The following is the full text of an interview given by Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, 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.
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.
The primary targets of the CPC’s “fighting spirit” are often internal – such as deeply entrenched corruption, vested interests, and structural economic imbalances. In your view, how has the CPC used its philosophy of “struggle” to overcome institutional inertia and continuously renew itself?
In the long term, the hardest enemy for any governing party is not an external rival but its own tendency toward complacency, capture and decay. In thousands of years of Chinese history, dynasties have risen and then rotted from within. The CPC is unique in having made the prevention of decay an explicit, never-ending task – what it calls self-revolution.
Deng Xiaoping saw the danger early. He understood that reform and opening up carried real risks: that those who “got rich first” might expect their wealth to translate into political power, exactly as it does in the capitalist world. His answer was the Four Cardinal Principles – adherence to the socialist road, the people’s democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Party, and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought – as a guard-rail against precisely that capture.
The New Era under Xi Jinping has been characterised by, among other things, a merciless and ceaseless campaign against corruption, both the “tigers” who damage the country as a whole and the “flies” whose petty graft makes ordinary people’s lives miserable; a rectification of the Party’s ranks and a powerful reaffirmation of the principle of serving the people; and the reassertion of public direction over private capital – tighter regulation of the technology and property sectors, party committees inside private firms, common prosperity as a check on runaway inequality.
What allows the Party to do this – to discipline its own members and to rein in some of the country’s wealthiest citizens – is, in the end, a class question. Because the working class and peasantry remain the ruling class, and the capitalist class is not, the Party has the structural independence to act against vested interests rather than on their behalf. A state captured by capital cannot meaningfully struggle against capital. That is the difference between self-revolution and the periodic, cosmetic “reform” you see in capitalist states, where the donors who fund the politicians are the very interests any cleanup would have to confront. Self-revolution is how the CPC answers the oldest question in Chinese statecraft: how to escape the historical cycle of rise and decline. Its answer is to never stop struggling, never let up on its “fighting spirit” in order to improve and to better represent the interests of the people.
General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized that the CPC must dare to struggle against systemic risks and deep-seated domestic challenges that are “unavoidable.” In practice, this spirit is often translated into major governmental campaigns. Looking at China’s major initiatives over the past few decades, which concrete example has left the deepest impression on you, and why?
From my standpoint, the targeted poverty alleviation campaign, and the elimination of extreme poverty, is truly remarkable.
The headline figure – the World Bank’s count of around 800 million people lifted out of poverty since 1978 – is staggering enough. But it’s particularly moving to look at how the goal of eliminating extreme poverty was attained. It was not achieved by simply writing cheques. Around three million Party cadres were sent out across the country – first to carry out what amounted to a poverty census, going village by village into the remotest areas to establish each household’s actual needs, and then staying there, sometimes for years, working with communities down to the level of the individual family to build a sustainable route out of poverty. In one place that meant a school; in another, a road; in another, brokering a commercial link with a nearby city to buy the village’s produce.
And of course “poverty alleviation” in China means something far more substantial than the World Bank’s cash line of a couple of dollars a day. It means secure housing, modern energy, clean piped water, dignified clothing, a nutritious diet, at least ten years of free schooling for the children, and guaranteed access to healthcare. Delivering that to 1.4 billion people, in a developing country in Asia, is genuinely without precedent in human history.
It impresses me because it is the antithesis of how the West now governs. It required mass mobilisation, long-term commitment and a willingness to set a binding target and then move the whole machinery of state to meet it – precisely the things an anarchic, shareholder-driven system cannot do.
The CPC often highlights that its historical milestones were forged through “struggle.” However, Western political discourse routinely misinterprets this term as blind confrontation or zero-sum factional power struggles. As an international scholar, what do you see as the fundamental difference between the CPC’s philosophy of “struggle” and the Western political understanding of conflict?
In mainstream Western political discourse, “struggle” is heard as either factional power-play – the war of all against all inside a ruling clique – or as zero-sum confrontation between states, one side’s gain being the other’s loss. Neither captures what the CPC means.
The philosophical root of the Chinese usage is the unity and struggle of opposites – the dialectical proposition that contradiction is the motor of all development, and that the point of struggle is to resolve a contradiction and move to a higher synthesis, not to annihilate an opponent. The primary “adversaries” in this vocabulary are not people but conditions: poverty, backwardness, corruption, inequality, ecological degradation, foreign domination. To “struggle against poverty” is not a euphemism for purging rivals; it is the literal organising principle of a campaign like the one described above. Even internally, the aim of the Party’s self-struggle is renewal and unity, not the liquidation of factions for its own sake.
You can see the same logic in Chinese foreign policy, which is where the Western misreading is most consequential. The West tends to assume that a rising power must, by the nature of things, seek domination – the “Thucydides trap”, security as a zero-sum good in which one state’s safety requires another’s vulnerability. The CPC’s actual conduct points the other way. Its stated principle is that security can only be common, or it is no security at all – the heart of the Global Security Initiative. It brokered the Iran–Saudi rapprochement in 2023 without coercion, sanctions or a single soldier. Its preferred metaphor is not conquest but “win-win cooperation” and “seeking common ground”. That the latter expression was used by Premier Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Conference in 1955 indicates that it is not a new invention, but a consistent principle of Chinese diplomacy.
So the fundamental difference is this. The Western frame treats conflict as terminal – a contest with a winner and a loser. The CPC’s dialectical frame treats struggle as productive – the means by which contradictions are worked through toward a higher unity. One is a logic of domination; the other is a logic of development.
As China stands at the gateway of its 15th Five-Year Plan and moves toward the Second Centenary Goal, the country is facing a new landscape of high-tech self-reliance, green transition, and complex external pressures, among other challenges. In your view, how will the CPC’s “fighting spirit” be tested on these new “battlefields”?
The 15th Five-Year Plan and the march toward the Second Centenary Goal of 2049 will test the “spirit of struggle” in a way the poverty campaign did not, because these are battlefields where the opponent pushes back hard and in real time.
The most obvious is high-tech self-reliance. The United States has openly made the containment of China’s technological rise a strategic priority – tariff wars, sanctions, export controls, the chip blockade, “decoupling”. The Party’s answer in the 15th Five-Year Plan is not retreat but a doubling-down: increased R&D spending of at least seven percent a year, and a concerted push in new energy, AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, robotics, nanotechnology and 6G.
The struggle here is to convert external pressure into the spur for indigenous innovation – to do under sanctions and containment what was once done with imported technology. So far the evidence is that pressure has accelerated rather than arrested that drive, but it is a genuine test and the outcome is not predetermined.
The second is the green transition. China is already the undisputed world leader in renewables, electric vehicles and electrification, and the Plan commits to accelerating decarbonisation across the whole economy. The “struggle” dimension is that this has to be done while still raising living standards and completing industrialisation – managing the contradiction between development and ecological limits rather than pretending it away, as the West largely does by offshoring its emissions.
Third, there are the deep domestic challenges Xi has called “unavoidable”: demographic ageing, regional and urban-rural disparities, the real-estate and local-debt overhang, and the unfinished work of common prosperity – ensuring that high-quality growth actually narrows inequality rather than widening it. And all of this proceeds under conditions of encirclement: the pivot to Asia, the New Cold War, the attempt to impose a strategic siege on China through control of energy chokepoints and the pressure on Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.
Ultimately, however, the test on these new battlefields is the same test the Party has passed before, in a new form: whether it can keep identifying the principal contradiction of the period and mobilising society to resolve it, without either capitulating to external pressure or abandoning the peaceful, people-centred and win-win character that has defined Chinese-style modernisation. On the record of the last 105 years, I would not bet against the CPC and the Chinese people surmounting these new challenges.
Excellent interview!