As a progressive socialist country whose economic rise is helping to put an end to 500 years of Western imperialism, or as a capitalist-imperial rival to the U.S.?
The Biden administration has disappointed many of its supporters by adopting policies and rhetoric with regards to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) similar to Trump’s and the Republicans.
Biden, for example, has supported $9.1 billion in funding for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, whose purpose is to encircle China militarily.
The Biden administration has also expanded Trump’s economic war on China, poured money into developing new high tech weaponry, missiles and bases in Australia, the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific, and funded the reconstruction of U.S. military bases on Pacific islands that have not been used since World War II.
The anti-war movement and what passes for the American left is mostly opposed to U.S. military provocations directed against China and fearful of the outbreak of World War III.
Beyond that, however, there are conflicting views about China and how it should be understood in the current global order.
On one side, you have people who consider China as a progressive socialist country whose economic policies have lifted millions out of poverty. On the other hand, you have people who view China as a capitalist-imperial rival to the U.S. which is threatening aggression against Taiwan and has committed genocide against the Uyghurs.
Two new books help to elucidate both positions in the China debate.
Kyle Ferrana, Why the World Needs China: Development, Environmentalism, Conflict Resolution & Common Prosperity presents China in a positive light, while China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity against Imperial Rivalry, written by Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu and Ashley Smith, is critical of it.
In my assessment, both books make some valid points and there are both good and bad things about the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Nevertheless, Ferrana presents, in my view, a stronger case that the PRC has produced remarkable achievements and that, rather than being an imperialistic rival of the U.S., it is contributing to the uplift of the Global South and is helping to advance a multi-polar world order capable of transcending Western imperial dominance.
Why the World Needs China
Kyle Ferrana is a software engineer and tenant organizer who writes for The International Magazine.
He depicts China as a country that has exposed the weaknesses of neo-liberal economic theory—a key reason the U.S. desires to go to war with it—and that is leading the way into a new era of multipolarity.
Ferrana starts his book Why the World Needs China by pointing to the stratospheric growth of China’s electric vehicle industry in the last 20 years.
To him, this growth exemplifies the economic dynamism of the PRC under a hybrid socialist government model involving significant state planning and government subsidization of industry, and the PRC’s commitment, with measures like massive reforestation, to ecological civilization.[1]
The PRC has successfully combated extreme poverty in part by connecting rural villages to the country’s paved road network and investing in economic development there. It has improved quality of life through a program of robust public sector spending and government-financed infrastructural projects, including high speed rail-lines, as a public good.
Ferrana uses Vladimir Lenin’s definitions of imperialism to refute the idea that the PRC is an imperialist power.
He says that the country is not ruled by finance capitalists like the U.S.; rather, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has subordinated billionaires from within its ranks and, under Xi Jinping’s leadership, is trying to institute socialistic policies that are designed to eradicate poverty, root out corruption, and redistribute national wealth.
While some Maoists rue Deng Xiaoping’s betrayal of the Chinese Revolution by liberalizing China’s state-run economy in the 1980s, Ferrana sees Deng as a visionary who introduced economic liberalization measures in order to create wealth that was a necessary precondition for achieving the communist goal of an egalitarian society where wealth was evenly distributed.[2]
In the international realm, Ferrana shows that China makes low profits from overseas investments and, rather than fleecing and exploiting helpless African nations, invests in them by building up their infrastructure and transportation networks.
China’s state news agency Xinhua, reported that, from 2000 to 2020, the PRC helped African countries build 13,000 kilometers of railway, 100,000 kilometers of highway, 1,000 bridges and 100 ports.[3]
Some of these have been constructed under China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has stimulated economic development and contributed to rising wages to such an extent that the U.S. has scrambled—in vain so far—to develop its own copycat version.
Chinese investment has contributed to reduced inequality and economic growth in African countries by helping to facilitatite their industrialization, in stark contrast to traditional colonial powers that forcibly structured African economies around raw material production.[4]
One reason for China’s positive impact is that its lending agencies and banks do not impose the same kinds of conditions upon loans as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which force economic austerity measures onto recipients and their populations.
The former are willing to lower interest rates, allow for renegotiation, and write off debts because state agencies are less concerned with profitable returns on their investments.
Unlike the U.S., the PRC does not employ soft-power NGOs that seek to manipulate political systems and it does not meddle in elections or deploy its military to affect regime change like the U.S. China has only one overseas military base (in Djibouti), while the U.S., which Ferrana calls the “super-empire,” has more than 800.
Ferrana’s eighth chapter, entitled “The Propaganda Siege,” juxtaposes the negative press depictions of China in the U.S. with many of the considerable achievements of the PRC in overcoming China’s Century of Humiliation—a reference to the 19th century, when the country was weakened under British neo-colonialism.
China’s achievements include the elevation of ethnic minority groups like the Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongols who were historically oppressed by the Chinese government, but which the PRC is now trying to help uplift.
According to Ferrana, the gap between media image and reality is most stark in the Xinjiang-Uyghur autonomous region where the Chinese state has been falsely accused by the U.S. media of engaging in forced-labor practices and genocide.
Tellingly, no such allegations are being advanced in the media of Muslim countries intent on spotlighting atrocities directed against oppressed Muslim groups like the Burmese Rohingya, Palestinians, and Kashmiris.
The anti-China bias of some Western human rights NGOs was evident when they praised a Uyghur suicide bomber who killed one and injured dozens of commuters in an Urumqi rail station in 2014. One of 52 reported terrorist attacks between 1990 and 2014, the bombing was attributed to “people amongst the colonized who are ready to use violence against the colonizer.”[5]
Instead of responding to the terrorist attacks and mob violence targeting Han Chinese by declaring a War on Terror à la George W. Bush, Xi and the CCP invested $700 billion into Xinjiang’s economic development and sent Uyghur men and women for education in Chinese language and job-training skills that would enable them to make a viable future living.
Schools that were perniciously labeled as re-education or concentration camps were actually part of what Ferrana considers to be an enlightened policy, comparatively speaking, that has contributed to economic growth in Xinjiang.
According to Ferrana, Western academics have tried to portray Xinjiang and Tibet as internal colonies of China so they could frame imperialist efforts to destabilize China by supporting insurrections there as “advancing decolonization.”[6]
Ferrana writes that “The ‘Uyghur genocide’ is frequently deployed by Western rhetoric to marshal left-wing dissent into anti-China xenophobia. It has become a thought-terminating cliché, a moral cudgel to silence any who would speak favorably of the PRC’s accomplishments, and thus restrains the Western proletariat from recognizing anything positive about their Chinese class allies.”[7]
China in Global Capitalism
Ferrana is likely to be very critical of the book China in Global Capitalism and its authors who he would consider to fall right into the trap that he is describing.
The authors title the subsection of their book on the Uyghurs “Anti-Terrorism and the Settler Colonial Project in Xinjiang.”
Though acknowledging the PRC’s “massive infrastructural projects” and “impressive economic growth” under Xi’s tenure in Xinjiang, they suggest that the Uyghurs have benefited little from it.
After a social eruption following Uyghur-Chinese clashes in 2009 and the outbreak of a low-level insurgency, the PRC’s security apparatus, according to the authors, “unleashed an intense campaign to subjugate and collectively punish the PRC’s Muslim citizens. By 2017, the state had constructed massive camps, euphemistically called ‘re-education centers,’ where it jailed hundreds of thousands of Muslims.”[8]
The authors further wrote of the PRC’s establishment of a “dystopian system of surveillance throughout Xinjiang,” comparable to apartheid-era South Africa or the contemporary West Bank, “that tightly controls all digital activities, and even tracks individuals’ movements through cities and towns with an encompassing system of security cameras linked to facial recognition software”[9]
These latter charges appear to be valid, with the PRC being known for its draconian surveillance apparatus. Ferrana makes a strong case, though, for media bias and misrepresentation regarding the “Uyghur genocide” that China in Global Capitalism appears to reinforce.
The book is intent on showing that China is not a socialist but a capitalist country that exploits its working class. While the public sector is more robust than in most Western countries and some industries are nationalized, the PRC allows only one labor federation, the CCP-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which ensures labor peace for China’s corporations.
When workers do strike, the police have routinely sided with corporation bosses, much like in the U.S. Gilded Age and other periods of labor unrest in U.S. history.
The result has been to keep wages low even as the country experiences economic growth. According to China in Global Capitalism, welfare benefits in China are not generous and social spending as a share of GDP is far below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average.[10]
Like in other capitalist countries, Chinese cities have glitzy stores and great wealth but there are deep class and regional inequalities and fiscal problems in the country.
Rather than being a visionary, Deng Xiaoping is depicted as a kind of Marxist turncoat who removed workers’ right to strike from the Chinese constitution, privatized state-run companies, and allowed China to become a sweatshop to the world.
U.S. companies, including Walmart and Apple among others, feed off the low-wage economy that allows them to make huge profits while the living standard of China’s workers and migrants remains low.
China in Global Capitalism’s view of China as a rival imperial power to the U.S. is reflected in China’s apparent intent to recolonize Taiwan. The book is also critical of the PRC’s suppression of Hong Kong’s 2019 umbrella revolution, which it says was motivated by a desire for better government representation, economic grievances, and pushback against an extradition law.
Significantly, the authors neglect to discuss the role that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and U.S. State Department-aligned NGOs played in supporting the umbrella revolution.
They lament that some of the protesters were flying U.S. flags, though these, along with the hooliganism of some of the protesters, raised clear signals from the viewpoint of the PRC, which could depict its clampdown as being necessary for national security.
With regard to Taiwan, China in Global Capitalism fails to discuss how the U.S. “porcupine strategy” of arming Taiwan to deter China has made Taiwan a flashpoint of the new Cold War, and reinforced Chinese desires to reincorporate Taiwan into the Chinese mainland.
During the original Cold War, the U.S. used Taiwan as a base of subversion across Southeast Asia, which China naturally does not want to reoccur.
The anti-China bias of the authors is seen additionally in their attempt to blame China for aggressively trying to reclaim islands in the South China Sea, failing to discuss how China has many legitimate historical claims including over the Senkaku Islands, which were taken by Japan during the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War.
China is blamed for supporting Russia’s “barbarous war” in Ukraine, though Ukraine was the real aggressor in that conflict with the U.S., and China’s newly found alliance with Russia is a key to major world power shifts now under way that anti-imperialists should be enthusiastic about.
China in Global Capitalism is valuable in debunking certain myths that may prevail about China and in highlighting some of the PRC’s negative features.
It could strengthen its argument by detailing in greater depth China’s repressive surveillance practices and authoritarian proclivities, including its brutal lockdown policies during the COVID—19 pandemic where millions of people were confined to their homes, and policed by drones using facial recognition software.[11]
The U.S. left should nevertheless recognize the great achievements of the PRC.
They should also be careful about not falling prey to dominant propaganda narratives that are used to marshal support for imperialist intervention and a potential hot war that could lead to the ruination of the U.S. and China.
Kyle Ferrana, Why the World Needs China: Development, Environmentalism, Conflict Resolution & Common Prosperity (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2024), 2. ↑
Ferrana writes that “the Communist Party under Deng’s leadership pursued free-market reforms as a stage it believed was necessary before socialism could be fully established.” (p. 162) ↑
Ferrana, Why the World Needs China, 131. ↑
Ferrana, Why the World Needs China, 130, 131. ↑
Ferrana, Why the World Needs China, 228, 229. ↑
Ferrana, Why the World Needs China, 261. ↑
Idem. ↑
Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu and Ashley Smith, China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024), 85. ↑
Friedman, et al., China in Global Capitalism, 86. ↑
Friedman, et al., China in Global Capitalism, 16. ↑
For interesting discussion, see David A. Hughes, “COVID-19” Psychological Operations and the War For Technocracy, Volume 1 (New York: Palgrave McMIllan, 2024), 20. Hughes emphasizes the high rates of suicide caused by the lockdowns. In another section, he discusses the importance of U.S. and Western military-technology transfers in contributing to China’s economic growth in the 1990s and collaboration with the U.S. He observes a strange idealization of China’s authoritarian proclivities among some members of the elitsit Trilateral Commission and other Western government leaders, including Justin Trudeau. Jeff Halper has pointed out that some of China’s surveillance technologies come from Israel. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
