Palestine Archives - Invent the Future

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.

Who opened the border at Ceuta?

In late July, tens of thousands crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, and at least 72 died. Carlos Martinez asks who really opened the border – and why the resulting crisis fitted so neatly into a wider campaign to punish Spain for its independent stance on Palestine, Iran and China.

This article was first published in the Morning Star.

On 30 and 31 July, something in the region of 60,000 Moroccans crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. At least 72 died on the Spanish side of the border, drowned in the Mediterranean or crushed in the attempt. Within days, the great majority had returned to Morocco, many of them voluntarily, on account of Ceuta having no work, food or shelter to offer them.

They were overwhelmingly young, poor and unemployed. “Everyone came because there is no work in Morocco”, one 24-year-old told the New York Times. They were not “invaders”; they were workers looking for work, and dozens of them died for it. They deserve our sympathy and our solidarity.

But this was no ordinary movement of people. Tens of thousands do not converge on one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders in a matter of hours by coincidence. The immediate spark was a flood of online messages falsely claiming that a Spanish Supreme Court ruling meant anyone reaching Ceuta by sea would receive papers and employment. The ruling said no such thing.

Besides, rumours alone do not open a militarised border. The decisive factor was the conduct of the Moroccan state. Its normally formidable border apparatus stopped functioning; the authorities failed to warn Madrid about the online mobilisation; and numerous accounts suggest that Moroccan officers actively encouraged people to cross. Indeed, Spanish intelligence has reportedly concluded that Rabat permitted and exploited the crossing.

There is a precedent. In 2021, Morocco relaxed its border controls and thousands entered Ceuta after Spain admitted Brahim Ghali, leader of the Polisario Front (Western Sahara’s liberation movement), for medical treatment. Rabat was using desperate people to punish Madrid over Western Sahara.

The provocation this time was very similar. On 20 July, just ten days before the crossing, Pedro Sánchez travelled to Algiers to announce a “new phase” in relations with Algeria, Morocco’s principal regional rival and the main supporter of the Sahrawi struggle for self-determination. Algeria is also Spain’s largest supplier of natural gas this year, giving the rapprochement considerable economic and strategic weight.

Rabat, then, had reasons of its own to open the border. But the resulting crisis fitted seamlessly into a wider campaign against Spain’s increasingly independent foreign policy.

Madrid recognised the Palestinian state in May 2024 and intervened in support of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. It has described the destruction of Gaza as genocide, imposed an arms embargo, banned imports from illegal settlements and repeatedly called for European sanctions against Israel.

Spain also refused Washington the use of the jointly operated Rota and Morón bases for attacks on Iran, subsequently closing its airspace to US aircraft involved in a war it described as illegal. It was alone within NATO in rejecting Donald Trump’s demand for military spending to rise to 5 percent of GDP. And on China it has been almost alone in Europe in resisting the tariff war, opposing the EU’s duties on Chinese electric vehicles and treating Beijing as a partner rather than a threat. For a medium-sized member state, this is a remarkable degree of insubordination – and it has not gone unpunished.

Washington’s response has been explicit. Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain over its refusal to facilitate the attack on Iran. After the Ceuta crossing, he and JD Vance immediately presented the episode as an “invasion” caused by “weak and very liberal laws”, instructing the US right to turn the deaths into a domestic political weapon. Italy’s quasi-fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni suspended Schengen arrangements with Spain and demanded its expulsion, regardless of the fact that Ceuta and Melilla are not part of the Schengen zone.

The Israeli response was also revealing. Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, used the crisis to taunt Spain over its “colonial enclaves”. Pro-Israel commentators had already advocated a new Moroccan “Green March” into Ceuta and Melilla as a means of punishing Sánchez and strengthening an ally controlling the entrance to the Mediterranean. Such interventions demonstrate how neatly the resulting crisis aligned with the strategic interests of Israel and the United States.

Morocco has been drawn ever more deeply into that system of strategic interests. In December 2020, it normalised relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. The price was US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over occupied Western Sahara, overturning decades of international consensus. Israel followed with its own recognition in 2023, while Israeli drones, air-defence systems and surveillance technology have become pillars of Morocco’s armed forces.

Washington has now begun applying pressure directly to the status of Ceuta and Melilla. In April, a US House appropriations committee described them as cities “under Spanish administration” but “located in Moroccan territory”. This was not the adoption of a new US policy, still less an outbreak of anti-colonial principle. The same administration recognises Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara and maintains its own colonial possession at Guantánamo Bay – not to mention a global empire of military bases, alliances and client states.

It is of course the case that Ceuta and Melilla are colonial enclaves, relics of the Iberian conquest of North Africa. Like the six counties of the north of Ireland, the Malvinas and the Chagos Islands, they are unfinished business that will eventually have to be settled. But the colonial question must not be reduced to an instrument for disciplining a government that has broken ranks over Palestine and Iran.

The external pressure, moreover, has a domestic twin. For two years the Spanish right has sought to bring the Sánchez government down by means other than the ballot box. A judiciary that the country’s transition to democracy left substantially intact – the same courts that pursued Catalonia’s elected leaders into prison and exile – has opened a cascade of investigations into the prime minister’s wife, his brother and his attorney general, on transparently political charges. The neo-fascist Vox party has made common cause with an international far right movement which cannot tolerate the kind of independent, mildly redistributive government that Sánchez represents. A “mass immigration crisis” is the perfect tool for presenting the government as weak, incompetent and incapable of protecting Spain’s borders.

Morocco has shamelessly exploited the poverty of its own people for its immediate geopolitical purposes, while the US, Israel and the European right are exploiting the resulting spectacle against Spain. None of them care about the lives of the young workers who died in the Mediterranean, nor about the thousands that have lost their lives in the wars the Sánchez government has stood up against.

Solidarity is not terrorism: the persecution of Fergie Chambers

US activist and philanthropist James ‘Fergie’ Chambers is being held in Spain, facing extradition to the United States for the ‘crime’ of funding humanitarian relief in Gaza. Carlos Martinez examines a coordinated offensive – from Fergie’s arrest to the proscription of Palestine Action and the anticommunist crackdown on both sides of the Atlantic – that seeks to recast solidarity as terrorism.

This article was first published in the Morning Star.

On 10 July, US political activist and philanthropist James ‘Fergie’ Chambers was arrested by police while driving in Ibiza, Spain, with his family. He has been held without bail ever since, awaiting possible extradition to the United States on charges of “international money laundering” intended to provide “material support” to Hamas. If extradited, he could well face decades in prison.

Chambers is not the typical target of Washington’s counter-terrorism apparatus. Heir to the Cox Enterprises media and automotive empire, in 2023 he cut ties with his family, sold his stake for a reported $250 million, and set about giving much of it away to humanitarian and social causes.

Over the course of the last three years, Chambers has donated over a million dollars to humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, including a quarter of a million dollars to the Sameer Project, funding a bakery that turns out 3,600 free loaves a day, a desalination plant supplying 150,000 litres of clean water daily, and a free clinic in Jabalia treating up to 300 patients a day, with a further $100,000 for the mental-health care of orphaned children. The British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta calls him “a vital supporter for the provision of care for children wounded in the genocide”.

Closer to home, Chambers bankrolled the movement against Atlanta’s “Cop City” police mega-base, paid the bail and legal fees of jailed activists, and covered the costs of the direct-action group Palestine Action USA. This is the “material support” for which Washington now wants him locked away.

The indictment is sealed, but by the account of those who have seen it, it offers no evidence that a single cent reached any “terrorist organisation” – only that Chambers moved money from US banks to banks in Tunisia, where he lived since late 2023, and where he has invested in local businesses and even bought the Club Africain football club, one of the longest established and most popular in the north African country. It is the first time the US has sought to extradite anyone for supporting the Palestinian cause. Strip away the absurd vocabulary of counter-terrorism, and what remains is the story of a man being hunted across borders for the crime of solidarity.

A coordinated offensive

Chambers was seized on the very day US Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened ministers from more than 60 countries to confront what his administration now calls “transnational far-left terrorism” – with its counter-terror officials briefing that the entire left constitutes a single terrorist network. Days later the State Department published a hundred-page report, grandly titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, which recasts everyone from Black Lives Matter to the campus encampments against the Gaza genocide as fronts and “fifth columns” for Havana. And at home, Donald Trump reserves his ugliest language for the socialist left, calling communism a “cancer” to be “cut out” and resharing calls to deport New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani and other “hardcore communist bastards”.

All of this constitutes a single, coordinated offensive by the resurgent hard right – one that seeks to redefine dissent itself as terrorism, and solidarity as subversion.

Britain down the same road

Britain is moving down the same road. Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July 2025 – the first time a protest group has ever been so designated. Membership or support is now a criminal offence, and hundreds of people have been arrested for nothing more than peacefully holding a placard, in what the United Nations’ own human-rights chief called a “disturbing” misuse of counter-terrorism powers.

This July the government widened the net further, proscribing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an arm of a sovereign state. Meanwhile in April, Ben Jamal of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Chris Nineham of the Stop the War Coalition – organisers of the largest demonstrations Britain has seen in a generation – were convicted of breaching police conditions on a march, in what Jeremy Corbyn described as a “dark day for civil liberties”.

The test for Spain

It is against this backdrop that Spain’s position becomes so fraught. The government of Pedro Sánchez has done more than any other in Western Europe to resist this tide: not only recognising the state of Palestine but passing emergency measures against the Gaza genocide, and refusing to let Washington use Spanish soil to attack Iran.

However, the decision on Fergie Chambers will not rest with Sánchez, or the executive branch alone. It rests first with the Audiencia Nacional (high court) – and the Spanish judiciary is one institution the country’s sometimes fraught and partial transition to democracy left largely untouched. The same courts that will weigh Chambers’s fate are those that hounded Catalonia’s elected government into prison and exile for daring to hold an independence referendum. This is lawfare with a long pedigree – indeed Sánchez himself and members of his family are in the sights of just the same judicial and security establishment, as is former social democratic prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

The court has 40 days to rule. If it refuses the extradition, the matter ends there; if it consents, the final decision passes to the Council of Ministers – to the government itself. Should it reach that point, the communists and the other left and progressive forces on whose votes the Sánchez government depends for its survival would surely be right to make their continued support conditional on refusing to hand Chambers over. For Sánchez the logic ought to be fairly plain: a government that allows a largely unreconstructed Francoist judicial machine to deliver a solidarity activist to Trump does not tame that machine; it feeds it and increases its appetite.

Spanish MPs from across the left – Podemos, Sumar, Izquierda Unida, along with the CUP, ERC, and EH Bildu, from Catalonia and the Basque Country, together with others – have already written to ministers demanding that the extradition be refused, warning that solidarity with Palestine, in a context of genocide and occupation, cannot be criminalised as terrorism. If a government can extradite someone for funding a bakery in Gaza, then every donation, every convoy, every act of humanitarian solidarity becomes a potential terrorist offence.

Solidarity is not a crime. Spain should say so, and let Fergie Chambers go home to his family.

Ghassan Kanafani, China, and the global struggle against imperialism

The following review by Carlos Martinez of Ghassan Kanafani — Selected Political Writings first appeared in the Morning Star.

This new volume from Pluto Press, edited by Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi, brings together some of the most important essays, manifestos and journalistic reports by the revered Palestinian writer and activist Ghassan Kanafani.

Kanafani is best known for his literary works, all of which are deeply imbued with the spirit of anti-colonial resistance. His novels, short stories and essays, such as Men in the Sun (1962) and Returning to Haifa (1969), vividly depict the experiences of exile, dispossession and resilience, giving voice to the Palestinian collective memory.

Rashid Khalidi, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine observes that, “among the literary figures whose ideas and images played a major role in the revival of Palestinian identity, Kanafani was perhaps the most prominent prose writer and the most widely translated”.

Kanafani also made important contributions as a journalist, theorist and political activist. Indeed, the editors of Selected Political Writings consider that he was “Palestine’s greatest Marxist thinker. His ideas – forged in the firepit of war, crisis and armed resistance – are flammable materials, rich in the lessons of the revolutionary sparks which ignited his era.”

Kanafani was spokesperson of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP – a Marxist-Leninist organisation that forms part of the resistance front in Gaza today) from the time of its formation in 1969, and co-authored its program, Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine.

A powerful and consistent advocate of armed struggle against colonial occupation, and of the centrality of the working class and peasantry in the struggle for national liberation, Kanafani was deeply influenced by the ideas of Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, and situated the Palestinian liberation struggle within the broader global struggle against imperialism and for socialism. His two visits to China (in 1965 and 66) “left a comparably profound mark on his thinking”.

Indeed, on page 113 of Selected Political Writings, in an extract from Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, we find: “The Palestinian and Arab liberation movement in alliance with national liberation movements in all undeveloped and poor countries will, in facing world imperialism led by the USA, find a strong ally to back its forces and augment its power of resistance. This ally is the People’s Republic of China.”

In a review for Counterfire, Michael Lavalette notes, with perhaps a hint of disapproval, that the PFLP’s Marxism was “heavily influenced by Third World, anti-colonial, armed struggles”. In Lavalette’s view, this is “not the classical Marxism of Lenin and Trotsky with its emphasis on the ‘self-emancipation’ of the working class”.

This comment brings Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism – recently reviewed in these pages – to mind. In their introduction to the English translation of that book, Jennifer Ponce de León and Gabriel Rockhill observe that “Eastern and Western Marxism … refer to two different political orientations… One of them is dedicated to the difficult and drawn-out process of building socialism in a capitalist-dominated world and, in particular, across the Global South, which has been the principal site for such endeavours thus far. The other is generally dismissive of such practical undertakings, often belittling concrete struggles against imperialism because they do not live up to an imagined standard of theoretical or moral purity.”

Kanafani’s writings and record of activity locate his thought very much within the sphere of Eastern Marxism. There is no “imagined standard of theoretical or moral purity”, and a great deal of “concrete struggle against imperialism”. He took tremendous inspiration from the construction of “actually existing socialism” and the revolutionary anti-colonial struggles waging around the world, and situated the Palestinian struggle within a global united front against imperialism.

In our struggle for the liberation of Palestine, we face primarily world imperialism… The major conflict experienced by the world of today is the conflict between exploiting world imperialism on the one hand, and these peoples [of Africa, Asia and Latin America] and the socialist camp on the other. The alliance of the Palestinian and Arab national liberation movement with the liberation movement in Vietnam, the revolutionary situation in Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America is the only way to create a camp that is capable of facing and triumphing over the imperialist camp. (p113)

Interestingly, the PFLP was one of only a handful of organisations globally to successfully navigate the Sino-Soviet Split, maintaining good relations with both the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. While clearly closer to China’s strategic orientation at the time, it recognised the Soviet Union as a “major supporter of the Arab masses in their fight against imperialism”, and benefitted from Soviet weapons, training and scholarships.

It’s also worth noting that the PFLP continues to maintain close links with People’s China. In July 2023, Deputy Secretary-General Jamil Mezher described China as a springboard for important global transformations that put an end to US imperialist hegemony and its savage policies in the world, and commended China’s constant support for the just causes of the Palestinian people in their struggle to restore their legitimate national rights.

Ghassan Kanafani’s ideas profoundly shaped Palestinian identity and resistance during a critical period of struggle against occupation and displacement. His influence was such that the Israeli foreign intelligence service saw fit to assassinate him on 8 July 1972. However, this despicable act (which can but remind us of so many other similarly despicable operations carried out by Mossad in the last 16 months), did not silence Kanafani, did not prevent his words from resonating. His clear-sighted and skilful application of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete reality of the Palestinian resistance has lost none of its relevance or its influence.

As Kanafani wrote, “the Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever they are, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era” (p95). As such, Selected Political Writings deserves to be widely read. The editors have performed a most valuable service in making Kanafani’s political contributions available for readers of English.