.

Meanwhile, looking at the world situation today, what’s striking is that China’s foreign policy – with its focus on multipolarity and win-win cooperation, its insistence on peace and on the principles of the UN Charter – is in many respects not so far removed from the Soviet conceptions of the time.

Not, in the end, uncomradely

It must be said that Whither China? is not by any means an uncomradely document. For all its polemic, Palme Dutt never crossed the line into treating China as an enemy. Indeed, the pamphlet’s most important passages are its most generous. It correctly notes, for example, the underlying culpability of imperialism:

“The main responsibility for the present difficulties in China lies, not in the internal situation, but in the international situation, in the criminal aggressive role of United States imperialism. The US imperialists have cut off China from her rightful place in international politics and maintained a permanent war situation.”

Palme Dutt then quotes US Defence Secretary McNamara, coolly estimating in January 1967 that a “relatively small number of warheads detonated over 50 Chinese urban centres would destroy half of the urban population … and more than one half of the industrial capacity” – and observes that it was hardly surprising such permanent menace should breed a suspicion that any kind of détente was betrayal. He continues:

“For this reason our international duty, irrespective of any differences on policy or tactical questions with the Chinese leadership within the international communist movement, is to maintain solidarity with China and the Chinese people and the Chinese revolution against the aggression of US imperialism.”

Written at the very nadir of the split, this is a principled and correct conclusion, and speaks admirably to Palme Dutt’s commitment to the defence of socialism and the socialist world.

What would Palme Dutt make of China today?

Even in 1967, even while penning a relatively harsh critique, Palme Dutt refused to write China out of the socialist camp:

“China is a socialist country. During the First Five Year Plan the foundations of socialism were securely established… There is no sign or indication whatever of the foundation of socialism being abandoned or overthrown … Experience has shown how socialist revolutions can go through difficult and dangerous phases, but can in the end overcome them and carry forward the advance.”

This assessment has aged well.

So what would he make of China now?

He would, first of all, have to take on board two stubborn facts: the People’s Republic of China still exists, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics does not. China has come to be the largest and most developed socialist society in history – it’s outlasted the USSR, lifted some 800 million people out of poverty, become the world leader in renewable energy, and now stands at the head of the long process of building a multipolar world.

And the change has not been only material. The Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo, touring China in 2010, watched peasants from the remotest corners of the country arriving in Beijing for the first time – men and women who had ceased to be, as he put it, “simple peasants tied to the piece of earth they cultivated, as if imprisoned”, and become citizens. Development had brought them not just an end to hunger but “individual and national dignity”.

Ultimately, China is carrying forward the projects that Palme Dutt cared most about: the defeat of imperialism, the advance of the oppressed nations, the survival and flourishing of socialism.

And given his assessment in 1967 that the foundations of socialism were secure, he would have seen the continuity of the revolution, and recognised that the People’s Republic remains socialist today. He would have asked the materialist’s questions: who holds the commanding heights of the economy? What class is in power?

He would have found his answer in the fact that the Chinese state owns the land beneath every city. That it owns the great banks – the largest banks in the world are Chinese and state-controlled, their executives, as The Economist has observed, “beholden to a higher authority than the stock market”. That it controls and manages energy, telecommunications, rail and heavy industry. Investment is still steered by five-year plans, and the Communist Party sits inside the major boardrooms. There is a capitalist class, and there are billionaires – but they are tolerated, not sovereign: not permitted to organise as a class, to form their own party, or to impose their will on society.

Many on the left can and do object: a stock market, billionaires, private capital, huge inequality – how can this be socialism? But the test was never the mere existence of capitalists; it is whether capital rules. The decisive question is who disciplines whom – and in China it is the state that disciplines capital, not the other way round.

Modern China is, as Albert Szymanski argued of the socialist states generally, a system whose legitimacy rests on building socialism and on raising the condition of the working people – and which is therefore driven, by its own internal logic, to keep doing so.

Palme Dutt would, in short, have recognised the continuity that runs, through every twist and turn, from the Jiangxi Soviet to the period of New Democracy, through the first three decades of socialist construction, through reform and opening up, to socialism with Chinese characteristics in the present day.

The Chinese idiom ‘seek truth from facts’ – which Deng Xiaoping would later make the watchword of the reform era – was given its classic Marxist formulation by Mao in 1940, in his essay On New Democracy, in a section with the subheading, of all things, “Whither China?”. Mao wrote:

“To seek truth from facts is the scientific approach, and presumptuously to claim infallibility and lecture people will never settle anything … There is but one truth, and the question of whether or not one has arrived at it depends not on subjective boasting but on objective practice. The only yardstick of truth is the revolutionary practice of millions of people.”

That is the standard by which I think Palme Dutt would have wanted to be judged, and by which he would have judged China. By objective practice – by the revolutionary practice of millions of people.

Taking Palme Dutt’s legacy forward

Does anything of practical importance flow from all this? I think it does.

The first thing is that, with the distance of a few decades, we can recognise that the Sino-Soviet split was a tragedy for our movement, but also that it need not be a permanent dividing line in our movement. We can learn the relevant lessons and move forward in the spirit of unity.

The cooperation we increasingly see across once-hostile traditions, the renewed solidarity with China among parties that were on the Soviet side of the split, is part of that healing. Palme Dutt, who was deeply committed to the unity of the international communist movement, would have welcomed it without reservation.

The other tasks flow from the one principle from which he never wavered in Whither China?: solidarity with a socialist country under imperialist siege, “irrespective of any differences”. That means the defence of socialism as a living project, regardless of any reservations comrades may have about this or that socialist country, or indeed of any differences that exist or may arise among the presently existing socialist countries.

It means the defence of the oppressed nations and peoples. It means the defence of the People’s Republic of China and its genuine, world-historic achievements against the slanders of the New Cold War – the trade war, the tech war, the propaganda war, AUKUS, the encirclement campaign, and so on. And it means the fight against imperialism and against the resurgent fascism that is imperialism’s shadow, and against the drive to war that threatens us all.

Palme Dutt ended his pamphlet on a note of confidence. Let me close with his words:

“Despite the present formidable difficulties and dangers … we maintain our confidence in the future of the great Chinese revolution and the Chinese people, and in the creative forces of a socialist revolution.”

Why the Chinese working class won’t pay for Western neoliberalism

The following article by Carlos Martinez responds to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s call at the recent EU summit for a new “Plaza Accord” to force up the value of the Chinese renminbi.

Carlos recalls how the original 1985 Plaza Accord was not a neutral rebalancing of trade but the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor – Washington strong-arming Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar, plunging Japan into a “lost decade” of stagnation while failing to dent a US trade deficit that originated in Washington’s own model of high consumption and low savings, not in the exchange rate.

Carlos argues that China today cannot be treated as Japan was. Where Japan was a subordinate Cold War ally hosting tens of thousands of US troops; China is a sovereign socialist state with an increasingly prosperous domestic market of 1.4 billion people, an independent financial policy and a central bank that answers to no one in the West – it simply cannot be “Plaza’d”.

The article also takes aim at the language of “overcapacity”, which Carlos describes as a euphemism for European and North American industry failing to compete after nearly half a century of financialisation, privatisation and deregulation. Chinese competitiveness in electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels flows from a complete industrial system and sustained investment in technology – not from currency manipulation – and the EU’s tariffs of up to 35 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles are, he writes, “an act of self-harm disguised as self-defence”.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

At the recent EU summit, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared the Chinese renminbi to be undervalued by as much as 30 per cent and floated the idea of a new Plaza Accord — a co-ordinated effort to force up the value of the currency, just as Washington did to Japan in 1985.

It is worth remembering how that story ended, because the history Merz is reaching for is not the cautionary tale he imagines it to be.

The Plaza Accord was not a neutral exercise in rebalancing trade. It was the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor. Meeting at New York’s Plaza Hotel in September 1985, the United States strong-armed Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar.

Within two years, the dollar–yen rate had fallen by half. Japanese exports were hammered, capital fled into frenzied property and stock-market speculation, and when that bubble burst at the end of the decade, Japan was plunged into a “lost decade” of stagnation that stretched into a lost generation.

Tokyo’s tormentors, meanwhile, failed to reap much from this harvest: the US goods trade deficit with Japan stood at around $46 billion in 1985 and, instead of shrinking, climbed past $55bn in both 1986 and 1987. The currency had been clobbered, but the imbalance remained.

The reason is that the imbalance never originated in the exchange rate in the first place. It grew out of the US’s own domestic economic model of high consumption and low savings, and out of the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, which compels the US to run deficits in order to supply the world with dollars. No amount of bullying Tokyo could fix a problem made in Washington.

Why could Japan be treated this way at all? Because it was never a sovereign equal but a subordinate ally — a Western outpost in East Asia, permitted to grow rich as part of the cold war project of containing communism, but never permitted to seriously challenge its benefactors. When push came to shove, hosting tens of thousands of American troops and sheltering under the US security umbrella, Tokyo had no choice but to fold. The Plaza Accord is now near-universally regarded, even by mainstream economists, as an act of economic sabotage dressed up as co-operation.

The world says no: Iran, the Global South and the end of the unipolar moment

The US-Israeli war on Iran has been defeated – and the world’s response to it, above all from China and the Global South, reveals how profoundly the global balance of forces has shifted. In the article below, Carlos Martinez argues that Iran’s victory provides important evidence that the unipolar moment is over.

The criminal US-Israeli war on Iran has wrought devastation on a horrendous scale. The campaign has included the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and numerous other political leaders and scientists; the bombing of schools, hospitals, bridges and energy infrastructure; and, from April, a naval blockade of Iran’s ports. Aerial attacks have killed around 3,500 civilians, including 168 children at an elementary school in Minab, in one of the gravest single atrocities since the Vietnam War.

This is a war of aggression, pure and simple. There has been no Security Council authorisation, and UN human rights experts have denounced the assault as a violation of the most basic principles of the UN Charter. The pretext – that Iran was on the cusp of acquiring a nuclear weapon – is the same threadbare story Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling since 1992, and is roughly as credible as Tony Blair’s claim in 2003 that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

But something distinguishes this war from the Iraq war a generation ago. In 2003, Washington could assemble a “coalition of the willing”, browbeat the UN, and assume the world would fall into line. In 2026, the world is conspicuously refusing to do so. And the war has not merely been opposed – it has been defeated. As of late June it stands suspended under an interim memorandum of understanding whose terms read like a list of concessions wrung from Washington. The response to this war – above all from China and the Global South – tells us a great deal about how profoundly the global balance of forces has shifted.

Cuba’s economic reforms and the prospects for socialist renewal

This month Cuba approved the most far-reaching changes to its economic model in more than 60 years. In this article, Carlos Martinez argues that – far from the blockade finally breaking the Revolution – the reforms are best understood as a defence of socialism under siege, following the strategic logic China has pursued since 1978: the controlled use of markets and foreign investment to develop the productive forces while the Communist Party retains political power and public ownership of the commanding heights.

This article first appeared on Friends of Socialist China. A version of the article, translated into Portuguese, can be found on Brasil de Fato.

This month Cuba announced the most far-reaching changes to its economic model in more than 60 years. Approved by an Extraordinary Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and passed unanimously by the National Assembly, the programme runs to 23 strategic axes and 176 concrete measures. Predictably, much of the Western press – along with a substantial section of the Western left – has rushed to interpret it as the moment the blockade finally broke the Revolution, as proof that Havana has at last been forced onto the capitalist road.

Such a reading misunderstands both the content of the measures and the history that has produced them. The reforms are best understood as Cuba’s attempt to do what several other besieged socialist states have had to do before it: to defend itself by developing its productive forces, on its own terms, but under conditions not of its choosing. As the Cuba specialist Isaac Saney puts it, the measures, “far from representing a retreat”, in fact constitute “a strategic effort to preserve and deepen the social gains of the Revolution in the face of relentless external pressure and unprecedented economic challenges”.

For those that have followed China’s development, the framework on display in Havana is immediately recognisable. Cuba is reaching, under enormous duress, for the strategic logic that has guided the Chinese Revolution since 1978: the controlled use of markets and foreign investment to develop the productive forces, while the Communist Party retains political power and public ownership of the commanding heights. It is also reaching for the support of its longstanding friends. China and Vietnam have been Cuba’s most consequential partners in weathering the present siege, and the deepening relationship between their parties forms an essential part of the backdrop to these reforms.

What the reforms actually do

Under the new package, Cuba will scrap the long-standing requirement that foreign investors partner with a state-owned company. It will authorise large private firms, permit private banks to operate, allow private real estate development, and open the door to domestic and foreign investors acquiring stakes in state enterprises, some of which are to be converted into joint-stock companies.

Cubans living abroad will be actively encouraged to invest, donate, import technology and build businesses at home. State-owned enterprises – which remain the principal pillar of the economy – will be granted far greater autonomy over investment, hiring, pricing and financial management, while municipal governments will gain expanded powers to pursue local development. Wage ceilings that have motivated significant numbers of skilled professionals to leave the country are to be lifted.

Imperialism vs multipolarity: how the war on Iran backfired on the US

The US-Israeli war on Iran was meant to halt the world’s drift towards multipolarity. Instead it accelerated it.

In this talk from the webinar “Imperialism vs Multipolarity: US and China’s clashing visions” (organised by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group), Carlos Martinez argues that the war on Iran is the sharpest illustration we have of two clashing visions of world order – a declining empire that rules through sanctions, blockades and bombing, and an emerging multipolar order based on sovereignty, development and peace.

The presentation covers:

What the war was really about: Iran, Palestine, the Belt and Road, and the containment of China
Why Iran survived in 2026 what Mossadegh’s Iran could not in 1953
China’s role: buying Iranian oil in defiance of sanctions, the UN Security Council veto, economic and diplomatic support
How the outcome has strengthened Iran, weakened the US, isolated Israel, and accelerated the rise of the multipolar world

Watch the full webinar: Imperialism vs Multipolarity: US and China’s clashing visions.

Transcript

I’m going to make Iran – rather than China or the US directly – the main focus of my remarks, because the war there is the sharpest illustration we have of the two clashing visions we’re discussing today.

First I’ll talk about how the Iran war relates to the overall global struggle between imperialism and multipolarity.

Second, how the emerging multipolar reality has shaped the outcomes of that war.

And third, how those outcomes are, in turn, reshaping the trajectory of the multipolar project.

Interview: Can the working class win?

The video below is an interview of Carlos Martinez by Jason Smith, for CGTN’s The Bridge to China podcast. Recorded in the lead-up to the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, the wide-ranging conversation covers the nature of China’s economic system, the achievements of Chinese socialism, the state of the left in the West, and the transition to a multipolar world.

Carlos argues that China is best understood on its own terms, as socialism with Chinese characteristics: a fundamentally socialist system with a significant market component, in which the state holds the commanding heights – banking, energy, telecommunications, rail and the top levels of industry – and directs investment through national planning. The presence of markets, billionaires or inequality does not make a country capitalist; what matters is which class holds power, and the ultimate measure is the living standards of ordinary working people.

On that measure, China stands apart: it is the country that has eliminated extreme poverty, effectively ended homelessness, and pursued common prosperity, a world-leading renewable energy build-out and the saving of lives during the Covid pandemic. If China is socialist and succeeding, Carlos contends, that vindicates the project of the global left – which is precisely why the West’s new cold war is aimed at preventing a socialist alternative from succeeding.

The interview surveys the scale of China’s transformation – some 800 million people lifted out of poverty, the “seven guarantees” that underpin poverty alleviation, life expectancy rising from around 35 at liberation to over 79 today, near-universal mortgage-free home ownership, and the most extensive public infrastructure in the world. Comparing China with India – liberated within two years of one another, from similar starting points – Carlos draws out what a revolution and Communist Party-led planning have made possible: sovereign development free of IMF discipline, coherent five-year plans, and the capacity for mass mobilisation, exemplified by the three million cadres deployed in the poverty alleviation campaign.

Turning to the West, Carlos describes the long retreat of the left under the neoliberal counter-revolution – de-industrialisation, the rise of the precariat, and a social peace bought with the super-profits of imperialism that are now drying up. He points to the crisis of confidence deepened by Gaza and to the Corbyn moment as signs that material reality is shifting, and to a growing openness to China – from “Chinamaxxing” and the RedNote migration to the surge in inbound tourism. The dogmatism that still leads much of the Western left to withhold recognition of China’s decidedly socialist achievements, he argues, plays into a US grand strategy whose core is the encirclement and containment of China.

The lesson for developed and developing countries alike, Carlos concludes, is that public ownership is not inefficient but the precondition for any serious industrial policy, that long-term planning beats short-term shareholder value, and that the West must come to terms with an inevitably multipolar world – starting, at a minimum, with adherence to the United Nations Charter.

A full transcript follows below. Individual answers will also be posted as separate clips on the Invent the Future YouTube channel.

Transcript

Jason Smith: Socialism, China, and the West. Hey everyone, I’m Jason Smith, originally from sunny California, now living in beautiful Beijing. Joining us today is Carlos Martinez, a British Marxist writer, researcher, and anti-imperialist activist. He is co-author of The East Is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century, and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China. Welcome back to The Bridge to China.

Carlos Martinez: Hey Jason, great to be with you. I think this is the third time.

Jason Smith: I think it is. I really wanted to have you on because the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China is coming up, and I wanted to get your thoughts on socialism, Marxism and Western perspectives of Chinese socialism. But before we get there — people may not have seen our previous interviews, or may not be familiar with your work. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with China and how you got into studying it?

Pure socialism is pure idealism: a reply to Jacobin on China

Carlos Martinez responds to a recent Jacobin book review that frames China’s development as “brutal exploitation” indistinguishable from Britain’s industrial revolution. Originally published at Friends of Socialist China.

Jacobin has published a review by Daniel Cheng of Adrift in the South, the memoir of the Chinese worker-poet Xiao Hai, detailing the harsh conditions he faced as a migrant worker in the megacities of southern China.

The book itself sounds interesting and worthwhile, and there is no reason to doubt the harshness of the conditions Xiao Hai describes. But the frame the review wraps around his story – that China’s economic miracle was “made possible by the brutal exploitation of millions of workers”, and that China’s development and the dark satanic mills of Britain’s industrialisation can be comfortably placed together in a category of “the universal suffering of capitalism” – is ahistorical, idealist, and, in the present geopolitical conjuncture, actively unhelpful.

Exploitation has to be contextualised

The first thing to say is that China’s growth has not simply enriched a class of capitalists. It has transformed the lives of the great majority. Over the past half-century, China has lifted an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty – by the World Bank’s own reckoning, more than three-quarters of the entire reduction in global poverty over the same period. Chinese workers and farmers today live longer, eat better, are far better educated and enjoy a level of material security their grandparents could barely have imagined.

Why does China still love Mao so much?

The standard Western story about modern China is that Mao has been quietly buried by the Communist Party, that Deng Xiaoping repudiated his legacy, and that the China that emerged after 1978 is no longer really socialist. By implication, China’s success is the success of capitalism, not of the revolution.

So why do ordinary Chinese people still travel in their millions to Shaoshan – the village in Hunan where Mao was born, now one of the most-visited tourist sites in China – to pay their respects to the founder of the People’s Republic? Stand there among the crowds and the Western story falls apart on contact.

In this video, Carlos Martinez draws on a recent trip to Shaoshan, and on the hard development data from the Mao era, to answer that question: the Mao era and the reform era are not opposed phases of Chinese history. They are two stages of a single revolutionary project, and the Chinese people know it.

Between 1949 and 1976, life expectancy in China rose by 32 years – the fastest improvement ever recorded by any country in human history. Adult illiteracy fell from over 80 per cent to 33 per cent by 1978. Land was redistributed. Women were emancipated. A complete industrial base was built from near-zero. The treaty ports were abolished. The country was unified after a century of fragmentation. This is the China the post-Mao leadership inherited – not the impoverished backwater of Western myth.

Without Mao, no Deng. Without 1949, no 1978. As the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin put it, the take-off of the post-1978 period “would not have been possible without the economic, political and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period.” It is also exactly how the Communist Party of China understands its own history, in Xi Jinping’s doctrine of “the two cannot negates.”

Sources and further reading:

Carlos Martinez, “No great wall: on the continuity of the Chinese Revolution”
https://invent-the-future.org/2021/05/no-great-wall/

Samir Amin, “China 2013”
https://monthlyreview.org/articles/china-2013/

Domenico Losurdo, “Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism”
https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/

Friends of Socialist China
https://socialistchina.org

Transcript

Hello and welcome. In April this year, I had the privilege of visiting Shaoshan, the small village in Hunan province where Mao Zedong was born in 1893. And Shaoshan is one of the most visited tourist sites in China. Ordinary Chinese people travel there in their millions every year. The Mao family home is preserved as it was. There’s a major statue erected in 1993 for the centenary of his birth. And across China, there are museums, study halls, and exhibition rooms commemorating the life of the man Chinese people overwhelmingly regard as the founder of modern China.

And I wanted to talk about Shaoshan because what you see there very much goes against the narrative that Western ruling class media and academia have been telling us about China for the last half century or so. The standard story runs like this. Mao’s been quietly buried by the Communist Party of China. Deng Xiaoping repudiated his legacy. The reform era China that emerged after 1978 is essentially a market economy with red branding, no longer connected to the revolutionary project that began in 1921, or to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. And the implication is that China’s success story is not a function of socialism. The achievements you can see across the country today are the achievements of capitalism. And Mao is some kind of embarrassing relic that the party can neither fully claim nor fully repudiate.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port and the complete collapse of the ‘debt trap’ narrative

In this article, Carlos Martinez examines how the “debt trap” narrative around Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port has completely collapsed. Originally published at Friends of Socialist China.

Hambantota, the deep-water port on the south coast of Sri Lanka, was for years the canonical example of what the Trump administration’s erstwhile vice-president Mike Pence labelled “debt-trap diplomacy” – the supposed Chinese practice of luring poor countries into unsustainable loans, then seizing strategic infrastructure when repayment failed.

Presenting a menacing, predatory China exploiting hapless developing nations to extend its reach and dominance, Hambantota became a top New Cold War talking point, propagated by Western journalists, Indian think tanks and Washington policy advisors alike.

However, the most obvious problem with the story was that it was patently untrue.

A succession of careful studies – by Chatham House, by Deborah Bräutigam at Johns Hopkins, and by Sri Lankan officials with first-hand knowledge of the negotiations – has now systematically dismantled the whole story.

First, the port project was not proposed by China. It was conceived in the 1970s by a Sri Lankan parliamentarian, D. A. Rajapaksa, and championed by his son, the future president Mahinda Rajapaksa. Feasibility studies were carried out by Canadian and Danish firms. Sri Lanka approached the United States and India for funding, and both declined. Only then did China step in, with the China Export–Import Bank (Exim Bank) lending and China Harbour Engineering as the contractor.

When Sri Lanka subsequently fell into debt crisis, this was driven not by Chinese lending but by Sri Lanka’s massive borrowing on Western-dominated capital markets – borrowing made cheap by post-2008 quantitative easing, then made suddenly expensive when the US Federal Reserve began winding down its programme in 2013. Chinese loans constituted just 9 percent of Sri Lankan government debt by 2016. The Hambantota loans specifically constituted 4.8 percent.

The 2017 concession agreement was painted as a debt-for-asset swap, but the reality was considerably less sinister: China Merchants Port leased the port for $1.12 billion in fresh investment, which Sri Lanka used to pay down its much larger Western creditors. Sri Lanka’s minister of ports at the time, Mahinda Samarasinghe, put it plainly: “We thank China for arranging this investor to save us from the debt trap”.

Sri Lanka’s debt trap was made on Wall Street, not in Beijing. As for the accusation that the Chinese military would use Hambantota as a naval base, that was always nonsense. The lease agreement explicitly prohibits the use of the port for military purposes. There have been no Chinese naval vessels at Hambantota, and the port is subject to US Coastguard inspections under the International Port Security scheme.

What has actually happened at Hambantota over the last few years? The port has actually become a major regional success.

Under the management of China Merchants Port – a state-owned operator with stakes in 42 ports across 25 countries, including Greece, Belgium and France – Hambantota has been transformed from a loss-making white elephant into one of the fastest-growing trans-shipment hubs in the Indian Ocean. By 2023 it was handling 700,000 vehicles, up 26 percent year-on-year. It has expanded its Sri Lankan staff from 300 in 2017 to more than 1,000 today. In November 2023 the Sri Lankan cabinet approved a $4.5 billion oil refinery to be built by Sinopec adjacent to the port – the largest foreign direct investment in Sri Lankan history.

Now, in 2026, comes the next phase. In March, the Hambantota International Port Group signed a $108 million agreement with Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries – the world’s leading manufacturer of port cranes – for six quay cranes, 16 rubber-tyred gantry cranes and 40 trailers. The new quay cranes will have a 72-metre outreach and a 65-tonne lifting capacity, enabling the port to handle the largest container vessels currently in operation. The investment will activate the port’s 1,300-metre container berth and lift annual capacity to around two million TEUs (Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units). Sri Lanka’s minister of ports has described Hambantota as “evolving into a modern, integrated port and industrial ecosystem capable of meeting the diverse needs of global maritime stakeholders”.

This is the Belt and Road Initiative in practice: massive long-term investment; transfer of technology; training of local workers; integration into a global logistics network; substantial revenue generation for the host country’s economy.

Sri Lanka’s ambassador to China between 2020 and 2023, Palitha Kohona, summarised the partnership: “It was not unusual that Sri Lanka, like many other developing countries, decided to work with Chinese companies due to China’s advanced skill levels, stunning technology and cost advantages. The Chinese role in Sri Lanka’s debt is grossly exaggerated and exploited mischievously for political advantage.”

You will not, of course, read any of this in the Western press. The same news organisations that carried out a multi-year campaign against Chinese “neocolonialism” have shown no interest whatever in the port’s subsequent transformation. Their interest in Hambantota was never journalistic; it was ideological. The story existed to serve a specific anti-China narrative. Once it could no longer be credibly sustained, the Western media simply moved on to the next anti-China story.

Who actually traps developing countries in debt? The IMF and the World Bank do. Wall Street’s bond markets do. The European Central Bank’s monetary policy does. The US Federal Reserve does. Across the Global South, more than three-quarters of external sovereign debt is owed not to other states but to private Western financial institutions – institutions with no obligation to consider the development needs of their borrowers, and every incentive to extract the maximum possible return. The track record of structural-adjustment programmes, debt-driven austerity and IMF-imposed privatisations across Africa, Latin America and South Asia over the last four decades is the actual story of debt and neocolonialism in our time.

The Belt and Road Initiative offers, by contrast, infrastructure, technology transfer, training and long-term investment on terms vastly more favourable than the major Western institutions have ever extended. That is why some 150 countries have signed up to it.

The BRI embodies three things that Western imperialism hates: the Global South’s emergence from dependency; the growing influence of the People’s Republic of China and its friendly, mutually beneficial relations with the rest of the developing world; and the emerging multipolar alternative to the Western-dominated global order. The Western media’s obsession with Chinese “debt traps” is thus nothing more than a demonisation campaign and a blatant act of self-projection.

Siege socialism or barbarism: why we must stand with Cuba

Carlos Martinez’s article on Cuba, siege socialism and the case for international solidarity, originally published in the Morning Star on 4 June 2026.

A few weeks ago, Donald Trump told reporters that he expects the Cuban government to be gone by the end of the year. He called Cuba “a failed country” and added: “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years, doing something. And it looks like I’ll be the one that does it.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared that “Cuba has consistently posed a threat to the national security of the United States” — a standard preamble before regime-change operations.

The Department of Justice has unsealed a federal indictment against 95-year-old Raúl Castro for events that took place 30 years ago, and in which Cuba acted in a completely legal and just manner.

Meanwhile, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group has entered Caribbean waters. And in the Caribbean and Pacific, the US Navy has over the last few months killed almost 200 people and destroyed 57 vessels in what are, by any reasonable definition, extrajudicial executions.

It is clear that the US is escalating its economic, diplomatic and military pressure on Cuba to unprecedented levels, with a view to getting rid of the Cuban Revolution once and for all.

What alternative future does Washington propose for Cuba?

It helps here to recover a concept developed by the late Marxist historian Michael Parenti.

In his 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti pointed out that for the entire history of actually-existing socialism — in the Soviet Union, in China, in Vietnam, in Cuba, in Korea and elsewhere — there has never been a single example of a socialist project that’s been allowed to develop in peace, to pursue its own development model.

Every socialist state has existed in a context of imperialist encirclement; socialist states have faced invasion, sabotage, blockade, embargo, assassination attempts, sanctions, coup attempts, proxy wars.

Parenti argued that you cannot judge any of these societies without taking that into account.

To compare really-existing socialism with an imaginary, abstract socialism that would have been allowed to develop in peace is intellectually dishonest. The socialism that actually exists is, in his phrase, siege socialism. It is shaped and distorted by the conditions under which it has been built.

Cuba today is the canonical example of siege socialism. It’s very literally under siege. The US blockade — 64 years old and counting — is now the most comprehensive economic siege in modern history.

Over the last couple of years, fuel imports have been cut by 90 per cent. Parts of the country are now experiencing blackouts of up to 20 hours a day. Hospitals are operating on emergency generators.

Medicines, basic foodstuffs, replacement parts, fertilisers — all are being squeezed by a sanctions regime purposely designed to bring about hunger and poverty, and to generate discontent against the government.

And yet, under that siege, socialism continues to deliver for the Cuban people. Cuba has a life expectancy of 78 years and an infant mortality rate of around five per thousand — both better than the US. A literacy rate above 99 per cent, and an education system that produces doctors in such abundance that Cuba exports more medical personnel worldwide than the WHO, UNICEF and Médecins Sans Frontières combined.

When hurricanes hit the Caribbean, Cuba invariably experiences the lowest death toll in the region: last year Hurricane Oscar killed seven people in Cuba and 235 in Haiti, despite hitting Cuba first and harder. This is what a basic orientation towards the needs of the people, rather than profit, can do.

The standard Washington framing for a post-socialist Cuba is something along the lines of a thriving market democracy, a haven for tourists and a consumer utopia where people cheerily drive their Teslas to the nearest polling station to vote for one of several neoliberal pro-US parties. But there is absolutely no historical evidence that supports the viability of that vision.

It would be more instructive to compare Cuba with Haiti, which has been subjected to non-stop US intervention and interference for over a century and is today, by pretty much every metric, a humanitarian catastrophe.

Or to compare Cuba with the Dominican Republic, with Guatemala, with El Salvador — countries that suffered the kind of regime change Trump is now threatening Cuba with, and that have spent the decades since exporting their populations northwards because life at home became unliveable.

We can also compare Cuba today with pre-revolutionary Cuba — the Cuba of Fulgencio Batista, where Havana was a mafia gambling capital and a brothel for North American tourists, where illiteracy and child malnutrition were endemic, where much of the country was racially segregated, where the US Marines came and went as they pleased and the presidents were chosen in Washington.

That is the Cuba the US is trying to bring back. A playground for the rich, a colony in all but name. That is what Trump’s talking about when he says he wants the Castro regime gone.

So Cuban socialism is very much worth saving. Can it be saved? It can. The Cuban people are extraordinarily resilient and committed to defending their sovereignty and their revolution. Furthermore, Cuba is not alone.

China is now Cuba’s largest energy and infrastructure partner, and a major source of food and medicine. This week, Chinese and Cuban officials met in Beijing for talks on agricultural co-operation, framed around a “Cuba-China community of shared future.”

The same day, the first 15,000 tonnes of a 60,000-tonne Chinese rice donation arrived in Havana — what Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez called “a new display of solidarity and brotherhood.”

On top of that, China is financing 92 solar parks across the island by 2028, projected to cover roughly half of Cuba’s daytime electricity demand.

Once Cuba generates its own power from the sun, the central weapon of the energy blockade begins to crumble.

China’s diplomatic backing is also worthy of note. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning declared this week that “China firmly supports Cuba in safeguarding its sovereignty, security and development interests” — the second such statement in a week.

Meanwhile Russia, Vietnam, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico and Brazil are all providing practical solidarity to Cuba, along with campaign groups such as Britain’s Cuba Solidarity Campaign. If Cuba can hold the line through this period, the multipolar world taking shape on the other side will be a far more hospitable environment for projects like the Cuban Revolution.

That is why Cuba must survive the present. The alternative has nothing to do with freedom or democracy.

It is the Miami exile establishment, the return of the old oligarchy, the carve-up of every public asset by foreign capital. We have seen what that looks like in Yeltsin’s Russia, or in Libya after Nato’s regime change war.

Rosa Luxemburg coined the phrase “socialism or barbarism” in 1916, in the middle of the first world war, as a general statement about humanity’s choices. In the Caribbean in 2026, it is a concrete question on the table.

Cuba has stood for 67 years as a beacon of hope for the oppressed and exploited around the world. It has been a source of inspiration for generations of activists, a symbol of resistance against imperialism, a model of what a different kind of society can look like.

The whole world must stand with Cuba now, in its hour of need. We must demand an end to the blockade, an end to sanctions, an end to threats. We must support Cuba’s right to self-determination, to sovereignty, and to development on its own terms.