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Holding the line: Jiang Zemin at 100

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

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

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

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

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

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

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

A revolutionary life

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

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

The most difficult period of world socialism

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

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

The charge sheet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Three Represents

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

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

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

The internationalist

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

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

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

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

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

The verdict

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

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

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

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

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

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

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

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

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

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

Responding to left criticisms of China’s foreign policy

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carlos Martinez: Compatible with capitalism.

Radhika Desai: Continue, please.

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

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

‘But at what cost?’: the Yangtze edition

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

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

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

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

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

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

But at what cost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

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

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

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

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

The case against

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

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

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

Should China “lessen the role of the state”?

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

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

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

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

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

Let us take the prescriptions in turn.

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

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

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

A reply to Greg Godels on China’s road to socialism

Greg Godels has published a thoughtful response in ML Today to Carlos Martinez’s recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Godels argues that the exploitation of the many by the few remains a central driving force of the Chinese economy, and questions whether China’s market reforms and its billionaire class can be squared with a socialist trajectory.

In the article below, Carlos argues that the decisive Marxist question is not simply whether wage labour and surplus value exist, but which class holds state power and in whose interest the economic surplus is directed. On that test – the class nature of the state – China’s billionaires answer to the state rather than command it; its reforms were a conscious strategy to develop the productive forces and build the material basis for a more advanced socialism; and China provably does not participate in imperialist super-exploitation.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

Greg Godels has written a considered response in ML Today to my recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Unlike much of what passes for left commentary on China, Godels writes as a comrade, not a Cold Warrior. He admires the Chinese revolution, insists that China’s fate must be decided by the Chinese people, and closes by affirming that, whatever its difficulties, “it is China’s road”. On all of that we agree. Where we part company is over a question that Godels, for all his fidelity to the classics of Marxism, never quite poses: which class holds state power?

State and revolution

Godels’s central charge is that the debate over China too rarely invokes “the exploitation of the many by the few”, and that when I ask for exploitation to be “contextualised”, I am really relativising and rationalising it. He is right that exploitation belongs at the centre of any Marxist analysis. But there is a second important category that is missing from his account entirely: the class nature of the state.

For Marx and Lenin alike, the question of whether a society is advancing towards socialism was never settled simply by cataloguing the presence or absence of wage labour and surplus value at the point of production. It was settled principally by asking which class holds power, and in whose interest the state directs the economic surplus. This is the whole point of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and of Lenin’s insistence, throughout the period of the New Economic Policy, that market mechanisms within a workers’ state are something categorically different from capitalism under a bourgeois state.

Under the NEP in the Soviet state, private capital, wage labour, rich peasants and market relations all flourished. Lenin did not conclude that the October Revolution had thereby been cancelled. He concluded that the proletarian state would make use of capitalist forms, on its own terms and under its own control, in order to build the material foundations of socialism.

Xi Jinping outlines China’s vision for the future of artificial intelligence

On 17 July, Xi Jinping delivered the keynote address at the opening of the 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai – his first in-person appearance at the conference since it began in 2018, and coming a day after 29 countries signed the agreement establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (WAICO), a new intergovernmental body headquartered in Shanghai. The event was attended by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Prime Minister Hun Manet of the Kingdom of Cambodia, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul of the Kingdom of Thailand, Secretary General of the United Nations António Guterres, and official representatives, business leaders, scholars and researchers from more than 100 countries and international organisations.

In the following analysis for Friends of Socialist China, Carlos Martinez examines the significance of Xi’s speech and the launch of WAICO. He argues that they represent a direct alternative to Washington’s approach – encapsulated in the Trump administration’s “Winning the Race” AI action plan, with its export controls, model restrictions and pressure on allies to join a technological blockade of China.

Where the United States treats artificial intelligence as a weapon in a zero-sum contest for supremacy, Xi calls for “open source, openness, collaboration and sharing”, and for AI to be developed as a common asset of humanity, with its benefits extended to the Global South. It is, Carlos writes, a democratic, multipolar and socialist vision: technology as a public good, serving people before profit.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

Should artificial intelligence – perhaps the most consequential technology of our era – be the exclusive property of a handful of corporations and one increasingly belligerent superpower, or should it be developed as a common asset of humanity? That is the question Xi Jinping posed, implicitly but unmistakably, in his keynote speech at the opening of the 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai on 17 July – his first in-person address to the conference since its launch in 2018, and delivered a day after 29 countries signed the agreement establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (WAICO), a new intergovernmental body headquartered in Shanghai.

Citing an old Chinese saying, Xi observed that “a single string cannot make music, and a single tree does not make a forest”, insisting that AI development “should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation”. The metaphor is well chosen, because a solo performance is precisely what Washington has in mind.

Winning the race, or sharing the prize?

The United States announced its own AI strategy a year ago. Its title – Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan – tells us much of what we need to know about the underlying philosophy. AI is conceived not as a tool for human development but as a weapon in a zero-sum contest for global supremacy; the plan is built around tightening export controls on advanced semiconductors, restricting access to leading US models, and pressuring allies – under threat of secondary tariffs – to join a technological blockade of China. The Trump administration has since extended export controls to cutting-edge US AI models, forcing even European businesses to confront the risks of depending on US technology.

Xi’s speech reads as a point-by-point repudiation of this approach. Where Washington seeks to hoard the technology, China calls for “open source, openness, collaboration and sharing”. Where Washington weaponises “national security” to justify its chip war, Xi calls on the international community to “jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country’s security over that of others”. Where Washington demands that the world adopt “American values” along with the American AI stack, Xi insists that AI “should not erode or undermine the diversity of world civilisations or the uniqueness of cultures of different countries”.

The West’s framing of AI as a civilisational contest is far from subtle. At the Paris AI summit last year, JD Vance warned darkly of “authoritarian regimes” using AI to control their citizens, while Britain’s technology secretary Peter Kyle declared that the AI race must be led by “western, liberal, democratic” countries. China’s response at the time – that it is “against drawing lines along ideological difference, overstretching the concept of national security, or politicising trade and tech issues” – is precisely the position Xi has now elevated to the level of a global governance programme. And as legal scholar Angela Zhang observed in the Financial Times, China does not think in terms of an “AI race”; its priority is not supremacy but self-sufficiency, diffusion and application – making the technology useful, cheap and universal.

People before profit

The contrast between China and the West’s approaches reflects two different social systems, with two different logics. In the US, AI development is driven by the profit expectations of a handful of tech giants and the war-planning of the Pentagon. In China, a socialist market economy directs the technology towards social ends: Xi spoke of smart devices that “truly improve people’s livelihood”, of coordinated upgrading across traditional and emerging industries “so that all sectors and businesses can benefit from AI”, and of keeping AI “always under human control”.

The difference shows up in practice. While Silicon Valley promises mass layoffs as a selling point to investors, China’s AI Plus programme – now fully integrated into state industrial policy – is oriented towards job creation and job quality, popularising AI as a social good while regulating its disruptions.

In Chinese hospitals, an AI screening tool called PANDA is detecting pancreatic cancer from routine CT scans before symptoms appear – catching early, at population scale, one of the deadliest cancers. And while Wall Street inflates an AI investment bubble of historic proportions, the CPC’s top theoretical journal has been urging the cultivation of “patient capital” – long-term, mission-oriented investment in place of speculative frenzy.

The DeepSeek phenomenon exemplifies the whole approach: a world-class model, developed at a fraction of the cost of its US competitors, requiring far less energy and computing power, released free and open source to the entire world. One model treats intelligence as a commodity to be enclosed; the other treats it as a public good to be shared.

Answering the call of the Global South

Some of the most striking passages of Xi’s speech concern the developing world. Xi warned against allowing the AI revolution to create a “new historical injustice” – a digital reprise of the colonial division of the world – and committed China to “help Global South countries with capacity building to bridge the AI and digital divides”. This was backed with concrete pledges: 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing countries over the next five years; international AI application cooperation centres with ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, CELAC, the SCO and BRICS; and the extension of MAZU, China’s AI-powered meteorological early warning system, to 30 countries.

WAICO itself is, in Xi’s words, “a major move by China to answer the call of the Global South”. Its founding membership – including Cuba, Ethiopia, Kenya, Laos, Pakistan, Brazil, Indonesia and Venezuela – speaks for itself, as does the attendance of UN Secretary-General António Guterres at the signing ceremony. Even the South China Morning Post acknowledges that Beijing is positioning itself as the advocate of openness “at a time when access to advanced technologies is increasingly constrained by export controls and corporate blacklists”.

Four initiatives, one vision

WAICO is the institutional expression of the Global AI Governance Initiative Xi proposed in 2023, and it takes its place within the broader framework of China’s four global initiatives: the Global Development Initiative (2021), the Global Security Initiative (2022), the Global Civilisation Initiative (2023) and the Global Governance Initiative (2025) – the operational programme of the community with a shared future for humanity. Indeed, the GGI concept paper explicitly identified the governance vacuum in artificial intelligence, alongside the underrepresentation of the Global South, as among the central failures of the existing international system. WAICO is the answer to that diagnosis: international rules on AI jointly formulated rather than imposed.

The speech maps directly onto the four initiatives: AI as “an important driver for shared prosperity” (development); AI as a contributor to “common security” rather than an arms race (security); AI in the service of “mutual learning between civilisations” (civilisation); and a “consensus-based global governance framework” built on “true multilateralism” and the central role of the United Nations (governance).

Beneath the mapping lies a single question, posed in every domain the initiatives touch: is the world a jungle in which the strong prey on the weak, or a family with a single shared home? Applied to AI, the first logic – the logic of capitalism and imperialism – produces export controls, corporate enclosure and an arms race; the second – the logic of socialism – produces open source, capacity building and cooperation.

What WAICO embodies is a fundamentally democratic vision of technological development: decisions about humanity’s future made not in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley or the war rooms of Washington, but through “extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefit” among sovereign equals. It is, equally, a socialist vision: technology as a public good, serving people before profit, with its benefits extended deliberately to those the capitalist world system has always excluded.

The United States offers the world an AI race with one permitted winner. China offers a symphony in which every country has an instrument.

Around the world, China is viewed more positively than the United States

A newly published survey by the Pew Research Center – covering more than 42,000 people across 36 countries – has found that China is now viewed more positively than the United States in most of the countries polled, with more people worldwide expressing confidence in Xi Jinping than in Donald Trump. It is a striking measure of how far Washington’s global standing has fallen.

In the following article, Carlos Martinez examines what lies behind this historic shift. He argues that the single most important factor is the war on Gaza – a genocide watched in real time by a global public that has also seen the governments of North America and Western Europe arm, finance and shield it, all while lecturing the world about a “rules-based order”. The same collapse of credibility, he notes, has quietly buried the “Uyghur genocide” narrative, and has been compounded by the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.

Set against this, the article points to what China offers the world: the greatest poverty alleviation in history, a global clean-energy transition, and cooperation on terms of sovereign equality – together with a new visibility that is allowing hundreds of millions of people to see Chinese life for themselves, bypassing the distorting filter of the Western press.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

For decades, Washington has been able to console itself with the notion that, whatever the world thought of its never-ending criminal wars, it could always rely on its vast apparatus of cultural hegemony to win hearts and minds around the world. At some level, it has always remained the land of the free and the home of the brave. But nothing lasts forever.

According to a new Pew Research Center survey of 42,151 people across 36 countries, China is now viewed more positively than the United States in most of the countries surveyed – and more people worldwide express confidence in Xi Jinping than in Donald Trump.

Even Canadians view China more favourably. In 2023, 57 percent of Canadians had a positive view of the US and just 14 percent viewed China positively; today China leads by 44 percent to 33.