In the following article, Karim Pourhamzavi – an Iranian lecturer specialising in global political economy and West Asian and North African politics at Beijing Foreign Studies University – takes aim at a strand of Western left thinking that treats Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and US capitalism as equivalent. Drawing on the history of capitalism, imperialism and uneven development, he argues that there is no equivalence in power between imperialism and its victims, even when the victim is a rising power like China.
Because the commanding heights of China’s economy remain in public ownership and its socialist state answers to the people rather than to the market, he contends, China is structurally incapable of the imperialism that has defined the West for five centuries – which is why, for the Global South, China’s rise represents the most constructive development since the birth of capitalism.
I recently attended a conference on the critique of global capitalism and possible global reordering in a renowned European city. My paper focused on critiquing imperialism and its expansion in West Asia. However, several presentations from European and North American scholars were unnecessarily and inaccurately Sinophobic in sentiment. Their thesis was astonishingly simplistic: capitalism is just capitalism, whether practiced by the United States or China. Therefore, they believed both are equally exploitative and destructive. This thesis suffers from both epistemological and empirical flaws. Such Sinophobic interpretations, coming from significant sections of the Western left, appear to abandon their emancipatory methodologies aimed at “changing” the world for the better, instead losing themselves in a positivist interpretation of the world. Yet there is no equivalence in power relations – or even sameness – between imperialism and its victims, even when the victim is a rising power like China.
Capitalism is not a universal condition
The aforementioned claims came from scholars in a city whose infrastructure is at least fifty years behind that of Beijing, where I live. These scholars have often never visited China, nor do they intend to, and they possess an ahistorical understanding of the Chinese political economy. Understanding socialism with Chinese characteristics requires revisiting the very term “capitalism.” Capitalism strictly refers to a political-economic system that emerged in Western Europe and expanded by imperial means to the Americas – precisely from 1492 onward. By the early 20th century, some 85 percent of the world’s land surface was under the colonial or semi-colonial domination of the Western powers and Japan. Therefore, China, like the rest of what we now understand as the Global South, was forcibly incorporated into global capitalism – compelled to cope with the enforced uneven development resulting from this historical process and to clean up the mess it left behind, a legacy that persists to this day.
Therefore, China’s modern history is not one experienced by the developed capitalist nations. Nor, at the philosophical and developmental planning levels, does revolutionary China share similarities with the core of capitalism or with those unevenly developed states that unsuccessfully tried to copy them as a way out of their underdevelopment. The first three hundred years of capitalist plundering in the world were based on a mercantilist political economy. This system sought to take everything from conquered nations and leave them nothing, while maintaining a balance of power among European rivals. It was centuries of plundering that enabled the Industrial Revolution – first in England, and then across the rest of Western Europe.
Britain having gained the upper hand in production compared to the rest of the world, Adam Smith disagreed with his mercantilist counterparts. He believed that the wealth of nations lies not in maintaining a favorable balance of exports vis-à-vis imports, but in production. He argued that markets must trade such production freely, without state intervention. Yet the notion of a “free” market was never fully realized; by different means compared to those of the mercantilist era, the state continued to intervene in favor of the market.
Karl Marx agreed with Adam Smith on the importance of production as a key source of capitalist wealth. However, he uniquely and sophisticatedly reflected on the alienation that results for the working class – who create such wealth – and extends from them to the rest of the world. These first two political economies are exclusively Western experiences, and they function as ideologies to dominate the global economic system of the last five hundred years. The miracle of the Chinese revolution was to adopt Marxist political economy as the theory most relevant to China’s own experience of uneven development, to localize it, and to shape its developmental planning accordingly. The result is that contemporary China holds the upper hand in both production and the moral high ground of socialism, which contains the alienation resulting from production.
The socialist difference: ownership, the state and the army
These two distinct patterns of modern history – what Marx and Engels described as the divide between exploiter and exploited – also explain why China is not an imperial power and, contrary to allegations by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is not engaged in “neocolonial” actions in places such as Africa. The fundamental fact about Chinese socialism is that the commanding heights of the economy – land, finance, energy, transport, telecommunications and the major heavy industries – remain in public ownership, and that political power is held by a communist party committed to socialist development. Privately owned enterprises in China are understood systematically as complementary to public ownership and are expected to support it when necessary. In other words, capitalism and private ownership are regulated and guided by socialism. This is why no Chinese company – public or private – behaves as Bechtel Corporation did in Bolivia, as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – today’s BP – did in engineering the 1953 coup in Iran, or as the handful of mostly American-owned media conglomerates that monopolize global narrative-making, especially when operating beyond China’s borders. After all, the state in the US and the rest of the capitalist world regulates in service of the market and the private sector, whereas China’s socialist state is committed to the well-being of the Chinese people, regulates on their behalf, and keeps the private sector within a responsible framework.
Imperial powers have long relied on the private sector to back their military endeavors. The United States took this to the extreme when, after the Second World War, it tethered its entire economic well-being to the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). US military power is intended to secure American hegemony and ensure its reproduction over time, while the MIC itself is meant to perpetuate the US economy – particularly by rescuing it during periods of global economic crisis. It goes without saying that the majority of the US MIC is privately owned, and its shareholders wield substantial influence over the US government to secure favorable regulations. By 2008, the number of privately contracted US military personnel in Iraq exceeded those managed by the government – and it is no coincidence that almost every US president since the Second World War has launched one or more wars benefiting this industry. This stands in stark contrast to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, which is accountable to the Chinese people through the Communist Party and the state, and is maintained for purely defensive purposes. This also explains why China can pursue foreign policies such as the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, the Belt and Road Initiative, and cooperation under the frameworks of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, while millions in West Asia and across the Global South suffer under the weight of US perpetual wars and imperialism.
Five centuries of uneven development
The history of capitalism is also the history of an unequally developed world. Throughout the 16th century, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers eradicated indigenous populations across multiple Latin American territories – reducing them to ten percent or even zero – in order to triple their supplies of European silver and gold. The Industrial Revolution may have made life easier for many segments of British society, but it also enabled British imperialism to colonize nearly all of Africa, West Asia, the Indian subcontinent, parts of China, the entirety of present-day Australia and New Zealand, and later Palestine. The other European powers and Japan were just as eager to claim their share of what is now the Global South. Every one of these capitalist expansions through imperial and colonial means was accompanied by severe monopoly. The imperial powers simply took from their subjugated nations and shared none of their technological advantages. Even the railways and limited infrastructure built in India and elsewhere served only to transport what had been looted from the colonies and to sustain the coercive administrative apparatus of colonialism.
China and the Global South
According to former Liberian Minister of Public Works W. Gyude Moore, the roots of Sinophobic rhetoric must be traced to the West, not to Africans themselves. The same holds true across much of the Global South, where Western media actively demonize China’s role and contributions. The reality, however, rests in the structural differences between China and the West outlined throughout this article.
Sino-African relations are not governed by the historical colonial pattern or the exploitative economic dependency that characterized the post-colonial era. The Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) frames this relationship, and similar agreements have been signed whereby China takes primary responsibility for building infrastructure across Africa, Latin America, the Caucasus, and parts of Asia – without claiming any monopoly over the benefits. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, while the US imposed vaccine sanctions on Iran, China’s partnership with Tehran provided alternatives not only in vaccines but across the range of essentials a Southern nation needs to sustain itself.
This is not a new observation. Speaking in November 2004, at the time of Hu Jintao’s state visit to Cuba, Fidel Castro observed that China “has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries”, and “an important element of balance, progress and safeguarding of world peace and stability”. Two decades on, that judgement looks more accurate, not less.
In short, for the Global South, China’s rise represents the most constructive development in the five hundred years since the birth of capitalism – precisely because of the fundamental differences between its socialist model and the imperialist logic of the West. China was never an imperialist power, and it never will be.
