Britain Archives - Friends of Socialist China

Kate Hudson: Let’s unite across borders against AUKUS

In the following article, Dr Kate Hudson, Vice President of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), noting that we are now five years into the AUKUS pact between Australia, the UK and the USA, poses the question: how does it fit into the ongoing build-up to war on China?

She goes on to argue that while “the most immediate struggles between the US and China are currently very much taking place on the economic terrain, the longer run underlying issues are of course military… there is no doubt that enormous resources are being put into expanding US military power to give it the capabilities to confront China.”

She explains that, at its most obvious level, AUKUS is a military pact between Australia, the UK and the US, which enables Australia to have nuclear powered submarines. “These are massively more capable than their previous conventionally powered subs, with much greater reach, much greater payload and much smaller detectability. In the context of either controlling the region, or being used in war, these subs are a massive escalation and provocation. They also constitute nuclear proliferation, which adds another whole order of illegality to the initiative.”

Resistance is building in Australia, particularly from the trade union movement but also from wider circles, including former Prime Ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Paul Keating. And there is common ground here in Britain: “Wages not weapons and welfare not warfare were key successful slogans at the TUC Conference last month… Let’s build the links across borders and step up our political and practical work here.”

Through Chinese eyes: a CASS scholar on Britain’s Xi Jinping Thought Study Group

The following article by Zhuo Mingliang, Associate Research Fellow at the Academy of Marxism of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), examines the work of the Xi Jinping Thought Study Group, set up in 2020 by the London-based Institute for Independence Studies. Among its founders is our co-editor Keith Bennett.

Zhuo introduces the Study Group and its core members, and summarises the main arguments of its 2023 book of memoirs by long-standing friends of China. These include the view that China’s achievements demonstrate the superiority of socialism, and that Xi Jinping Thought is “a great gift to all humanity” that can help unite progressive forces worldwide. He also outlines the Institute’s distinctive positions, among them its emphasis on the non-Western development of scientific socialism and its critique of Western leftists who remain sceptical of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The article offers an interesting insight into how Chinese scholars view the work of China’s friends in the West – and into the role of people-to-people movements in breaking through the anti-China consensus in the Western media.

Brits in revolution: Weaving the struggles of British and Chinese people into a community of shared future

The following is the text of a talk given by our co-editor Keith Bennett on September 23rd to a meeting organised by the Birmingham People’s History Archive and held at its offices housed in the Birmingham and Midland Institute.

With the title of Brits in Revolution, Keith introduces various British people whose lives became entwined with the Chinese revolution in various ways and in its different phases and stages and travels back and forth between Britain and China, between the Chinese revolution and progressive and working class movements in Britain, and between individuals in both countries, illustrating in this way how each influenced and reinforced the other, creating history in the process.

Starting with the first opium war waged by British imperialism against China and the Chartist movement in Britain, the first mass political expression of the modern proletariat, in the early 1840s, Keith takes us through the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the early collaboration between British and Chinese communists in the 1920s, the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, the early days of building New China and the more complicated period of the 1960s.

Inevitably these snapshots omit many great events and many individuals who richly deserve to be remembered, but Keith concludes:

“In this spirit, in going back and forth, I have tried to draw out how the role of British people in supporting and even participating in the Chinese revolution is not simply a matter of something that happened ‘over there’. Rather it represented two mutually reinforcing fronts of ultimately the same fight, a struggle whose commonality was forged through the interweaving of numerous threads in such a way that they could not actually be dissevered. And further that here we can perceive part of the makings of what Xi Jinping now calls a community of shared future for humanity.”

Socialist China Conference 2026 in pictures

On Saturday 3 October 2026, more than 150 people gathered at the Cypriot Community Centre in Wood Green, north London, for the third annual Socialist China Conference, marking the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Across six and a half hours, an opening rally, three panels – on AI and the new quality productive forces, on China’s foreign policy and the making of a multipolar world, and on resisting the New Cold War – and a closing rally brought together activists, scholars, trade unionists and representatives of the Chinese, Cuban and Laotian embassies.

Here are some images from the day. For a full account, see our report of the conference (or the shorter version in the Morning Star); recordings of all the sessions are available on our YouTube channel.

China Daily reports on the Socialist China Conference 2026

China Daily has published a report by its London correspondent Xing Yi on our third annual Socialist China Conference, held in London on 3 October to mark the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The report notes that speakers from left-wing and anti-war organisations, embassies and academia called for China’s peaceful rise, its contribution to the Global South and its vision of a shared future for humanity to be better understood in the West. It summarises the conference’s three panels – on AI and technology, on China’s foreign policy and the making of a multipolar world, and on resisting the New Cold War – and covers the launch of the book China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World, edited by Keith Bennett and Carlos Martinez.

For a fuller account of the day, see our own report of the conference. Recordings of all the sessions are available on our YouTube channel.

“We need to see China as it actually is” – China Daily hosts ‘Vision China’ in London

Intended to showcase vibrant and vivid examples of people-to-people links, China Daily organised a ‘Vision China’ event, held at the global headquarters of the Institution of Civil Engineers in central London, on September 17, with the theme, ‘Listen to Each Other, Open New Horizons’.

With opening addresses by Qu Yingpu, publisher and editor-in-chief of China Daily, and Zhao Fei, chargé d’affaires ad interim of the Chinese Embassy in London, the event also heard from renowned British Sinologist Frances Wood, who is also a vice president of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU). For Frances, mutual learning was not just a ‘good-to-have’, but also central to her nearly 35 years of work at the British Library, which involved the conservation and digitisation of some 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments of ancient scrolls from Dunhuang, in northwest China’s Gansu province, dating from the third to the 10th century CE.

Michael Spence, president and provost of University College London (UCL), noted the contributions of the college’s 15,000 Chinese students and its many more Chinese alumni, as well as its role in promoting Chinese language learning in schools across the country. Listing some daunting global challenges – from fighting climate change to governing artificial intelligence – Spence said he does not see any “reasons for pessimism”, because what British and Chinese students, scholars and researchers have already achieved through collaboration is “proof of what is possible”.

Other speakers included Chen Junyan, winner of the second prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2024, Mike Longhurst, a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, and Richard Trainor, provost of the Rhodes Trust at the University of Oxford.

Also addressing the event was Ondřej Dostál, a member of the European Parliament from Czechia (Czech Republic), who began by noting with reference to his country’s socialist period: “I was born in Czechoslovakia, which was never a colonial power, but always helped the developing countries across the world with technologies and education.”

Referring to how times are changing, he continued: “When I was eight, we had elections and I remember seeing posters: ‘With the Soviet Union. Forever and never otherwise.’ When I was eleven, the Soviet Union was no more.”

Disillusioning experiences followed with the United States and the European Union, however: “I first visited China in 2008 to attend a conference on health law.

“After I was elected to the European Parliament, I decided to visit China again. I had the honour of being the only Member of the European Parliament present at China’s Victory Day parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the victory over fascism. [On September 3, 2025.] And, just over a month ago, on 15 August, I laid flowers at Chairman Mao’s statue in Shaoshan, and saw, not only in the museum, but also in real life, what China has achieved over a mere three generations.

“I saw the incredible development of China in cities such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, Changsha and Ningbo. I saw how China has become the world’s leader in innovation, patents and high-quality productive forces and in technologies that will shape our future.”

But there is still “an enormous gap between the real China and perceptions of China in the West”.

Dostál thinks there are two reasons for that:

The speed of China’s growth has been extraordinary. For many people in the West, their perceptions have simply failed to keep pace with reality.
But there is also “the purposeful smearing of China in parts of our political discourse and media, designed to prevent our friendship and mutually profitable engagement. And to contain China’s rise. It is the narrative of a ‘China as a threat’.”

He argues: “We need to understand China as it actually is. Its achievements and its contradictions. Its history and its aspirations. Its government and its people.

“Only when we see China as it actually is, can Europe formulate a China policy based on reality rather than projection.”

Socialist China Conference 2026: another landmark in building friendship and solidarity with China

On Saturday 3 October 2026, Friends of Socialist China held its third annual Socialist China Conference at the Cypriot Community Centre in Wood Green, north London, to mark the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. More than 150 people attended, and a remarkable number stayed for the full six and a half hours.

Alongside the opening and closing rallies, there were three panels: on artificial intelligence and the new quality productive forces; on China’s foreign policy and the making of a multipolar world (launching the new book of that name); and on resisting the New Cold War.

Opening rally

Andreas Grigoriou, Secretary of AKEL (Progressive Party of Working People of Cyprus) in Britain, welcomed everyone on behalf of the Cypriot Community Centre. Chairing the opening rally, Professor Radhika Desai of the University of Manitoba took issue with the currently fashionable description of our moment as a Gramscian interregnum – loosely paraphrased as a ‘time of monsters’, in place of Gramsci’s ‘morbid symptoms’ – in which the old is dying and the new cannot be born. The old North Atlantic world is certainly dying, she said, but the new world is not struggling to be born: it is already being actively constructed, and socialist China is leading that process. China demonstrates in practice what capitalism insists is impossible: that prosperity and justice can be planned at scale, with markets harnessed through regulation rather than left to rule.

Jiang Zhouteng, Minister Counsellor at the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the UK, said his country had produced two miracles rarely seen in the world – rapid economic development and long-term social stability – citing fourteen consecutive five-year plans completed and the 15th now begun, and a contribution to global economic growth that exceeded 35 percent in 2025.

Pablo Ginarte Sampedro, First Secretary for Political Affairs of the Cuban Embassy, outlined what is the hardest period in Cuba’s modern history: eight collapses of the national grid this year, and more than 100,000 patients – among them 11,000 children – waiting for surgery delayed by the blockade. He praised the Chinese contribution of 900 megawatts of solar generation, 144 solar parks and 10,000 household photovoltaic systems, all of which has lifted the renewable share of Cuba’s electricity from around three percent to 21 percent in the space of a single year. “The United States cannot blockade the sun”, he remarked. For Cuba, multipolarity is not an abstraction but the difference between being able to survive and being crushed by imperialism.

Mick Wallace, a former MEP (Member of the European Parliament) for Ireland South, asked whether war is inevitable, and answered that it is not: the peoples of Europe and of the Global South do not want war, and neither does China – which matters, because China is the new big player, and the world is a different place both for its rise and for the approach it takes. China has not dropped a bomb on anyone in 47 years. While it now takes more minerals out of Africa than Europe and the US combined, there is no coercion involved, and it invests dramatically in infrastructure: a couple of years ago, in the same month that the US completed its 29th military base on the African continent, the Chinese completed their 29th major infrastructure project. He noted too that China has been consistent in upholding the UN Charter at a time when the West has effectively abandoned it.

By video from Beijing, renowned CGTN journalist Li Jingjing conveyed the atmosphere of the anniversary flag-raising in Tiananmen Square, drawing attention to the second slogan on the rostrum, too often forgotten: “Long live the great unity of the people of the world.”

Czech MEP Ondřej Dostál also sent a video greeting, observing that socialism with Chinese characteristics has carried China in three generations from utmost poverty to today’s success story.

AUKUS at five

In the following article, which was originally published in the Morning Star, Jenny Clegg notes that five years have passed since the shock announcement of AUKUS – a three-way military pact between Australia, Britain and the US.

It is also, she notes, five years since Labour CND’s emergency motion opposing the deal gained over 70 per cent of the vote at the Labour Party conference. AUKUS, the motion stated, was in breach of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) stipulation that exchanging non-nuclear for nuclear technology must be for peaceful purposes.

But it is, Jenny continued, as if this vote never happened, “the Labour government now has not only embraced Aukus but expanded its commitment”.

“Australia has become the first country to break its non-nuclear status by acquiring nuclear-powered submarines. In the absence of proper public debate, peace groups and trade unions have now launched an independent public inquiry into the project sponsored by a new initiative – the Australian Peace and Security Forum.”

Adding that now seems as good a time as any to take stock of what it is exactly the British government has committed to, Jenny proceeds to give a detailed breakdown and concludes that former prime minister Keir Starmer had “saved AUKUS”:

“Britain then is deeply implicated in the violations of the NPT, in placing Australia on the front line of a US war on China and stoking a new arms race. As well Australia has become alienated from its regional neighbours — the south-east Asia states and Pacific Islanders, who after decades of nuclear testing now see their hard-won Nuclear Weapons Free Zones brushed aside.”

The government, Jenny writes, “claims that Aukus offers a ‘generational chance to revitalise the UK industrial base’ but CND’s Alternative Defence Review (2025) exposes the wastefulness of ‘military Keynesianism’ sucking desperately needed funds and skills from areas more beneficial to the economy. By the 2050s, when they are made fully operational, the submarines will likely be outdated. Spending billions is clearly a decision heavily influenced by the profit motives of the arms industry.

“Progress is slow too on Pillar 2’s Darc — Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability system — in Wales linking with facilities in North West Australia and Texas as part of Trump’s Golden Dome. Local opposition is building.”

Jenny concludes: “With the US military now swarming over Australian bases, the independent inquiry, due to report later this year, has been holding hearings in different locations around the country. Supported by crowdfunding through trade unions, environmental and other NGOs as well as individuals, the inquiry is led by a former environment minister with a team including a former admiral, a former state politician and leader of the Australian Labour Party, a human rights lawyer and a representative of the country’s First Nations.

“With a remit covering costs and jobs, strategic rationale, nuclear non-proliferation and environmental impact, it provides the space to conceive a different future for Australia which may prove to be the spark for a really broad popular front against militarisation. The anti-war movement in Britain should take note.”

Full details of the Australian inquiry, including all the submissions it has received, can be found here.

Workers Party leader George Galloway: “We want an economy like China’s”

The Chinese weekly political magazine Beijing Review recently carried edited excerpts from an interview with George Galloway, former member of parliament and leader of the Workers Party of Britain (WPB), with its reporter Zhang Shasha, in which George shared his views on the country’s five-year plans, whole-process people’s democracy and economic transformation; challenged Western perceptions of China’s rise, and discussed how competition can coexist with cooperation in an increasingly uncertain world.

According to George: “Socialism with Chinese characteristics is one of the most important theoretical developments in human society since the Industrial Revolution… China has created something new, something that the world has never seen before.”

The Western political system, he says, is incompatible with long-term planning, “because elections are the only thing that ultimately matter… And if you are only thinking four years ahead, you are inevitably going to make mistakes, even if you have the good intentions, but most of them do not.”

Citing his interest in infrastructure, he refers to a recent visit he made to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, “which was a very poor place only a few decades ago. Today, it has new infrastructure, new development and public services that are comparable with much richer areas. In many Western countries, a region like Xinjiang would simply be left to decline.”

Asked about the concept of whole-process people’s democracy, he replies: “I hope China continues to get that system right, and everything I hear suggests that the developments China has made are moving in a positive direction.

“For generations, our people believed that we were the democracies, and that countries like China were dictatorships. But it turns out that China has more democratic elements than we do. And that is quite a cultural shock for many people in the West to come to terms with.”

On the economy, he takes air conditioning and cars as examples and concludes, “our political system and our economic system are no longer suited to the 21st century. China’s system is. That is why my party, the Workers Party of Britain, is unapologetic. We say openly: We want an economy like China’s. We want to be like China – but with British characteristics.”

He sounds a note of caution on the international situation: “We are facing a very dangerous period. The recklessness of some political leaders when it comes to matters of war and peace is something I have rarely seen in my lifetime. I thought I grew up in uncertain times, but looking back now, those years seem much more stable compared with what we are experiencing today.

“If countries continue to look at each other with suspicion and treat each other as permanent enemies, we will not be able to solve the challenges facing humanity.”

George Galloway is the Workers Party of Britain’s candidate in the October 8 by-election for the parliamentary seat of Holborn and St. Pancras in north London, caused by the resignation of former prime minister Keir Starmer.

A total of 15 candidates are contesting the seat. Seeking to hold it for the Labour Party is Sagal Abdi-Wali. Currently the leader of Camden Council, in which the constituency is located, she originally came to Britain as a child refugee from Somalia. However, she is firmly on the right of the party and known to be close to Starmer. The leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski is seeking to become his party’s first London MP. He previously contested a by-election for a council seat in the constituency in 2015 for the Liberal Democrats.

We need to talk about China

In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez sets out the agenda for the third annual Socialist China Conference, taking place in London on Saturday 3 October.

Carlos notes that the British ruling class – the security state and its media representatives above all – talks about China constantly, from Chinese “kill switches” in wind turbines to Beijing supposedly funding the Palestine marches. The conference is a chance for the left to get a word in: on the drive to war in the Asia-Pacific, on what China’s achievements in poverty eradication, infrastructure and renewable energy mean for workers in Britain, on the shifting of global opinion in China’s favour, and on turning the “Chinamaxxing” mood among young people into political understanding.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

If the right-wing press is to be believed, Britain is under systematic attack by the cunning Chinese communists.

Over the past couple of months, we have been warned that Beijing is funding the Palestine marches; that these perennial evil-doers are hacking our tractors; that Chinese-made wind turbines may be fitted with kill switches; and that a Chinese-owned hotel in Cyprus has a suspiciously good view of RAF Akrotiri.

Former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove has claimed that China “could switch off our power grid at any second.”

The British ruling class – and particularly the security state and its media representatives – talks about China constantly, so it is probably a good idea for us to get a word in. That is what the third annual Socialist China Conference, in London this Saturday, is for.

War and peace

China’s unprecedented rise took the West by surprise. Washington’s strategists expected the country to remain at or near the bottom of the global economic hierarchy for decades or centuries, but today’s China is the world’s second-largest economy and is growing at more than twice the rate of the US economy; it is also the world’s largest trading nation and manufacturer.

It is a world leader in renewable energy, high-speed rail, space exploration, telecommunications and advanced manufacturing, and is catching up quickly in cutting-edge digital technologies.

Reds under the bed and in the tractors

In the following article, Carlos Martinez surveys a burst of anti-China stories in the British right-wing press – the Telegraph’s warning that Chinese chips in GPS-guided tractors could be used to spy on farmers and fitted with kill switches; the Times’ claim that Chinese-made wind turbines could be used to shut down Britain’s electricity supply; and the Telegraph’s discovery of a hotel near RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus with a good view of the runway.

In each case, he notes, the evidence is absent and the motive is never explained. Meanwhile every documented instance of weaponised supply-chain hardware – Stuxnet, the NSA’s intercepted routers, Nord Stream, the booby-trapped pagers in Lebanon – belongs to Britain’s Western allies rather than to China.

He also points to an instructive contradiction: in the same week that Chinese industrial policy was being described as a threat to national survival, both the Guardian and the Financial Times carried pieces arguing that Britain should be learning from it. The purpose of the hysteria, Carlos argues, is not to inform economic policy but to build support for the US-led New Cold War.

Socialist China Conference 2026 (London, 3 October)

📆 Saturday 3 October 2026, 10.30am–5pm

📍 Cypriot Community Centre, Earlham Grove, Wood Green, London N22 5HJ

Following the success of our two previous conferences, Friends of Socialist China will mark the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China with our third annual Socialist China Conference, in London on Saturday 3 October.

The conference is a day-long deep dive into various aspects of contemporary China, including foreign policy, the New Cold War, and AI and technology. Alongside opening and closing rallies, there will be panel discussions on:

Resisting the new cold war and the threat of hot war
AI, technology and the new quality productive forces
Book launch: China’s foreign policy and the making of a multipolar world

The event is organised by Friends of Socialist China, with support from a number of progressive organisations including the Morning Star, Communist Party of Britain, Workers Party of Britain, Communist Party of Ireland, International Manifesto Group, Student Federation of India UK, Black Liberation Alliance, AKEL in Britain, Iskra Books, Praxis Press, Manifesto Press, Caribbean Labour Solidarity, Third World Solidarity, No 2 NATO, Birmingham People’s History Archive, Labour Affairs Magazine, Mushtarek, and Institute for Independence Studies.

Tickets are available now on Eventbrite. We hope you can join us.

Confirmed speakers

Mick Wallace (Former MEP; Former TD for Wexford)
Vijay Prashad (Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)
George Galloway (Leader, Workers Party of Britain; Former MP) (video)
Jenny Clegg (Author and peace activist)
Kate Hudson (Author; Vice-President, CND)
Li Jingjing (Reporter with CGTN) (video)
Alex Gordon (Former President, RMT; General Secretary, Communist Party of Britain)
Zhang Weiwei (Director, China Institute, Fudan University) (video)
John Ross (Senior Fellow, Chongyang Institute, Renmin University of China)
Alfredo Saad Filho (Professor, Queen’s University Belfast)
Radhika Desai (Professor, University of Manitoba; Convenor, International Manifesto Group)
Roger McKenzie (International editor, Morning Star)
Francisco Domínguez (Secretary, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign)
Yanan Song (Lecturer in Global Politics)
Keith Bennett (Co-editor, Friends of Socialist China)
Carlos Martinez (Co-editor, Friends of Socialist China)
Ali Al-Assam (Managing Director, NewsSocial Cooperative)
Fiona Sim (Black Liberation Alliance)
Gearóid Ó Machail (Communist Party of Ireland)
Paul Atkin (Political analyst and environmental campaigner)
Nuvpreet Kalra (CodePink)
David Peat (Iskra Books; Friends of Socialist China)

Andy Burnham: Britain is prepared to restore relations with China to their historic high

Chinese President Xi Jinping held phone talks with new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham on September 8.

Congratulating Burnham on assuming office, Xi noted that China and Britain are comprehensive strategic partners. He urged the two sides to respect and trust each other, overcome differences, seek common ground and expand mutually beneficial cooperation, adding that both governments are committed to developing their economies and improving people’s well-being, and the two countries can complement each other’s strengths and facilitate each other’s development.

China and Britain are both major countries in science and technology with rich resources in education, culture, sports and other fields, Xi said, and called on the two sides to adopt an open and forward-looking approach and strengthen exchanges and cooperation in various fields.

More pointedly, considering the recent issues faced by British Steel and Chinese wind turbine maker Ming Yang, Xi expressed the hope that the British side will fully protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese investors.

Prime Minister Burnham told Xi that he had served as mayor of Manchester for many years and maintained friendly exchanges with China for years. President Xi’s visit to Manchester during his state visit to Britain in 2015 had a significant impact on promoting local exchanges and cooperation with China, he noted. Britain is ready to conduct high-level exchanges with China, advance bilateral cooperation in various fields, strengthen people-to-people exchanges, and restore bilateral relations to their historic high, so as to better benefit the peoples of both countries.

He added that amidst the current turbulent and complex international landscape undergoing changes, Britain and China, as permanent members of the UN Security Council, should promote the resolution of international hotspot issues through dialogue, jointly address global challenges such as climate change, and work together to safeguard world stability and prosperity.

Burnham also spoke highly of China’s efficient and effective response to the mudslide disaster that struck Gyirong Port in southwest China’s Xizang [Tibet] Autonomous Region on the country’s border with Nepal and expressed his appreciation for China’s assistance to affected British citizens.

A new McCarthyism on both sides of the Atlantic

Two stories eight days apart, both from London newspapers, both pushing a McCarthyite agenda – one aimed at Britain, one at the United States. The Telegraph announced that “China is funding pro-Palestine marches in UK”. The Times reported that members of the Democratic Socialists of America had signed a public statement of support for Chinese socialism and, worse, had travelled to China.

Neither story alleges a crime. Neither produces a document showing a payment from the Chinese state or an instruction from the Communist Party of China. Both rest on the same syllogism: people hold anti-war positions that are also held in Beijing; therefore they hold them because of Beijing; therefore anti-war campaigners are not citizens exercising their rights but instruments of a foreign power.

The following article takes the two chains apart – four degrees of hedged separation in the British case, and in the American one the discovery that socialists are interested in socialism – and sets them against how Washington and London actually operate, from AIPAC’s congressional junkets and the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program to the pro-Israel lobbyists who have donated to half of Keir Starmer’s cabinet.

It then places the episode in its proper lineage. Ellen Schrecker’s segregationists blamed “outside agitators”; the NAACP was investigated for communist infiltration; Paul Robeson lost his passport for eight years; W.E.B. Du Bois was indicted as an unregistered foreign agent in his eighties. The purpose was never to prove foreign control, but to deny that the people protesting had minds of their own.

And it examines the machinery now being assembled: 3,061 terrorism-related arrests in Britain in the year to March 2026, 92 percent of them relating to Palestine Action; the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme and the campaign to add China to its enhanced tier; and, in the United States, presidential memorandum NSPM-7, which lists “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” among the indicators federal agencies are to investigate.

The following article by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez is an expanded version of a piece that first appeared in the Morning Star.

Two stories, eight days apart, both from London newspapers, pushing a McCarthyite agenda in two different countries. The Telegraph announced that “China is funding pro-Palestine marches in UK”. The Times reported that members of the Democratic Socialists of America – “the left-wing group behind Zohran Mamdani’s rise” – had signed a public statement of support for Chinese socialism and, worse, had travelled to China.

Neither story alleges a crime. Neither produces a document showing a payment from the Chinese state, an instruction from the Communist Party of China, or any kind of broken law. Both rest on the same syllogism: people hold anti-war positions that are also held in Beijing; therefore these positions are taken up because of Beijing; therefore anti-war campaigners are not citizens exercising their basic democratic rights, but instruments of a foreign power.

Britain: four degrees of separation

Take the evidence as presented by the Telegraph. US congressional investigators are examining £250,000 in “alleged” payments to a company “linked to” CodePink in the UK, from firms “connected to” Neville Roy Singham, a US businessman “accused of” financing pro-China content.

Four degrees of separation, with every link in the chain a substantial hedge, from which emerges a headline asserting that the People’s Republic of China is funding the mass movement in Britain against genocide in Gaza. Singham is a US citizen who made his money building a software consultancy and now spends it on causes he believes in. What the allegations amount to, at most, is a US businessman with left-wing opinions funding a US peace group that has a British affiliate.

And what are the recipients of this money charged with doing? Organising protests against Britain’s involvement in genocide. Campaigning for peace with Iran. Calling for the removal of British military bases in Cyprus. Visiting China and saying that it is not our enemy. Every one of those is a lawful (and obviously principled and correct) political position, and several of them are held by most of the British public. Polling by YouGov in July found that 50 percent of Britons believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza against 17 percent who believe it is not, and that 55 percent think Britain should no longer treat Israel as an ally.

Also, consider the sums under discussion. A quarter of a million pounds would barely cover the placards at London’s anti-genocide demonstrations, let alone the portaloos. Spread across the half of the country that has reached the conclusion Beijing supposedly paid for, it comes to less than a penny a head. If that is the price of British public opinion, the Chinese state has driven a remarkable bargain.

The US: socialists found to be interested in socialism

The US version of the story is, remarkably, even thinner. The Times has made the extraordinary discovery that socialists are interested in socialism.

Thirteen members of the DSA, it reports, have signed the Friends of Socialist China statement, declaring that they aim to support the People’s Republic and to promote understanding of Chinese socialism. This is a public statement, published on a public website, which anyone may sign and which has attracted just shy of 1,000 signatories to date from dozens of countries. Thirteen of them turn out to belong to a US socialist organisation. Many readers may struggle to identify a scandal.

Then comes the evidence of sinister coordination: some DSA members went to China. A provincial foreign affairs office in Guizhou helped arrange an itinerary. They attended the parade marking 80 years since the victory over Japanese fascism. According to one of them, they were – gasp – treated well.

From this, the anti-China campaigner Alexander Reid Ross concludes that the trips “exhibit fingerprints of extraordinarily high-level co-ordination by the People’s Republic of China”, and speculates that these individuals’ standing within the DSA “has been improved precisely through the efforts of foreign parties”, raising the question of “who they’re working for”. No offence is alleged and no evidence is offered.

It is probably not a coincidence that the story has surfaced just as Washington is making a concerted effort to revive its Xinjiang campaign. One of the DSA members had visited Xinjiang and reported that he found nothing to support Western accusations of forced labour. To go to Xinjiang and decline to repeat the slanders is evidently the graver offence. Better by far to be one of those who have built entire careers on Xinjiang atrocity claims and who have, for the most part, never set foot in the place.

Set this against how Washington and London actually work

The double standard is easily identified. AIPAC’s affiliate flies members of Congress to Israel as a matter of routine. The State Department’s own International Visitor Leadership Program has hosted more than 230,000 foreign leaders since 1940, over 500 of whom went on to become heads of state or government – a rate of return on hospitality that Guizhou could barely dream of. The National Endowment for Democracy funds journalists, opposition parties and NGOs across the planet and publishes the grant lists in its annual reports.

Meanwhile in London, pro-Israel lobbyists have donated to half of Keir Starmer’s cabinet, a sum considerably higher than the £250,000 that so alarmed the Telegraph.

None of that is considered “foreign interference”, but a Chinese provincial foreign affairs office booking a few hotel rooms is a matter of national security.

The New Red Scare

None of this is new.

The historian Ellen Schrecker describes how segregationists in the American South always insisted that the region’s black population was perfectly content with its subordinate status, and that demands for change were “the product of ‘outside agitators’”. Linking those agitators to the Communist Party, she writes, gave the segregationists “new allies as well as a more modern rationale” for their campaign against the civil rights movement. The same device had served US employers for decades before that: strikes were never the product of legitimate grievance but the work of outside agitators, “usually foreign-born”.

The purpose was never to prove foreign control. It was to deny that the people doing the protesting had minds and interests of their own.

So the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909 and considered the US’ oldest civil rights group), by then a decidedly moderate organisation, was investigated for communist infiltration and became, as Gerald Horne records in Black and Red, among the first targets of the red scare. Paul Robeson had his passport confiscated for eight years and was systematically denied concert venues, the object being, in Horne’s phrase, to make him “radioactive”. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped and briefed against, with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI formally designating him “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism”.

And the world-famous scholar Dr. WEB Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP, then in his eighties, was indicted as an unregistered foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The damage was not confined to the individuals named. Schrecker’s verdict is that opposition to the Cold War became so completely identified with communism that “it was no longer possible to challenge the basic assumptions of American foreign policy without incurring suspicions of disloyalty”. That is the actual purpose of an exercise like this one: not primarily to convict any particular individual, but to make a set of opinions – against war, against racism, against genocide, against the encirclement of China – too expensive and too dangerous to hold.

The machinery now being built

In Britain, Palestine Action has been proscribed under terrorism legislation, and the consequences show up in the government’s own figures. In the year ending March 2026 there were 3,061 terrorism-related arrests, an increase of 1,186 percent on the previous year, and 2,819 of them – 92 percent – related to alleged support for Palestine Action. Quite an upsurge in “terrorism” – without a single fatality or even injury. Charges under section 12 of the Terrorism Act, which covers support for a proscribed organisation, had run at around five a year between 2019 and 2023; in 2024 there were 17. A counter-terrorism apparatus built to deal with bombers now focuses nine-tenths of its arrests on a protest movement, perhaps a majority of whom are pensioners, and only a small fraction of those arrested are ever charged.

As Sara Vivacqua documents in the Canary, the same powers have been turned on journalists covering the genocide. Asa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada had his home raided in October 2024 and his devices seized, containing material capable of identifying sources in Palestine, and has never been charged. Kit Klarenberg was stopped at Luton Airport under Schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act, and says the questioning made plain that the object was his journalism rather than terrorism.

The Foreign Influence Registration Scheme went live last year; its enhanced tier, which makes it a criminal offence to act at the direction of a specified foreign power, in areas beyond just political influence, without declaring it, currently applies to Russia and Iran, and there is a sustained campaign to add China to the list. Put that together with a year of newspaper stories linking the Palestine movement to Beijing, and the state acquires a mechanism for treating anti-war protest as a hostile foreign operation.

In the United States the equivalent already exists, and it is the same statute. Presidential memorandum NSPM-7, signed in September 2025, directs federal agencies to investigate nonprofits, activists and their donors, listing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” among the indicators to be looked for, and assigning Joint Terrorism Task Forces to pursue violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. An organisation whose members are on record supporting Chinese socialism, and who may have accepted a hotel booking from a Chinese provincial government, is precisely the kind of thing that memorandum was drafted to capture.

What is actually being defended

Ordinary British people did not need the Communist Party of China to make them angry about Gaza. Nearly three years of televised mass killing, British-made components in the aircraft, RAF surveillance flights out of Akrotiri feeding information to an army facing genocide proceedings at the International Court of Justice: millions of people in Britain concluded that their government was complicit and reaching that conclusion required no assistance whatsoever from Beijing. Nor do young Americans need instructions from Guizhou to notice that they cannot afford rent, and that a country which has eliminated extreme poverty and become the world’s first green energy superpower might be worth studying.

Which is what the accusation is for. Not to show that anyone took Chinese money – nobody has shown that anyone did – but to disqualify a position rather than answer it. An argument traced back to a foreign capital need never be met on its merits. So the Times assembles a chain running from rent control in New York through the DSA and a Guizhou hotel booking to Beijing, and the Telegraph assembles one running from a march against genocide through CodePink and a US software millionaire to the same destination. And it has to be China at the end of both chains, because China is the country doing most to prove that socialism works and that a better world is possible.

It’s essential that we see through this cynical manoeuvre, defend those being targeted, and resist the creeping authoritarianism that is being normalised in the name of “security”. The people marching for Palestine are not instruments of a foreign power. They are ordinary human beings who are disgusted with their own government’s complicity in genocide. And on this issue at least they represent the views of the majority.

Hawks dressed as doves: the Guardian’s case for a harder line on China

In the following article, written for the Morning Star, our co-editor Carlos Martinez takes apart a recent Guardian column by Simon Tisdall whose complaint, running through every paragraph, is not that the West has been too aggressive towards China but that it has not been aggressive enough.

Carlos works through the column point by point: the claim of Western “debilitating fatalism” towards a country already facing a tariff war, semiconductor export bans, AUKUS, the Quad, RIMPAC and a chain of US bases from Japan to Australia; Tisdall’s unfortunate choice of Wales as an analogy for language rights; the assertion of “brutal re-education camps” offered without evidence, source or argument, resting on the discredited work of Adrian Zenz and the arms-industry-funded ASPI; and the verdict that Xi is an “unelected autocrat”, delivered without reference to the five levels of People’s Congresses, the consultative apparatus that precedes their votes, or the satisfaction ratings that no Western government has approached in living memory.

The article’s conclusion is that this is liberal hawkishness in its purest form – deploring Trump in one paragraph and demanding his policy in the next – and that it is more dangerous than the honest belligerence of the right, because it recruits people of genuine conscience to a war they would otherwise oppose.

Chinese ambassador calls for UK and China to cooperate on AI

Chinese Ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang recently contributed an article to the Guardian newspaper calling for the two countries to cooperate on AI. He begins by noting that: “Like the steam engine, the harnessing of electricity and the internet before it, it has the potential to transform how we work, live and interact.

“But every technological revolution brings challenges as well as opportunities. As AI systems become more capable, people are asking legitimate questions. How can AI remain safe, accountable and under human control? How should its development be governed? How can its benefits be shared more widely?”

He adds: “These questions were at the heart of the 2026 World AI Conference, held… [recently] in Shanghai.”

Keeping the main focus on the Global South he notes that China will develop international AI-application cooperation centres with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the League of Arab States, the African Union, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and its fellow BRICS countries.

But that does mean there is not ample space and opportunities for China-UK collaboration:

“China and the UK have much to gain from working together. The UK has a competitive edge in frontier research, life sciences, financial services and AI innovation… In healthcare, combining British strengths in biomedical research with China’s capacity to deploy AI at scale can accelerate drug discovery, improve medical imaging and enhance healthcare delivery… Policymakers, researchers and business leaders from China and the UK need to increase exchanges and translate dialogue into joint research, commercial partnerships and closer cooperation on AI governance.”

British Steel or British Steal?

In July, the British government completed the full nationalisation of British Steel – a move welcomed by the country’s trade unions, and one socialists have no reason to oppose in principle. But as Carlos Martinez argues in the following article, what took place was not simply the homecoming of a strategic industry. It was the expropriation of the Chinese firm that Britain itself invited in to rescue that industry six years ago, and which invested upwards of £1.2 billion doing so.

Comparing the treatment of Jingye Group with the £500 million subsidy handed to India’s Tata Steel for an almost identical transition at Port Talbot, he argues that this is a story about China rather than about steel – part of a wider pattern that takes in the seizure of Nexperia in the Netherlands, the forced sale of TikTok in the United States and the blocking of Chinese rare-earth investment in Australia. Nationalisation, he concludes, need not be reversed; it needs to be completed honestly, with prompt and adequate compensation, and with China engaged as the obvious partner for the green transformation Scunthorpe needs.

Wham! – Musical icebreakers in 1985 China

Keith Bennett finds a new documentary film on the first western pop group to perform in the People’s Republic to be a warm, touching and entertaining depiction of a moment in history.

Wham! 10 Days in China, a documentary film with much contemporary footage which went on general release in the UK on July 28, records the extraordinary story of the duo’s 1985 visit, when they became the first western pop group to perform in China, with concerts in Beijing and Guangzhou.

For some of us, the film is a vivid reminder of how China looked at that time. George Michael, then 21, and Andrew Ridgeley, then 22, were true icebreakers. China was still in the relatively early stage of reform and opening up and was very much, in Deng Xiaoping’s words, “crossing the river by feeling the stones”. Although living standards were rising, we were still some way away from the subsequent Chinese economic miracle. However, people’s expectations were definitely rising and with it their eagerness to embrace the outside world (and not without a whole range of misconceptions and naïve expectations) and to experience new things. As others have already noted, in reviews of the film and of course elsewhere, China was a country and a society on the cusp of great change – a change that has in turn profoundly altered the whole course of global development in the twenty-first century in ways that could not reasonably have been envisaged 40 years ago. It is actually extraordinary that these two young men played a modest but very real part in making this happen – in icebreaking and in inventing the future.

According to the film, becoming the first western pop group ever to be invited to perform in the People’s Republic was conceived as just a smart way of making it in the United States. That’s as maybe, but they still had to be prepared to make that leap and take that chance – something that might be seen as a rare moment of real insight on the part of the band’s cynical and manipulative manager. It also necessitated patient and protracted negotiations, something that would be all too familiar to anyone involved in similar work at the time. The art curator James Birch provides a vivid account of what it took to secure the first British contemporary art exhibition in Beijing and Shanghai a few years later in his Gilbert and George and the Communists.

Using China as the gateway to the USA might appear to have been counterintuitive but it showed that there was great interest in and fascination with China in the country at that time, albeit for very different reasons on the part of different sections of the population. As we have previously noted, today’s is not the first iteration of ‘Chinamaxxing’.

Wang Yi meets Britain’s new foreign secretary Ed Miliband

Following his appointment on July 20 as Britain’s foreign secretary by new prime minister Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband attended meetings around the ASEAN Regional Forum, held this year in the Philippines’ capital Manila, later in the week.

Among Miliband’s bilateral meetings was that with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, held on the morning of July 23.

Wang Yi congratulated Ed Miliband on assuming his new post and noted that as major countries in the world and permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, China and the UK have a relationship that goes beyond the bilateral scope and carries global significance. He further expressed the hope that the UK will abide by the one-China principle, safeguard the political foundation of bilateral relations, provide a fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese enterprises in the UK, and avoid securitising economic and trade issues.

Wang added that the vision of building a community with a shared future for humanity and the four major global initiatives put forward by President Xi Jinping address the deficits in peace, development, security and governance facing the international community, articulate the vision and goals of China’s diplomacy, and provide important public goods for the world. China and the UK need to work together to transcend differences, jointly uphold multilateralism, support the revitalisation of the core role of the United Nations, oppose unilateral bullying and protectionism, and make greater contributions to world peace and development.

Ed Miliband stated that the new UK government attaches great importance to its relations with China. As major countries with significant influence in the world, the UK and China should continue to strengthen cooperation on global security, health and development issues. The UK is ready to strengthen exchanges at all levels with China, expand cooperation in areas such as climate change, and enhance multilateral communication and coordination.

As indicated in Wang’s above remarks, China is adopting a positive attitude towards relations with the new British government. However, Burnham’s government will need to responsibly address a serious problem it has inherited from the previous administration of Keir Starmer, namely the expropriation of the Scunthorpe steel plant hitherto owned by China’s Jingye company. The importance China places on this can be discerned from the headline given by the Xinhua News Agency to its report on the meeting, ‘Chinese FM urges Britain to avoid imposing security implications on economic, trade issues’.

Speaking at a reception held at his embassy that evening to mark the 99th anniversary of the founding of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Chinese ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang described his foreign minister’s meeting with Miliband earlier in the day as having been “very productive”.

On his X social media account, Miliband wrote: “Our relationship with China matters – for security, the economy and climate.

“Glad to discuss Ukraine and the Middle East with Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

“We are taking a consistent, long term and strategic approach to relations with China, rooted in UK and global interests.”

Miliband last visited China in March 2025 as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero.

On July 20, Chinese Premier Li Qiang had congratulated Andy Burnham on his assuming office as British prime minister.

Li said China and Britain are both permanent members of the UN Security Council and major global economies. Stronger dialogue and cooperation will not only advance the development of both countries but also contribute to greater stability and global peace.

Li further expressed his readiness to work with Burnham to strengthen engagement, deepen mutual trust, expand exchanges and cooperation, and advance the long-term and stable comprehensive strategic partnership, bringing greater benefits to both countries and their peoples.

Andy Burnham previously led a trade mission to China in September 2018 as Mayor of Greater Manchester.

Young British communist visits Xinjiang: “Not at all what Western media says”

Amar, a 22-year-old activist from London, visited Xinjiang in April 2026, wanting to see the region for himself after years of Western media coverage alleging genocide there. In this interview with Xinjiang Today, recorded in a coffee shop in Urumqi, he describes what he found.

He talks about the ordinariness of daily life in Urumqi, and the surprise of local people that a visitor would think to ask whether their lives are normal at all. He recounts a conversation with a barista about how the region has changed since his childhood – the journey from Urumqi to Kashgar cut from around 40 hours by rail to roughly 11, and the four-day bus trip across the Tianshan Mountains reduced to a few hours by the 22-kilometre Tianshan Shengli Tunnel, the longest expressway tunnel in the world, which opened in December 2025. Infrastructure on that scale, Amar argues, is built because it improves people’s lives rather than because it returns a profit, and would never be undertaken in a society run by a capitalist class.

He also discusses the very different relationship between the public and the police in China compared with Britain, why his family came to see China as a beacon of hope, and what worries and encourages him as a young person facing the prospect of imperialist war.