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
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.
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?
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.
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.”
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.
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.
As Donald Trump tightens his energy stranglehold on Cuba – severing oil supplies, threatening countries that dare to help, and following the Kissinger playbook of “making the economy scream” – a remarkable story of socialist solidarity is unfolding.
Writing in the Morning Star, Carlos Martinez documents how China has stepped into the breach, assisting Cuba with its energy sovereignty and its green transition. Chinese solar exports to Cuba have rocketed from $5 million in 2023 to $117 million in 2025. Beijing has committed to building 92 solar parks on the island by 2028, with a combined capacity equivalent to Cuba’s entire current fossil fuel generation. Already, Cuba’s share of solar power has risen from 5.8 percent to over 20 percent in a single year – a pace of transition that energy analysts describe as one of the fastest ever achieved by a developing nation.
But as this article shows, China’s solidarity extends far beyond megawatts and megaprojects. Ten thousand photovoltaic systems have been donated for rural homes, maternity wards and health clinics. Five thousand solar kits installed across 168 municipalities are keeping medicines refrigerated and families powered through the blackouts. President Xi Jinping personally approved $80 million in emergency aid for electrical equipment. Chinese Ambassador Hua Xin has pledged “firm support under all circumstances.”
This, Carlos argues, is what South-South cooperation looks like in practice: technology, financing and humanitarian assistance with no conditionalities, no structural adjustment, no strings attached. Fidel Castro said in 2004 that China had become “the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries.” Cuba’s solar revolution suggests his assessment has only become more prescient.
When the lights go out in Havana — as they have done for up to 20 hours a day in the worst months of Cuba’s current energy crisis — the causes are not difficult to identify.
The United States’ economic blockade, in place since 1962 and systematically tightened under successive administrations, has cost Cuba an estimated $160 billion ($2 trillion in current prices, which is equivalent to around 20 years of Cuba’s annual GDP).
The latest escalation of this cruel and illegal blockade has involved a full-scale energy embargo, with the US attempting to completely cut off Cuba’s access to oil.
The kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro three months ago resulted in the severing of by far Cuba’s most important energy supplier.
Trump’s tariff threats then forced Mexico to cancel emergency oil shipments. The result has been blackouts, fuel shortages and severe disruption to daily life across the island. The Trump regime is following the Kissinger playbook of “making the economy scream” in order to force regime change.
And life is unquestionably being made difficult. As a Cuban hairdresser told Medea Benjamin of CodePink in February: “You can’t imagine how it touches every part of our lives. With no gasoline, buses don’t run, so we can’t get to work. We have electricity only three to six hours a day. There’s no gas for cooking, so we’re burning wood and charcoal in our apartments. It’s like going back 100 years.”
Thankfully, at the end of March, a Russian tanker carrying an estimated 730,000 barrels of crude oil docked in Havana, providing some urgently needed relief. But Cuba’s energy import situation continues to be highly precarious and uncertain.
Nobody can blockade the sun
The Cuban people’s response to this siege has not been surrender. It has been transformation — and at the heart of that transformation is a remarkable programme of solar energy development, driven by one of the most significant acts of international solidarity in the history of the global green transition.
China’s support for the Cuban renewable energy programme has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Chinese solar exports to Cuba rose from $5 million in 2023 to $117m in 2025. A report in the Financial Times on April 6 notes that “thanks to Chinese technology, the Caribbean island has 34 solar parks in operation with a capacity of almost 1.2 gigawatts (GW), a 350 per cent increase on 2024, enabling Cuba to more than quadruple its proportion of solar-powered generation by the end of last year.”
Beijing has committed to building 92 solar parks in Cuba by 2028, with a combined capacity of approximately 2GW — equivalent to Cuba’s entire current fossil fuel generation capacity. The solar parks already connected to the grid are contributing 1GW. As a result, Cuba’s share of solar in total electricity generation has risen from 5.8 per cent a year ago to over 20 per cent today.
Energy analysts have described this as one of the most rapid solar transitions ever achieved by a developing nation.
Cuba has set official targets of generating 24 per cent of its electricity from renewables by 2030, rising to 40 per cent by 2035 and 100 per cent by 2050. At the current pace of buildout, the 2030 target looks well within reach — and may be exceeded considerably sooner.
Battery storage — currently in place at only four of Cuba’s 55 solar parks — will need to be expanded significantly to address the evening peak demand. Wind energy will also make a growing contribution, with 19 wind farms totaling 415 MW currently being built, again with Chinese support. But the pace of the solar buildout, measured against where Cuba was just months ago, is already extraordinary.
Chinese support at all levels China’s contribution extends beyond large-scale infrastructure. Beijing has also donated 10,000 photovoltaic systems for deployment in isolated rural homes and critical facilities — including maternity wards and health clinics — ensuring that medical equipment can continue to function and medicines can be refrigerated even during power cuts.
A further 5,000 solar kits have been installed in health centres across 168 municipalities, each comprising panels, inverters and storage batteries. The head of Cuba’s Electric Union described the household-level systems as life-changing: enabling families to run a refrigerator, a fan and a television, and reducing the rural-to-urban migration that energy poverty drives.
Furthermore, in January 2026, President Xi Jinping personally approved $80 million in emergency financial aid for electrical equipment, alongside a donation of 60,000 tons of emergency rice aid.
China has been involved in Cuba’s energy sector for many years — supplying wind turbines since 2018, providing electric buses through Yutong since 2005, and supporting the assembly of Chinese electric cars, scooters and bicycles in Cuba through the Caribbean Electric Vehicles (VEDCA) programme.
In 2021, Cuba joined the Belt and Road Energy Partnership, the Chinese-led international framework for clean energy investment. But the current programme represents a qualitative leap, driven in large part by the urgency of Cuba’s situation and the depth of the bilateral relationship.
As Chinese ambassador Hua Xin stated at the handover ceremony for a recent tranche of solar parks: China stands with Cuba in “firm support under all circumstances.” Cuban Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy stated that the co-operation between the two socialist countries represents “a joint commitment to energy sovereignty.”
Socialist solidarity
What is taking shape in Cuba is a demonstration, in the most concrete terms, of what South-South co-operation and socialist solidarity look like in practice: China is providing technology, financing, expertise, training and humanitarian assistance to a country under siege, with no conditionalities, no structural adjustment requirements, no demand for market access.
Hugo Chavez one described the flourishing ties between progressive Latin America and China as a “Great Wall against US hegemonism.” Cuba’s solar revolution is a powerful example of that wall in action.
Fidel Castro said in 2004 that China had become “the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries.” Two decades later, the US is raining bombs on Iranian civilian infrastructure, tightening its cruel blockade on Cuba, kidnapping Venezuela’s elected president, and supporting an ongoing genocide in Gaza.
China meanwhile is emerging as the major trading partner of the vast majority of global South nations; has become the world’s only renewable energy superpower; and consistently demonstrates its commitment to peace, international law and global prosperity.
Fidel’s assessment looks more prescient than ever.
Recorded in Changsha, China, this wide-ranging conversation between Carlos Martinez and Danny Haiphong focuses on some of the most urgent questions in contemporary world politics: the Iran ceasefire, the Strait of Hormuz, the collapse of US military credibility, and what it all means for China and the multipolar world.
Carlos argues that Iran is playing a sophisticated and restrained game – responding precisely and proportionately to every US provocation, never escalating beyond what the situation requires. The IRGC’s recent seizure of Israel-linked vessels attempting to bypass Iran’s Hormuz regulations was not aggression but enforcement: Iran exercising sovereign control over its territorial waters in response to a US blockade that itself violates the ceasefire terms. With 34 Iranian oil tankers having bypassed the blockade and reached global markets, the attempt to economically strangle Iran is visibly failing.
The military picture for the US is stark. Drawing on Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) analysis, Carlos and Danny detail the extraordinary depletion of US munitions – nearly half of Patriot and THAAD interceptors, 45 percent of precision strike missiles, 30 percent of Tomahawk stockpiles – expended in just 40 days of hostilities. Replacing these systems will take years. Meanwhile Iran has been rapidly replenishing its stockpiles of missiles and drones. The asymmetry is decisive: Iran has more cards to play, more escalation options unused, and a population of 93 million ready to defend their country. A land invasion, Carlos notes, would be the greatest US military defeat since Vietnam, and perhaps in history.
The conversation turns to the deeper strategic logic of the conflict – which is not only about Iran, but about Palestine, regional hegemony, and the long-term objective of suppressing China’s rise. Control of Venezuelan oil, disruption of Iran’s energy relationship with Beijing, dominance of the Strait of Hormuz: these are moves in a long game aimed at encircling China before a potential hot war in the Pacific. The irony, Carlos argues, is that the war has achieved the opposite – depleting US military capacity, accelerating the multipolar trajectory, and motivating the countries of the ‘intermediate zone’ in Europe and elsewhere to engage more deeply with China as a stable and responsible global actor.
The video below is an interview of Carlos Martinez by Jason Smith, for CGTN’s The Bridge podcast. In this wide-ranging discussion, touching on a range of issues from the war in Iran to the nature of China’s whole-process people’s democracy, Carlos opines that “democracy” is not an abstract universal but always has a specific class content. What the West calls liberal democracy is more accurately described as capitalist democracy: a system in which the ruling class – those who own and deploy capital – dominates political life, and government is fundamentally oriented towards preserving existing production relations and expanding capital. As Marx observed, the oppressed are permitted once every few years to choose which representatives of the oppressing class shall govern them.
China operates a different democratic model suited to a different social system. The capitalist class cannot organise politically, cannot direct state power in its own interests, and cannot dictate to the government – for example, Huawei does not tell Beijing what to do. The Communist Party, with over 100 million members, is a party of the working class and its allies, obliged to maintain legitimacy by actually delivering – on poverty alleviation, healthcare, pollution control, housing, renewable energy and more. The result, borne out by polling data including a Harvard Kennedy School survey showing 94 percent government approval, is that Chinese citizens report far higher levels of satisfaction with their democracy than citizens of the US or Britain. The Two Sessions – the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference – give concrete institutional expression to this whole-process people’s democracy, translating debates from across society into national policy, including this year’s 15th Five-Year Plan.
The US-China rivalry is not a conventional geopolitical contest between two comparable powers. The US helped integrate China into the global economic order in the late 1970s on the assumption that China would remain permanently at the bottom of the hierarchy – making cheap goods, opening up to Western capital, abandoning its socialist orientation through peaceful evolution. The reality has been entirely different: China is now the world’s largest economy, the leading force in renewables, telecoms, advanced infrastructure and space exploration, and is advancing an alternative model of modernisation that operates entirely outside the paradigm of imperialism – without war, occupation, austerity or the Washington Consensus. That is the real threat: not military aggression, but the ideological and material demonstration that another development path is possible. The hybrid war against China – sanctions, tech controls, military encirclement, demonisation – is aimed at preventing China’s further rise, weakening its global relationships, and ultimately reversing the Chinese Revolution. China, for its part, simply wants to develop and to cooperate.
The multipolar project is in essence a demand that the principles of the UN Charter – sovereign equality, non-interference, peaceful coexistence – be actually observed, not merely invoked rhetorically. The record of US-led imperialism in the postwar period, from the Korean War to the 1953 coup in Iran to the current wars on Venezuela and Iran, makes clear these principles have never been adhered to by Washington. Institutionally, multipolarity means strengthening the UN, building out BRICS, the SCO, the NAM and the G77+China, developing alternative financing, and expanding south-south cooperation backed by China’s economic weight and the Belt and Road Initiative. This project increasingly has institutions, momentum and a trajectory – though it faces the enduring obstacle of US military hegemony and the reckless aggression of a declining empire.
For those in the West who want to engage constructively, the starting point is to resist the war propaganda that saturates mainstream media, tell the truth about China, and actively participate in anti-war movements – making the case for maximum global cooperation on climate, peace and development.
Below the video of the full interview is a selection of clips with individual answers, which have been posted on the newly-revived Invent the Future YouTube channel.
The following short article, written for the Morning Star, provides a whirlwind tour of the extraordinary progress made by the People’s Republic of China since its founding on 1 October 1949.
October 1 2024 will mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, when Mao Zedong declared that “the Chinese people have stood up.”
In the intervening period, China has undergone an extraordinary transformation.
Life expectancy has increased from around 35 to over 78 years, surpassing that of the US. Universal literacy has been achieved. Extreme poverty and malnutrition have been eliminated. Famines are a thing of the past.
In the years immediately following the founding of People’s China, feudalism was dismantled and warlord rule was ended. New China won and defended its sovereignty.
Education and healthcare were rolled out to the countryside for the first time.
The social and economic position of women has improved beyond recognition — one example being that, before the revolution, the vast majority of women received no formal education whatsoever, whereas now a majority of students in higher education institutions are female.
China was one of the poorest countries in the world and languished in a situation of extreme technological backwardness.
Now it’s one of the world’s leading innovators in science and technology — particularly in renewable energy, space exploration, digital networking, quantum computing, nanotechnology and advanced manufacturing. It has displaced the US as the world leader in both scientific research publication and patent grants.
Crucially, China has emerged as the pre-eminent world leader in tackling climate change. Its investment in wind and solar power has brought costs down globally by as much as 90 per cent.
Indeed a recent Financial Times editorial admitted that “when it comes to climate change, Beijing’s green advances should be seen as positive for China, and for the world.”
Although it’s described in the Western media as a malevolent and aggressive power, China’s record is remarkably peaceful. It hasn’t been at war in over 40 years.
And unlike the US, China doesn’t have a global infrastructure of hegemony — foreign bases, troops and weapons stationed in other countries, and so on.
Nor does China engage in economic hegemonism. While much is made of China’s economic power, its loans and investment throughout Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and elsewhere are generally speaking welcome, because they come with a low rate of interest, there are no conditions of austerity, and they’re used to fund crucial infrastructure projects that are allowing countries to break out of underdevelopment after centuries of colonial and neocolonial exploitation.
For example, with Chinese finance and support, Ethiopia opened the first metro system in sub-Saharan Africa a few years ago. Again with Chinese finance and support, Bolivia has launched a telecoms satellite that provides connectivity to the whole country — the poorest country in South America.
Indeed just a couple of days ago, President Xi Jinping announced at the opening ceremony of the Forum on China–Africa co-operation in Beijing that China would unilaterally give all least developing countries (LDCs) zero-tariff market access for all products, making China the first major economy to take such a step. “This will help turn China’s big market into Africa’s big opportunity.”
China plays a helpful role on the diplomatic stage, its contributions oriented towards peace and co-operation. A case in point is the tragic situation in Gaza. While the US and Britain continue to provide the weaponry of genocide, along with financial and diplomatic cover, China has been a loud and consistent voice demanding an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
China always reiterates the necessity of respecting the fundamental national rights of the Palestinian people, and — significantly — it recently mediated an agreement between 14 Palestinian resistance movements, with the rationale that Palestinians need the maximum level of unity if they’re going to win their rights.
While of course there are problems and contradictions, just as there are in all countries, Chinese people live better than they ever have done, and China plays a positive role in the world.
Research by the Harvard Kennedy School shows that the Chinese government enjoys the support of more than 90 per cent of the population — not something that can be said of Keir Starmer and his neoliberal friends.
And yet people in the West often have a negative impression of China. China is presented by politicians and journalists as being an aggressive, expansionist power; an authoritarian dystopia engaged in myriad human rights abuses; a climate criminal; and so on.
The anti-China propaganda has not moved on much from the days of Fu Manchu — these inscrutable Chinese hate our democracy and they want to take over the world.
Faced with imperial decline and the inevitable emergence of a multipolar world, the US ruling class is waging a fightback in order to keep the Project for a New US Century train on the rails. This includes a propaganda component which is essentially aimed at generating public support for a reckless new cold war.
Ordinary people in the West must not allow their consent to be manufactured for confrontation with China, which does not serve their interests.
Humanity faces serious existential threats in the form of climate breakdown, pandemics, antimicrobial resistance, and the possibility of nuclear war. To face up to these threats, we need to work collectively and within a framework of multipolarity, the UN charter, and international law.
As such, we must build bonds of friendship and co-operation with China, and we should seek to understand China better.
On Saturday September 28, from 10am to 4.30pm, at Bolivar Hall, London W1T 5DL, Friends of Socialist China and the Communist Party of Britain, supported by a number of other organisations, are holding a conference to mark the 75th anniversary of the PRC’s founding.
There will be panel discussions on: China, multipolarity and the rise of the global South; China’s road to socialism; and Standing up against the new cold war.
Speakers include Felix Plasencia (Venezuelan ambassador to Britain), Minister Zhao Fei from the Chinese embassy, George Galloway, Robert Griffiths, Alex Gordon, Jenny Clegg, Zhang Weiwei, Victor Gao, Radhika Desai, Ben Chacko, Andrew Murray, Roger McKenzie and many more. Register at www.bit.ly/china-75.
The following is the text of a speech given by Carlos Martinez at an online meeting of the Scottish Trade Union Peace Network on 22 August 2024.
Many thanks for inviting me to join you.
I’m going to focus my remarks on China’s foreign policy, comparing that with the US and Britain’s foreign policy, and then discussing the dangers of this escalating New Cold War, which could all too easily end up as a hot war.
China aggressive?
China of course is framed in the Western media as an “aggressive” and “expansionist” power which is hell-bent on subverting the “rules-based international order”.
According to the NATO Heads of State summit in Washington last month, “China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values”.
What’s the basis for this characterisation? I’m going to talk about some of common themes:
First, Taiwan. China is accused of undermining democracy in Taiwan and threatening imminent invasion.
The funny thing is that China’s position on the Taiwan question has not meaningfully changed in the last seven decades, and it’s entirely consistent with international law and numerous United Nations resolutions – not to mention the various joint agreements between the US and China.
Taiwan is a part of China. It was seized by Japan in 1895 and returned to Chinese control in 1945, at the end of World War 2, as agreed by Britain, the US, the Soviet Union and China at the Potsdam Conference.
In 1949, having lost in the Chinese Civil War, Chang Kai-shek and his people fled to Taiwan and set up a renegade administration, and the US positioned its Navy – the Seventh Fleet – in the Taiwan Strait to prevent the communist government from reuniting the country. But even then, Taiwan never claimed to be a separate country – the Kuomintang simply said that Taiwan was the real China and that the People’s Republic was the renegade. Indeed that idea is still part of Taiwan’s constitution.
So China’s very consistent position is that Taiwan is part of China. This position – the One China Principle – is accepted by more than 90 percent of the world’s countries, including the US and Britain. China has always said that it seeks peaceful reunification but that it reserves the right to use force in case of outside interference or a unilateral declaration of independence. Furthermore it makes the very reasonable point that the Taiwan issue is an internal matter for Chinese people on both sides of the Strait to resolve.
There is nothing particularly bellicose or unusual about such a position. Frankly, if you’ll excuse the slight provocation, China’s historic claim to Taiwan is far stronger than Britain’s historic claim to Scotland, but does anyone think Westminster would avoid the use of force if Scotland, backed and armed by Russia, say, were to unilaterally declare independence.
So nothing has changed with respect to China’s position on the Taiwan question. What’s changed is that the US and its allies, seeking to provoke conflict and undermine China, are increasing their support for separatist elements, are increasing their supply of weapons to the administration in Taipei, and are steadily rowing back on the One China Principle.
Biden has said multiple times that the US would intervene militarily if Beijing were to attempt to change the status quo by force – which goes directly against what was agreed by the US and China back in the 1970s when relations were re-established. It is essentially a way of signalling: we are building towards war against China, and Taiwan will likely be the flashpoint. And the way we plan to win public support for that war is by presenting it as a war to protect democracy in Taiwan.
Another popular accusation about China’s “aggression” is that it’s engaged in expansionism in the South China Sea, because it patrols its own waters, and because it has a number of complicated territorial disputes over control of an array of tiny uninhabited islands.
