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Trade unions under socialism: the dialectics of Chinese labour

China’s trade union federation has grown faster than any union federation in history – from 134 million to around 300 million members in two decades, with union density of around 75 percent, compared with around 20 percent in Britain and 10 percent in the US. Yet in the West, including on much of the left, Chinese unions are routinely dismissed as fake or as tools of an authoritarian state.

In this contribution to a Critical Theory Workshop panel on Immanuel Ness’s new book on the dialectics of Chinese labour, Carlos Martinez explains why. Trade unions work differently under socialism: workers are not struggling against the state as an agent of capital, but with the state against capital. And China is still a developing country, where modernisation is essential to escaping dependence on the imperialist core. Seeing only the “sweatshop” snapshot, Carlos argues, is a fundamentally undialectical way of looking at Chinese labour, and it misses the whole trajectory.

Watch the full panel discussion.

Transcript

Thanks so much, Gabriel, for that extremely generous introduction and to Critical Theory Workshop for inviting me to speak here, in spite of the fact that I know substantially less about this topic than the other panellists.

But mainly, thanks go to Manny for writing a very useful, a very important, and I think a very brave, courageous book. And you yourself note in the book that challenging the consensus in the West on Chinese unions is a taboo, right? You’re right that we risk being excluded from the field of Western labour studies.

What I want to talk about is the anti-China consensus in relation to trade unions seems a little bit bizarre if you look at the numbers as the book explains, and as Manny has talked about in his introduction, for the last half century, trade unionism has been in decline, practically everywhere in the world. Meanwhile, in China, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions has grown faster than any union federation in history. In the last two decades, it’s gone from 134 million members to around 300 million today, representing union density of around 75 percent. Now, here in Britain, union density is around 20 percent. In the United States, it’s around 10 percent. So 75 percent seems pretty fantastic, right?

But in the West, all of this, including, sadly, among much of the left, is dismissed as kind of state propaganda or manifestation of authoritarianism or fake unions, et cetera. So what I want to talk about in the few minutes that I’ve got is, why don’t people get it? What’s so difficult about understanding trade unions in China?

I think the first reason, and the most important reason, and something that’s explored a fair amount in the book is trade unions simply work differently under socialism. And that should be fairly obvious, right? Trade unions under socialism work differently to how they work under capitalism. And, of course, the labour studies field is concentrated primarily in the West, and it’s based on the experience of unions in the West, i.e. in capitalist countries.

What does it mean to be a capitalist country? It means a society in which the capitalist class, the people who own and deploy capital, constitute the ruling class, and the state primarily serves their interests, right? So in that context, the trade union, which is a vehicle for the working class to organise against capital, should have an essentially antagonistic relationship with capital, with the state, right? That’s what you expect: independence from the state is indispensable for trade unions in capitalist countries and Western countries. And that’s one of our demands as leftists, as Marxists, as communists, right? We rightly demand that, while noting that trade unions being organised as part of the capitalist state and controlled by the interests of capital has traditionally been one of the features of fascism. That’s what you have with the German labour front in Nazi Germany. That’s what you have with the so-called syndicates in Mussolini’s Italy.

But in a socialist state, the working class and its allies, by definition, are organised as the ruling class. In China, the trade unions, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, was part of the coalition that took power in 1949. The Communist Party of China and the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese state, didn’t set up the Chinese Trade Union Federation. The ACFTU predates the formation of the People’s Republic of China by around 25 years. Upon the capture of power and upon liberation, upon the incorporation of the People’s Republic, the trade unions were immediately brought into the state structure. And as Manny’s mentioned, what was established in 1949 was defined as a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on an alliance of workers and peasants.

So, a people’s democratic dictatorship, which is probably a pretty obscure expression for non-Marxists, but Marxists will be familiar with it. It creates democracy for the working class and peasantry and imposes dictatorship on the forces of feudalism, imperialism and comprador capitalism. There’s no need for trade unions to be independent of that sort of arrangement. So we’re talking about working class organisations in a workers’ state. And Manny writes in the book, under socialism, workers are not struggling against the state as an agent of capital, but with the state against capital.

And that’s been the case in every socialist country. This isn’t actually something that’s unique to China. You find a very similar arrangement in Cuba. You find a very similar arrangement in Vietnam. You found a very similar arrangement in the Soviet Union, in the German Democratic Republic, et cetera. In each case, the union federation was linked to the governing Communist Party. And that’s actually a little reminder that the modern Western critique of trade unions in China is, in many ways, just a revival of the old critique of the Soviet trade unions. And that’s a reminder that you’ve got a pretty clear, continuous line from Cold War propaganda through to new Cold War propaganda.

I think there’s additionally, in the case of China, perhaps a racial element that means the critique is a bit more extreme when it comes to China than it was for the USSR. Somehow it’s easier for us to think of China’s rulers as uniquely sinister. We’ve got this Fu Manchu stereotype of cynical, inscrutable Chinese, hell-bent on world domination. And that sort of stereotype and that sort of image is only just beneath the surface of mass consciousness in the West, generally speaking.

So none of which is to say that there’s no problems or contradictions in terms of Chinese labour and Yan Pan has enunciated some of those very ably. The fact is that building socialism has never been a simple process, largely because the world remains dominated by imperialist powers. Socialism with Chinese characteristics has many contradictions. It’s a very complex and a very new process that hasn’t yet, something that hasn’t been done before.

The most obvious contradiction is that while capital is subordinated to the state, the dictatorship that’s imposed on the capitalist class is basically pretty benign these days. People who own and deploy capital may not be able to form their own political party. They may not be able to organise in their specific class interest. They may not be able to organise to restore capitalism, but they can make a lot of money. They can exploit human labour. They can live very well.

And furthermore, alongside that, China’s whole framework of development relies partly on capital to help develop the productive forces in order to create a material basis for a more advanced socialism. As such, you’ve got this sort of fragile class alliance which creates a complex dual role for an organisation like the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which is both defending workers against capital and helping the country to develop, to develop its productive forces, to modernise, to move towards a more advanced socialism.

And actually, I think the ACFTU these days, at least, does a great job in defending the interests of the working class. It takes up the demands for higher wages, for better conditions, for social insurance, for pensions and so on. And one example of that is that no company in China is allowed to ban union activity, which is a situation which we in the West can only be envious of. And with ACFTU help, workers win around 95 percent of labour cases in court.

And Manny pointed out in his opening remarks about this sort of Catch-22 analysis from the West about Chinese trade unions, but that if workers go on strike, it shows that they reject the state, they reject authoritarianism. But if there’s peace, if there’s labour peace, if they don’t go on strike, that supposedly shows repression and that the critic always wins. And it reminded me of a classic quote from Michael Parenti’s book, Blackshirts and Reds, where he said: “If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed. But if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s ideology. If the workers went on strike, this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system. If they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and they lacked freedom.”

So the second reason, a second very important reason, I think people in the West and including on the left struggle to understand Chinese trade unionism and its differences with Western trade unionism is that China is a developing country. It’s still in the process of modernisation, yes, over the last few years, it’s emerged as a science and technology powerhouse, but its productivity is still a fair way behind that of the imperial core. Its per capita income is perhaps 20 percent of the US’s. It still has literally hundreds of millions of people who live in relative poverty, albeit they enjoy a standard of living far above what their counterparts enjoy in the other countries of the Global South.

Modernisation probably doesn’t feel that important to a lot of people in the West. It doesn’t feel that important to a lot of people in the US or in Canada or in Britain or in Europe because we’ve been reaping its fruits for a long time now. But for a country in the Global South, it means becoming more prosperous, it means creating a better life. And it also, very importantly, at a political and a geopolitical level, means escaping from the position that the West would like to hold China in as a peripheral country dependent on the imperial core, vulnerable to imperialist pressure, vulnerable to intervention.

So modernising and developing the productive forces is an entirely necessary process, and it involves a lot of hard work. There’s no way around that.

And, yeah, I was on a delegation in China three or four years ago, and it was a delegation of communist parties. And someone from Northern Europe asked the vice chair of the ACFTU, well, what do you think of fighting for a six-hour working day? That’s what we’re fighting for in the union movement in our country. And this vice chair, this official, waited for the question to be translated, allowed himself the briefest of chuckles and said, listen, we’re a developing country, and if our working class, if our 400 million workers went down to a six-hour working day, we wouldn’t develop. That would slow down China’s development. What we do instead is we fight to ensure that the 40-hour week is respected, that workers are properly compensated when they do do overtime, they only do overtime if they want to do overtime, they have social insurance, they have pensions, they’re not abused and exploited, that they have a voice in the workplace.

And sorry, Gabriel, I’m aware I’ve gone overtime, so I’ll just finish up by saying that much of the Western left looks at Chinese labour conditions, and they just see this. It’s a caricature or a snapshot, which is the sweatshop, right? And that misses the whole trajectory. It’s a fundamentally, actually, undialectical way of seeing it. Yes, there is a history of brutal exploitation of labour in China, particularly by the likes of Apple and by the likes of Nike, by basically Western multinationals.

And the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, working with the state, has been in the lead of the fight against that exploitation and has had remarkable successes, successes that are basically without parallel elsewhere in the world. So, yeah, thank you. I’ll leave it at that.

China isn’t imperialist – here’s the proof

Is China simply another imperialist power, differing from the US only in degree? It’s a claim heard increasingly often on the left, from the Communist Party of Greece to Jacobin. This video sets out why that claim doesn’t survive scrutiny.

Working from Lenin’s classical definition of imperialism, Carlos Martinez examines whether China exhibits the super-exploitation of foreign labour that has always been imperialism’s economic core – and finds the opposite: China has been on the receiving end of value extraction by Western capital, not a source of it. The video looks at the real record of the Belt and Road Initiative against the “debt trap” accusation, at China’s strikingly peaceful military record since 1949, and at whether the underlying class dynamics of Chinese society could ever produce an imperialist foreign policy. And it closes by asking what China’s promotion of a multipolar world order means for the long-term prospects of overcoming imperialism altogether.

The video is based on Carlos’s chapter in the newly-released book China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World, co-edited by Keith Bennett and Carlos Martinez, available now from Praxis Press.

More on the Belt and Road “debt trap” claim: China isn’t trapping the Global South in debt.

Transcript

Hello and welcome. This video is based on a chapter I’ve written for a newly-released book, co-edited with Keith Bennett: China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World, out now from Praxis Press – link in the description.

In this video I want to work through the core of that chapter, which addresses a question that comes up again and again on the left: is China imperialist?

That China is an imperialist power is a fairly widespread claim, at least in the West. China is after all a major player on the world stage, with a large economy, a powerful military and expanding global influence, and it routinely faces accusations of “debt trap diplomacy” and other forms of economic coercion.

Some go even further: China has been described as “a rising imperialist power… that increasingly exploits Third World countries in pursuit of raw materials and outlets for its exports.” The Communist Party of Greece says China is “an integral part of the international imperialist system”, with its disputes with the US amounting to nothing more than a quarrel over “the division of the loot”.

In this framing, China is just another imperialist power, differing from the US and Western Europe only in degree, and all the talk of multipolarity is a veneer over the ambitions of a rising hegemon.

The strategic implication of that for the left is clear: if China is an imperialist power, it must be opposed and exposed like any other imperialist power. That’s the line of Neither Washington nor Beijing, which picks up where the old – and unlamented – Neither Washington nor Moscow left off.

I want to show why that’s wrong – that China has never been engaged in the type of economic, political and military domination that the word ‘imperialism’ implies; that its internal class dynamics and the actual geopolitical reality militate against it becoming imperialist, and that the multipolar world order it’s working to build provides a way out of imperialism for everyone.

What is imperialism?

Let’s start with a definition. In his classic pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin put forward what he called the “briefest possible definition” – that imperialism is “the monopoly stage of capitalism” – and then set out five basic features: the concentration of capital into monopolies; the rise of a financial oligarchy, essentially the banks, as the driving force of the economy; the export of capital as a key engine of growth; international combines that carve up the world between them – the modern multinational; and the complete territorial division of the world among the major capitalist powers.

That still holds up pretty well. But there’s one important development Lenin couldn’t account for at the time: a few months after he published that book, the Russian working class overthrew the tsarist system and founded the world’s first socialist state, which went on to back national liberation struggles and socialist movements around the world.

That set in train a new phase of human development: the phase of the transition to socialism.

Today’s world still has imperialist powers and it still has oppressed countries, but it also has socialist countries and countries – for example India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico – that are fairly deeply integrated into the global economy, that export capital like the vast majority of the world’s states, and yet they don’t dominate other countries. That’s a crucial difference from Lenin’s time: since the start of this transitional phase, it’s possible to actively engage in the global economy – to trade and invest on your own terms – without being an imperialist power.

So I’d argue that the most useful working definition of imperialism today is this: a system of economic, political and military domination of some countries over others, driven by the dominant countries’ pursuit of raw materials, land, markets and cheap labour, in which value flows continuously from the periphery (the oppressed countries) to the core (the imperialist countries) through structures that have been put in place and are held in place by means of coercion. That’s a bit of a mouthful, admittedly. More pithy perhaps is the definition by economists Li Zhongjin and David Kotz: “Imperialism is… the economic and political domination of one country by the ruling class of another aimed at extracting economic benefits for that ruling class.”

Super-exploitation is the core of it

The core concept for understanding the reality of imperialism is the super-exploitation of labour in the oppressed countries.

Marx wrote that capital goes abroad “because it can be employed at a higher rate of profit in a foreign country.” The Russian Marxist Nikolai Bukharin identified exactly this dynamic – capital is exported in search of a higher rate of profit, drawn above all from the higher rate of exploitation in poorer countries – as the defining feature of imperialism.

The economist John Smith has done a detailed and useful investigation of what this looks like in the 21st century. He notes that the major imperialist powers have spent decades outsourcing production to low-wage economies, reinforcing a hierarchy in which the US, Western Europe and Japan – what Samir Amin called the “imperialist triad” – remain the core of the global economy, while the Global South is relegated to the periphery.

Eighty-three percent of the world’s manufacturing workforce now lives in the Global South, often exposed to forced labour, illegal overtime and relentless downward pressure on wages and safety. This reflects a process starting in the 1970s where, facing a chronic crisis of overproduction at home, Western capital turned to what Smith calls “global labour arbitrage” as a survival tactic. Paying starvation wages in the Global South is how Western capitalism has propped up its own declining profitability for decades.

Is China a super-exploiter, or the super-exploited?

Where does China fit into all this? Clearly, not on the side of the exploiters. Like South Asia, Africa and Latin America, China has been on the receiving end of huge capital inflows from the imperialist triad, as multinationals leveraged its vast, highly-educated and relatively low-wage workforce.

Certainly throughout the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, value was created in China and captured by the West. John Smith’s 2008 study of Apple’s iPod found that the 12,250 Chinese workers making it earned just six percent of the average US retail wage – and while a similar number of workers were employed on each side, the total US wage bill was 719 million dollars against a Chinese wage bill of 19 million.

The economists Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, analysing this kind of unequal exchange, conclude that “there is a clear transfer of surplus value from China to the bloc of imperialist countries, averaging five to ten percent of China’s GDP since the 1990s… China is not an imperialist country by our definition; on the contrary, it clearly fits into the dominated bloc.”

Now, Chinese wages have been rising fast and clearly things have changed since 2008. Chinese companies do invest abroad. But there’s no evidence of systematic super-exploitation of foreign labour by Chinese capital – actually the biggest recipients of Chinese investment are the US, Britain and Australia, and it’s hard to see how those flows could be described as exploiting Western labour.

As for China’s lending to the Global South, this is typically composed of mutually beneficial deals, rather than deals designed to extract superprofits. China is offering developing countries an alternative to the predatory lending of the IMF and World Bank – and that’s a challenge to the imperialist system, not a reinforcement of it.

No imperialism without domination

The word ‘imperialism’ comes from the Latin for command, to rule; obviously it’s very closely connected to the word ‘empire’.

It isn’t just about concentration of capital or foreign investment – fundamentally, it’s about domination. So: does China assert economic, political or military domination over other countries? Has it joined Lenin’s “handful of exceptionally rich and powerful states which plunder the whole world simply by clipping coupons”?! Quite obviously not.

And yet the Belt and Road Initiative is routinely condemned as neocolonialism – China luring developing countries into debt traps to dominate them. This doesn’t stand up, and I’ve got another video on this topic that I’ll link in the description. But even the reliably reactionary Economist admits debt-trap accusations are “largely unfair”, noting that China “has financed roads, ports, railways and other needed infrastructure, when private lenders and other countries were often unwilling to do so.”

Chinese interest rates typically run at about half those of Western banks, without the austerity conditions the IMF attaches. Tim Jones of the charity Debt Justice calls the whole debt trap narrative a distraction by Western countries, and asserts that “their own banks, asset managers and oil traders are far more responsible”.

Of Chinese loans to Africa, 40 percent has gone to power generation and 30 percent to transport – addressing Africa’s infrastructure gap.

The people actually living with these loans agree. Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister, responding to debt-trap accusations last year, said: “The Belt and Road Initiative is not a debt trap… it is a lifeline for our social and economic development.” Angola’s Minister of Energy and Water says that “China has never imposed any projects on us; each project was selected by us… Nobody offered us support except China.”

And China is actively sharing technology the West has always hoarded – payment systems, satellite networks, telecoms, renewable energy – opening up a pathway out of Western dependence.

Is there such a thing as peaceful imperialism?

Another thing is that China is remarkably peaceful for an imperialist power.

As Hugo Chávez put it: “China is large but it’s not an empire. China doesn’t trample on anyone, it hasn’t invaded anyone, it doesn’t go around dropping bombs on anyone.”

This directly connects to the political theory. Bukharin observed that the struggle to invest capital abroad “is always reinforced by military pressure”, and Rudolf Hilferding argued that finance capital needs a state strong enough to “intervene in every corner of the globe”.

The entire imperialist system was built through military force – Britain’s empire on naval supremacy over sea lanes on which, famously, the sun never set and the blood never dried; Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian imperialism were all built on brutal conquest; the US itself was built through war against Indigenous nations, against Mexico, and then across Latin America and the Pacific. And even after formal colonialism ended, the imperialist powers carried on using force to maintain their dominance – the wars on Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and today Iran; the proxy wars on Syria and Yemen; the sanctions strangling Cuba, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua and other countries.

As Thomas Friedman famously put it in the New York Times, with remarkable candour: “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas”.

China’s record simply looks nothing like this. China participated in the Korean and Vietnam wars on the side of the victims of imperialism. Then it had a brief border war with Vietnam in 1979. In the nearly half-century since, China hasn’t dropped a single bomb on foreign territory. Its per-capita military spending is around one-twentieth of the US’s; it holds roughly five hundred nuclear warheads to the US’s five thousand, and it’s maintained a no-first-use policy since its first nuclear test in 1964.

So if we’re saying that China has become an imperialist power without recourse to military force – without coercion, without war – then we are throwing Lenin’s theory of imperialism out the window.

Could China become imperialist?

So China isn’t imperialist today. But could it become imperialist in future? For a country to go down that road, three things have to be true: 1) it has to be capitalist, in the sense that profit maximisation is the core motive of its economy; 2) its capitalist class has to exercise control of the country’s foreign policy; and 3) the objective conditions have to exist for it to actually dominate other countries.

Let’s take these in turn.

In China, the profit motive is certainly important, but it isn’t the principal factor driving economic strategy – after all, a huge share of the economy is directed by the state, the major banks are state-owned and answerable to the Chinese people, and infrastructure and technology projects go ahead regardless of short-term returns. As economist Arthur Kroeber puts it, China is “an economy where the state remains firmly in command… but where market tools are used to improve efficiency.”

Meanwhile, People’s China has never experienced economic contraction. Chinese capital simply doesn’t face the crises of profitability and overproduction that have historically driven Western capital abroad.

Nor is capital the main driver of China’s foreign relations, which are built on the UN Charter, the principles of peaceful coexistence, the principles of non-interference, and the construction of a multipolar world.

Back in 1974, at the UN General Assembly, Deng Xiaoping said that if China ever turned into a bullying superpower, “the people of the world should expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.” Xi Jinping reiterated this idea at the 20th Party Congress: “China will never seek hegemony or engage in expansionism.”

So the Chinese state has a consistent foreign policy, based on the long-term interests of the Chinese people. Even if private companies in China wanted to subvert it in the interests of making a quick buck, they lack the political power to do so.

And even if the Chinese state did harbour imperialist ambitions, the objective conditions for pursuing those ambitions simply don’t exist. Some writers on the left have claimed that China is walking the same “road well-travelled” as Britain, Germany and the US. What they haven’t noticed is that road isn’t actually open any more. Lenin noted, over a century ago, that the world was already “completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible” – and redivision means displacing existing imperialist powers by force. That was the whole logic of the First World War.

China’s peaceful record indicates very strongly that it’s not pursuing such a path.

In summary, the only way China could become an imperialist power is through capitalist counter-revolution – which is, ironically, exactly what the existing imperialist powers would love to see happen.

Multipolarity and overcoming imperialism

The last point I want to make is about the global order China is trying to build.

China rarely frames its foreign policy in overtly revolutionary language these days, but it stands at the core of an objectively anti-imperialist trajectory: the push towards a multipolar world, described by Jenny Clegg as “a pattern of multiple centres of power… shaping a negotiated order”.

That’s by definition a shift away from a US-dominated unipolar order towards a more equal and democratic system in which all countries – including those of the Global South – have a voice; in which all countries can assert their sovereignty and choose their own development path free from hegemonism.

Time and time again, the imperialist powers have blocked the development of the Global South, and have worked to crush socialist movements and governments, from Chile to Indonesia to Grenada to Angola to Iran to Nicaragua. Through the structures of the UN, BRICS, the G77+China, the Non Aligned Movement, the Forum on China Africa Cooperation, China-CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China is actively advancing the interests of the developing world.

So multipolarity offers real opportunities for peace and development, and a more favourable context for humanity’s advance towards socialism.

China is not an imperialist power. Rather, it’s an anti-imperialist power, and its foreign policy is directed towards a fundamental transformation of the global order – away from hegemonism, towards multipolarity, sovereignty, cooperation and peace.

At a moment when the imperialist powers, led by the US, are resorting to ever more desperate violence to maintain their dominance, China’s promotion of multipolarity, and its vision of a global community of shared future, matter more than ever.

There’s a lot more detail and a full set of sources behind the points I’ve made in this video – you can find that all in the chapter in China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World, out now from Praxis Press, link in the description.

Thanks very much for watching. Do give it a thumbs-up for the sake of the algorithm, and see you next time.

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.

What was so special about Fidel Castro?

Fidel Castro was born on 13 August 1926. On the centenary of his birth, Carlos Martinez asks: what was actually so special about Fidel? Not the myth, but what he concretely did and understood that so few others did.

This video looks at four aspects: the unswerving revolutionary, who saw the possibility of overthrowing a US puppet dictatorship, defeated a CIA invasion in 72 hours, and then refused to follow Gorbachev when 85 percent of Cuba’s trade vanished overnight. The principled and undogmatic Marxist, who insisted that Marxism could not be conceived of as a church with its Rome and its Pope, who backed Allende’s peaceful road and the Bolivarian governments alike, and whose 1993 assessment of Chinese socialism put him decades ahead of most of the Western left. The consummate internationalist, who sent 375,000 troops to help defeat apartheid South Africa in Angola and took nothing in return, and whose “army of white coats” has now put more than 600,000 Cuban health workers into 165 countries. And the man of the people – the literacy campaign, the confrontation with racism, the early warning at Rio in 1992.

Then the video turns to why this centenary matters so urgently. Cuba is facing the gravest threat since 1959: a Trump administration reportedly working to bring the government down by the end of the year, a fuel blockade that has produced six national grid collapses in 2026 alone, a reported plan for a naval blockade, and an assault on the Cuban medical missions. Honouring Fidel means giving Cuba our firm solidarity.

Sources and further reading:

To honour Fidel Castro means to continue his work of fighting imperialism and building socialism

Fidel Castro on Chinese socialism (1993) – the full text of the remarks quoted in this video

Cuba: siege socialism or barbarism – earlier video

Cuba Solidarity Campaign

Cuba is not a failed state – it is a besieged state (Morning Star)

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

This Thursday, 13 August, Fidel Castro would have been a hundred years old. Cuba has designated this the Year of the Centenary of the Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, and there are events taking place all over the world to mark the event.

So, what was so special about Fidel? What, concretely, did he do and understand that so few others did?

The question matters particularly now, when Cuba faces its gravest threat since 1959.

When Engels stood at Marx’s graveside in Highgate Cemetery in 1883, he said that Marx was “before all else a revolutionist”, whose real mission in life was to contribute to the overthrow of capitalist society and to the liberation of the modern proletariat. And that description fits Fidel just about as well as it has ever fitted anybody.

What he attempted was extraordinary. In the 1950s, Cuba was ninety miles from the United States — economically dominated by it, politically supervised by it, culturally saturated by it, and ruled by Washington’s man, Fulgencio Batista. This was the height of McCarthyism. There was no model of revolution to copy. There was no collapsing empire leaving a power vacuum, no Red Army arriving over the border.

Cuba’s existing communist party, the Popular Socialist Party, was a serious organisation with real roots in the working class, but it didn’t believe that the moment had come. Its leader, Blas Roca, was honest about this afterwards. For a long time, he admitted, the party “failed to take any practical steps” towards armed struggle, because it assumed that the struggles it was leading would culminate in insurrection more or less spontaneously. Fidel recognised the potentially revolutionary situation and then did the practical work: preparing, training and assembling people who were prepared to fight.

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.

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.

Interview: Fighting spirit has allowed the CPC to survive and adapt over a century

The following is the full text of an interview given by Carlos Martinez to the Global Times, marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). An abridged version was published by the Global Times on 12 July 2026 as part of a special series of interviews with international scholars reflecting on the party’s century-long journey.

In the interview, conducted by GT reporter Xia Wenxin, Carlos explores the meaning of the CPC’s “fighting spirit”, or “spirit of struggle” – a concept he argues is routinely misread in the West as blind confrontation or factional intrigue, but which in fact flows directly from the dialectical core of Marxism. Struggle, in this sense, is not a mood but a method: the recognition that development happens through contradiction, and that a serious revolutionary party must identify the principal contradiction of each period and mobilise the masses to resolve it.

Tracing this thread from Mao Zedong’s 1945 parable of the Foolish Old Man who removed the mountains through to the present day, Carlos discusses how the same method has allowed the party to survive and adapt across a century that saw so many other revolutionary projects defeated. He examines the CPC’s practice of self-revolution and its unrelenting campaign against corruption; the targeted poverty alleviation drive that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty; and the fundamental difference between the Chinese dialectical understanding of struggle as productive and the Western view of conflict as terminal.

Finally, he considers how this fighting spirit will be tested on the new battlefields of the 15th Five-Year Plan – high-tech self-reliance under conditions of US containment, the green transition, and the assorted domestic challenges on the road to the Second Centenary Goal of 2049. As he concludes, “on the record of the last 105 years, I would not bet against the CPC and the Chinese people surmounting these new challenges.”

The abridged version of this interview first appeared in the Global Times. The full version was first published on Friends of Socialist China.

As the CPC marks its 105th anniversary, it stands as one of the longest-governing political parties in modern history. Looking back at this journey, how do you evaluate the role of the “fighting spirit” in helping the party navigate historical crises and constantly adapt to changing eras?

I think that, for the CPC, “fighting spirit” is closely related to the dialectical core of Marxism: the recognition that development happens through contradiction, that nothing valuable arrives without meaningful effort, and that a serious revolutionary party has to identify the principal contradiction of each period and work to resolve it. Struggle, in this sense, is not a mood; it is a method.

This is not a recent slogan grafted onto the Party; it runs right through its tradition. One of the clearest statements of it is Mao’s closing speech to the Seventh Party Congress in June 1945, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains”, in which he retold an old fable. A foolish old man sets out to dig away two great mountains that block the way to his house; when a wise old man mocks the folly of it, he replies, “When I die, my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can’t we clear them away?” The two mountains, Mao said, were imperialism and feudalism, and the task of the Chinese people was to dig them out. What turns the parable into a statement of strategy is its ending: “Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?”

Fighting spirit, in this conception, is not so much heroic individual will as the conviction that an apparently immovable obstacle yields to patient, collective, intergenerational effort, once the masses are mobilised to do the digging.

That method is exactly what has allowed the Party to survive and adapt across a century in which so many of the other revolutionary projects of its generation were defeated. Consider the sheer range of conditions it has had to navigate: a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country torn apart by foreign invasion and civil war; the construction of an entire industrial and social base from near-zero after 1949; the turn to reform and opening up; and then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states in 1989–91, when counter-revolution triumphed almost everywhere – but was resolutely defeated in China. As Deng Xiaoping told Julius Nyerere in 1989, “so long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world”.

That the People’s Republic did not collapse was not luck. It was the product of a party willing to struggle on every level: against foreign domination, against feudalism, against poverty, against underdevelopment, against corruption, and against ideological ossification.

What defines the CPC’s 105-year success? – a CGTN Dialogue

The following is a discussion from CGTN’s Dialogue programme marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Broadcast in the wake of Xi Jinping’s anniversary speech – in which he hailed the Party’s 105-year history as the “most magnificent epic” of the Chinese nation – it brings together Xia Lu, associate professor at the School of CPC History and Party Building at Renmin University of China; Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China; and Radhika Desai, convenor of the International Manifesto Group.

The panel discusses how to evaluate the CPC’s achievements and governing logic; the role of Marxism – seeking truth from facts, the mass line, and the Party’s capacity for self-renewal – in explaining its longevity and legitimacy; and the distinctiveness of Chinese modernisation. Radhika Desai argues that the Chinese revolution, following the Bolshevik revolution, set humanity on a path to socialism, and that amid a declining capitalism China has become an “ocean of stability”. Carlos Martinez stresses that China’s is a modernisation achieved without colonialism, slavery or war – shattering the Eurocentric assumption that to modernise is to Westernise. Xia Lu reads the Party’s six outstanding qualities through the lens of dialectical and historical materialism, and emphasises the mass line and the Party’s vigilance against detachment from the people.

This discussion was originally broadcast by CGTN’s Dialogue. The video and a transcript follow.

Transcript

Host: Hello and welcome to Dialogue. Addressing a gathering marking the 105th anniversary of the Communist Party of China, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Xi Jinping hailed the 105-year history of the Party as the “most magnificent epic” of the Chinese nation. He urged the Party to press ahead to build China into a modern socialist country on schedule. So how should we evaluate the Party’s achievements and governing logic over the past 105 years? What does the speech tell us about the Party’s discipline and capacity for self-renewal? And as China moves toward its long-term modernisation goals, what challenges lie ahead? Joining me today from Beijing are Xia Lu, associate professor from the School of CPC History and Party Building at Renmin University of China; Carlos Martinez, author of The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China; and also Radhika Desai, convenor of the International Manifesto Group. Welcome to the show. Radhika, I’ll start with you: I’m sure you followed the speech, so I wonder what were your major takeaways?

Radhika Desai: Well, first of all, President Xi’s speech really grasps the fundamentals of the achievements of the Party. I would say that for this party to be more than a century old – 105 years old – while retaining its legitimacy among a billion-strong population, and having essentially transformed the people of China not only into an agent of their own history, giving the destiny of the people into the hands of the people of China, but into an agent of world history – that is a tremendous achievement. The second major event setting the world on a path to socialism after the Bolshevik revolution was the Chinese revolution. And the Bolshevik revolution is no longer; the Chinese revolution is still going. So it set humanity on a path to socialism, and it continues there – at this particular time in history when circumstances have become extremely dangerous, thanks to the decline of that very capitalism. In its decline, capitalism is unleashing chaos, destruction and economic disruption all over the world. In this context, the CPC not only holds great legitimacy among the people of China, but shows the way forward to the rest of the world, and has become a beacon, an oasis of stability, and a visionary path to the future.

Host: Carlos, President Xi said the Party’s endeavours over the past 105 years have fundamentally transformed the future of the Chinese people – as Radhika said, blazed the right path toward the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, demonstrated the strong vitality of Marxism, had a profound influence on the course of world history, and made the CPC a powerful communist party. What do you make of such a statement?

The Great Road – Zhu De, fifty years on

The following article by Carlos Martinez marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Zhu De – founder of the People’s Liberation Army and, with Mao Zedong, one of the leading architects of the Chinese Revolution’s victory.

Drawing on the classic accounts of Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow and Evans Carlson, it traces Zhu De’s journey from a tenant’s hut in Sichuan, through to the founding of the Red Army and the rostrum at Tiananmen Square – and asks what his life still teaches, half a century on.

This article was first published on Friends of Socialist China.

Fifty years ago, on 6 July 1976, Zhu De died in Beijing at the age of 89. It was a year of terrible losses for the Chinese people: Zhou Enlai had died in January; Mao Zedong would follow in September. Of the three, Zhu De is the least remembered in the West – and yet the army he built, the People’s Liberation Army, remains the guarantor of everything the Chinese Revolution has achieved, and his life traces the arc of that revolution more completely than almost any other.

Red Virtue: origins in Sichuan

Zhu De was born in December 1886 into a tenant family in Yilong county, Sichuan, on an estate whose landlord was known locally as the “King of Hell”. By what Edgar Snow called “a strange accident of language”, the two characters of his name mean “Red Virtue” – a fact his parents could hardly have foreseen, “or they would surely have changed it in terror”.

His mother bore 13 children; the last five were drowned at birth because the family could not feed them. She herself, he recalled, “was so humble that she had no name of her own”. The clan pooled its resources to educate a single son who could talk back to the tax collectors – and so Zhu De, almost by accident, became literate, passed through the old examination system in its dying days, and entered the Yunnan Military Academy, where he joined Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary Tongmenghui (a radical secret society and precursor to the Kuomintang) and took part in the 1911 Revolution and the campaigns that destroyed Yuan Shikai’s attempted monarchy.

The hardest battle

By his mid-thirties Zhu De was a general in the warlord armies of the south-west: wealthy, decorated, and addicted to opium. The 1911 Revolution, he concluded, had been “aborted by republican compromise with foreign imperialism”; warlordism was a dead end, and he was part of it. So he walked away. He gave up his commands and his fortune, and broke his opium addiction alone – pacing the deck of a Yangtze steamer for a month, in what Snow called “the hardest battle of his life”, proof that “this man had more steel in his will than his acquaintances supposed”.

Then he asked to join the infant Communist Party. His reasoning was characteristically direct: if the foreign imperialists attacked this party with everything ugly in their vocabulary, “it was the party for Chu Teh” (Chu Teh being the older Western spelling of his name). Rejected in Shanghai by then CPC General Secretary Chen Duxiu – who could not believe a former warlord general capable of becoming a communist – he sailed for Europe, and in Berlin in late 1922 presented himself to a student organiser more than ten years his junior named Zhou Enlai. His old life, he said, “had turned to ashes beneath his feet”. He was admitted to the party he would serve for the remaining 54 years of his life.

What would Rajani Palme Dutt have made of contemporary China?

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

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

The text was first published on Friends of Socialist China.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A pamphlet of its moment

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

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

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