Economics Archives - Friends of Socialist China

Michael Roberts: WAPE 2026 – Adam Smith, imperialism and financialisation

The following report by the Marxist economist Michael Roberts covers the 19th Congress of the World Association of Political Economy (WAPE), held at the University of Greenwich in London – a Chinese-initiated academic body that brings together Marxist economists from across the world.

This year’s theme was Adam Smith, 250 years after the publication of The Wealth of Nations. WAPE chair Cheng Enfu of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences argued that Smith has been badly misrepresented by the free-marketeers who claim him: he explained modern economies not through markets alone but through the social division of labour, moral norms and the role of the state. Several papers were devoted to rescuing Smith from neoliberalism. But as Cheng also noted, Smith’s labour theory of value was contradictory – he held that labour creates value while also reverting to a theory based on “factors of production”, and it is the latter that modern mainstream economics kept and the former that it discarded.

Roberts’s own paper, on imperialist exploitation, concludes that under imperialism the poor countries of the world will never close the gap with the Global North – with one exception. On present trends, no BRICS country will reach the current high-income level within twenty years except China, which he projects will get there by 2041 and match the projected rich-country level by 2046. His explanation is that value is persistently transferred from South to North, and that profitability across the Global South is falling faster than productivity is rising, choking off investment. China is the exception because its investment growth is less determined by profitability than that of any other major Global South economy – which is to say, because it is a socialist country with a planned core.

Roberts was also presented with a WAPE award for his significant contribution to Marxian economics.

The antibiotics crisis and the case for socialism

Ara Darzi – surgeon, Labour peer and author of the 2024 review of the NHS – has written in the Financial Times that the West has handed China “the keys to the medicine cabinet”, warning of the “peacetime weaponisation” of pharmaceutical supply chains. China supplies around 94 percent of the key raw materials for amoxicillin and nearly half of global antibiotic ingredient exports.

The following article by Carlos Martinez takes the sinophobic framing apart. China has never withheld medicine from anyone, while the United States is currently obstructing medical supplies to Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, and held up ventilator and PPE shipments during a pandemic. However, what Darzi concedes along the way is of interest.

Darzi’s own diagnosis is that antibiotics are a permanent market failure: a drug whose value rises the less it is used cannot recoup its research costs, so Novartis, AstraZeneca and Sanofi have all quit the field, and the company that brought a new antibiotic to market in 2018 was bankrupt within a year. As former British Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies put it, a medicine that cures you in a week is a worse business proposition than one you must take for life. Meanwhile some 4.71 million deaths were associated with antibacterial resistance in 2021, with the heaviest burden falling on South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa – precisely where the market is least likely to step in.

Darzi’s conclusion is that antibiotics should be treated not as a commodity but as critical infrastructure, planned and publicly supported. The article agrees, and observes that when China applies exactly that logic – to antibiotics, solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, high-speed rail or semiconductors – it is denounced as overcapacity and distortion, and met with tariffs. Darzi has written a very persuasive argument for socialism, and appears not to have noticed.

Former premier Zhu Rongji passes away

Former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, a key architect of China’s economic reforms and of the country’s transition to a socialist market economy, died of illness on August 12 at the age of 98.

Zhu had served as a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the 14th and 15th Central Committees of the Communist Party of China (CPC). An official obituary extolled him as an excellent Party member, a time-tested and loyal communist fighter, and an outstanding proletarian revolutionist, statesman and leader of the Party and the state.

Zhu was born in October 1928 in Changsha, Hunan Province. He studied in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tsinghua University from 1947 to 1951. He joined the CPC in October 1949.

In March 1998, he was appointed premier of the State Council. Facing the impact of the Asian financial crisis and the catastrophic flooding in China, he implemented the plans of the Party Central Committee to shift from a moderately tight fiscal and monetary policy to a proactive fiscal policy and a prudent monetary policy, expand domestic demand and deepen reforms in key areas, thereby sustaining steady and rapid economic growth.

Whilst a staunch proponent of economic reform, Zhu was always deeply concerned about the immediate as well as the long-term interests of the working class and the majority of the people.

He worked to establish the basic living security system for laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises, the unemployment insurance system, and the minimum living guarantee system for urban residents. He also made great efforts to address issues such as wage arrears and the re-employment of laid-off workers.

The obituary stressed that Zhu had deep affection for the people. He emphasised that government officials must always bear in mind that they are public servants and should have the courage to speak the truth, not fear giving offence, and refrain from seeking special privileges. He also stressed the need to take the initiative, with a strong sense of responsibility, to shoulder heavy burdens, take on tough problems and go all out to deliver real results for the people.

After retiring from leadership posts, he steadfastly upheld and supported the CPC Central Committee with Hu Jintao as general secretary, and then the CPC Central Committee with Xi Jinping at its core. He continued to care about the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics and firmly supported efforts to improve conduct, promote integrity and fight corruption.

The obituary concludes that Zhu’s life was a revolutionary, fighting and glorious one. His death is a great loss to the Party and the state.

China’s exports support Global South development

In the following article, which was originally published by the South China Morning Post and is reproduced here from the Center for China and Globalization (CCG) in Beijing, Zhou Xiaoming takes issue with western narratives that allege that China’s exports are stifling the development of the rest of the Global South. On the contrary, he argues that China’s export portfolio constitutes a positive-sum diffusion of industrial growth.

Zhou enjoins us to “look at the sector where you would expect the fiercest head-to-head competition – labour-intensive consumer goods. If China were truly monopolising the export space of others, its share would be stable or climbing. In reality, it is falling. China’s share of global garment exports fell to just under 30 per cent in 2024, a significant drop from its peak of over 40 per cent about a decade ago.”

China, he continues, “is not shipping goods to outcompete Global South producers; it is shipping the building blocks that make factories viable. According to an Oxford Economics report, nearly half of China’s total exports are intermediate goods – components and raw materials that feed into other countries’ production lines rather than finished products for consumers.

“Take Southeast Asia. Customs data from the first half of 2026 shows China’s intermediate goods exports to Association of Southeast Asian Nations member states rocketed 24.5 per cent year on year to 2.86 trillion yuan. These kinds of inputs help Vietnamese electronics assemblers, Thai auto-part makers and Malaysian chip packagers produce and export their own finished goods. This is deep integration.”

He continues: “Beyond components, there are capital goods. China’s enabling role also comes into play here. For decades, a major barrier to industrialisation was the staggering cost of capital equipment. Today, Chinese-made industrial machinery is dramatically more affordable… As Chinese capital and equipment are building industrial capacity across the Global South, China is turning itself into the ‘mother machine’ of the industrialising world, transforming technology and production know-how that Western development aid never delivered.”

He concedes that, “Yes, China runs surpluses with multiple developing nations. But look closer. Take Vietnam for instance. Its 2025 trade deficit with China stood at around US$115 billion. Yet imports of capital and intermediate goods tell the real story. In 2025, capital goods such as computers, electronics, and machinery accounted for over half of its total imports. Vietnam’s deficit is a receipt for industrialisation.”

Whilst, “we are witnessing a historic reorganisation of global production – one that offers developing nations their first genuine shot at industrialisation without waiting for Western handouts… China’s exports pose a challenge to sectors such as automobile and home appliances in South Africa and Brazil. However, China’s exports are primarily the scaffolding on which other Global South countries are erecting their own industrial futures. Tear that scaffolding down, as some want, and you deprive scores of developing economies of a route out of underdevelopment.”

He also reminds us to look at imports: “China is the top export destination for 79 countries and regions. In May, it expanded its zero-tariff import policy to 53 African countries. Painting China as a threat to development ignores how Beijing is widening its doors to products from the Global South.”

He concludes: “Western critiques are rather paternalistic, assuming developing nations are passive victims, incapable of making rational choices about their own trade relationships. That condescension, echoing the ‘white man’s burden’, is the real obstacle to the Global South’s prosperity.”

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.

Why the Western left misreads China: capitalism, imperialism, and the socialist difference

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.

Should China “lessen the role of the state”?

In the latest of the Financial Times’ periodic lectures to Beijing on how to run its economy, the Brookings Institution’s Eswar Prasad urges China to reduce its reliance on public investment, move away from manufacturing and – above all – “lessen the role of the state”. In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez takes the prescriptions in turn.

He finds them to be not a serious diagnosis but an invitation to dismantle the socialist foundations of the most successful economic development in human history, in favour of a model that is visibly failing the countries that practise it.

Every so often the Financial Times publishes its periodic instruction to China on how to run its economy. The latest comes from Eswar Prasad of the Brookings Institution, and it follows the established template: concede the achievements in a subordinate clause, then explain that catastrophe looms unless Beijing adopts the policy mix of the countries currently growing at a third of its rate.

China, we learn, is “in serious trouble” – while growing at about 4.3 percent, a figure no G7 economy has come close to in years, and roughly double the US rate. Inflation has turned positive after a deflationary spell; industrial profits are rebounding. In any other country this would be reported as a soft landing. For China it is presented as calm concealing catastrophe.

Let us take the prescriptions in turn.

First, China must “reduce reliance on public investment and exports”.

But since around 78 percent of China’s growth derives from capital inputs, cutting investment means cutting growth. This is simply the United States inviting China to engage in economic self-harm. Public investment is the key mechanism through which China has built its infrastructure, energy, transport and industrial base. It is also the mechanism through which it has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. And it is the mechanism through which it has built a high-tech economy that now competes with, and even out strips, the West across the board.

As the Marxist economist Michael Roberts has repeatedly shown, it is high levels of productive investment, not the debt-fuelled consumption favoured in the West, that drive sustained growth and rising living standards over time – exactly the relationship mainstream commentary is determined to invert.

On exports, trade accounted for about 20 percent of China’s growth in 2025; the rest came from domestic consumption and investment. Household consumption, meanwhile, grew at 4.4 percent, in line with GDP. The claim that China free-rides on foreign demand is simply not what the data shows.

China’s open-weight AI exposes the fiction behind Wall Street’s boom

The following article by Gary Wilson, an editor of the US socialist newspaper Struggle – La Lucha, offers a sharp Marxist reading of the summer’s turmoil in AI stocks – and of why the release of powerful open-weight models by Chinese firms has sent such a shock through Wall Street.

In July, the arrival of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and DeepSeek’s V4 – open-weight models matching the strongest systems from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google – triggered the worst week for US chip stocks in over a year and briefly cost Nvidia its crown as the world’s most valuable company. Wilson argues that the panic exposed the hollowness of the whole AI boom, which rests not on profits already earned but on the promise that a handful of US corporations will exercise a monopoly over the technology and charge the world a toll for every use.

Drawing on Marx’s concept of fictitious capital, he shows how a thin layer of real income has been made to support a towering mass of debt and inflated valuations – with AI-linked firms now accounting for around 40 percent of the value of the S&P 500. Open-weight models threaten to make the assumed monopoly impossible, which is why Washington is turning from market competition to coercion, deploying export controls and national-security pretexts to defend a monopoly that competition has in reality already broken.

Against this, the article counterposes the vision set out by Xi Jinping in Shanghai – of AI developed openly as a shared asset of humanity – and the material foundation, created by the 1949 Revolution, that allows China to direct investment towards public use rather than private rent.

Las reformas económicas de Cuba y las perspectivas de la renovación socialista

We are pleased to republish below the Spanish translation, by the progressive Chilean journal El Ciudadano, of Carlos Martinez’s recent article, Cuba’s economic reforms and the prospects for socialist renewal.

El siguiente artículo analiza las transformaciones más profundas del modelo económico cubano en más de seis décadas: un programa compuesto por 23 ejes estratégicos y 176 medidas, aprobado por unanimidad este mes por la Asamblea Nacional.

Buena parte de la prensa occidental, así como un sector importante de la izquierda en Occidente, se ha apresurado a presentar estas reformas como el momento en que el bloqueo finalmente consiguió quebrar a la Revolución. Carlos sostiene exactamente lo contrario. A su juicio, las reformas deben entenderse como una estrategia de defensa del socialismo bajo condiciones de asedio, inspirada en la lógica que ha guiado a China desde 1978: el empleo regulado de los mecanismos de mercado y de la inversión extranjera para desarrollar las fuerzas productivas, mientras el Partido Comunista conserva el poder político y la propiedad pública de los sectores estratégicos de la economía. Como señala el especialista en Cuba Isaac Saney, estas medidas, «lejos de representar un retroceso», constituyen «un esfuerzo estratégico por preservar y profundizar las conquistas sociales de la Revolución».

El artículo sitúa las reformas en el contexto de un cerco sin precedentes impuesto por Estados Unidos: 64 años de bloqueo, recrudecido bajo Trump y Rubio, con el suministro de combustible prácticamente estrangulado y apagones de hasta veinte horas diarias. Asimismo, recorre las dos últimas décadas de reformas graduales emprendidas por Cuba, desde los Lineamientos impulsados por Raúl Castro hasta la Zona Especial de Desarrollo Mariel, concebida deliberadamente siguiendo las experiencias de China y Vietnam. La cuestión decisiva, sostiene Carlos, es la misma que distinguió las reformas de Beijing de la perestroika de Gorbachov: ¿quién conserva el poder político? Cuba, argumenta, está recorriendo la senda de la reforma y apertura china, no la vía soviética de la perestroika; y la solidaridad de China —expresada en la cooperación energética, alimentaria y en las relaciones entre ambos partidos comunistas— puede resultar determinante.

En palabras del presidente Miguel Díaz-Canel: «No hay soberanía con un plato vacío». Y también: «No nos vamos a reunir solamente para resistir. Nos vamos a reunir para crear. Para producir. Para decidir. Para controlar. Para prosperar y para transformar».

SCO debates sovereign financial infrastructure for the Global South

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) – which now represents some 42 percent of the world’s population – is increasingly turning its attention to building financial infrastructure independent of the US dollar. At a forum held on the sidelines of the 14th World Peace Conference in Beijing, officials and analysts from Iran, Russia, China, Belarus and Uzbekistan debated how the bloc might construct alternative settlement mechanisms capable of insulating its members from Washington’s unilateral sanctions.

The context is the growing use of sanctions as a weapon of economic warfare against independent states – Iran, Russia, Belarus, Venezuela and Cuba among them. As the following report from Press TV explains, the proposals under discussion build on an initiative advanced by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian at the SCO’s Tianjin summit: expanding trade in national currencies, developing secure digital infrastructure for cross-border payments, and establishing a multilateral swap fund to cushion members against financial shocks.

For its proponents, such a system is about more than evading sanctions. It is about establishing a sovereign financial architecture for the Global South – one that would allow nations to decouple from Western financial hegemony and conduct their trade, investment and development on their own terms. It is a further sign of the emerging multipolar order.

Why the Chinese working class won’t pay for Western neoliberalism

The following article by Carlos Martinez responds to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s call at the recent EU summit for a new “Plaza Accord” to force up the value of the Chinese renminbi.

Carlos recalls how the original 1985 Plaza Accord was not a neutral rebalancing of trade but the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor – Washington strong-arming Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar, plunging Japan into a “lost decade” of stagnation while failing to dent a US trade deficit that originated in Washington’s own model of high consumption and low savings, not in the exchange rate.

Carlos argues that China today cannot be treated as Japan was. Where Japan was a subordinate Cold War ally hosting tens of thousands of US troops; China is a sovereign socialist state with an increasingly prosperous domestic market of 1.4 billion people, an independent financial policy and a central bank that answers to no one in the West – it simply cannot be “Plaza’d”.

The article also takes aim at the language of “overcapacity”, which Carlos describes as a euphemism for European and North American industry failing to compete after nearly half a century of financialisation, privatisation and deregulation. Chinese competitiveness in electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels flows from a complete industrial system and sustained investment in technology – not from currency manipulation – and the EU’s tariffs of up to 35 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles are, he writes, “an act of self-harm disguised as self-defence”.

Cuba’s economic reforms and the prospects for socialist renewal

The following article by Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China and author of The East Is Still Red, examines the most far-reaching changes to Cuba’s economic model in more than 60 years – a programme of 23 strategic axes and 176 measures approved unanimously this month by the National Assembly.

Much of the Western press, and a good part of the Western left, has rushed to read the reforms as the moment the blockade finally broke the Revolution. Carlos argues the opposite: that they are best understood as a defence of socialism under siege, following the strategic logic China has pursued since 1978 – the controlled use of markets and foreign investment to develop the productive forces while the Communist Party retains political power and public ownership of the commanding heights. As the Cuba specialist Isaac Saney puts it, the measures, “far from representing a retreat”, constitute “a strategic effort to preserve and deepen the social gains of the Revolution”.

The article sets the reforms against the backdrop of an unprecedented US siege – 64 years of blockade, escalated under Trump and Rubio, with fuel choked off and blackouts of up to twenty hours a day – and traces Cuba’s two decades of gradual reform, from Raúl Castro’s “Guidelines” to the Mariel Special Economic Zone consciously modelled on China and Vietnam. The decisive question, Carlos insists, is the one that separated Beijing’s reforms from Gorbachev’s “perestroika”: who holds political power? Cuba, he argues, is travelling the road of China’s reform and opening up, not the Soviet road of perestroika – and China’s solidarity, in energy, food and party-to-party ties, may prove decisive.

In President Díaz-Canel’s words: “There is no sovereignty with an empty plate” – and “We are not going to come together only to resist. We are going to come together to create. To produce. To decide. To oversee. To prosper, and to transform.”

A version of this article, translated into Portuguese, can be found on Brasil de Fato.

China’s success vindicates the project of the global left

The video below is an interview of Carlos Martinez by Jason Smith, for CGTN’s The Bridge to China podcast. Recorded in the lead-up to the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, the wide-ranging conversation covers the nature of China’s economic system, the achievements of Chinese socialism, the state of the left in the West, and the transition to a multipolar world.

Carlos argues that China is best understood on its own terms, as socialism with Chinese characteristics: a fundamentally socialist system with a significant market component, in which the state holds the commanding heights – banking, energy, telecommunications, rail and the top levels of industry – and directs investment through national planning. The presence of markets, billionaires or inequality does not make a country capitalist; what matters is which class holds power, and the ultimate measure is the living standards of ordinary working people.

On that measure, China stands apart: it is the country that has eliminated extreme poverty, effectively ended homelessness, and pursued common prosperity, a world-leading renewable energy build-out and the saving of lives during the Covid pandemic. If China is socialist and succeeding, Carlos contends, that vindicates the project of the global left – which is precisely why the West’s new cold war is aimed at preventing a socialist alternative from succeeding.

The interview surveys the scale of China’s transformation – some 800 million people lifted out of poverty, the “seven guarantees” that underpin poverty alleviation, life expectancy rising from around 35 at liberation to over 79 today, near-universal mortgage-free home ownership, and the most extensive public infrastructure in the world. Comparing China with India – liberated within two years of one another, from similar starting points – Carlos draws out what a revolution and Communist Party-led planning have made possible: sovereign development free of IMF discipline, coherent five-year plans, and the capacity for mass mobilisation, exemplified by the three million cadres deployed in the poverty alleviation campaign.

Turning to the West, Carlos describes the long retreat of the left under the neoliberal counter-revolution – de-industrialisation, the rise of the precariat, and a social peace bought with the super-profits of imperialism that are now drying up. He points to the crisis of confidence deepened by Gaza and to the Corbyn moment as signs that material reality is shifting, and to a growing openness to China – from “Chinamaxxing” and the RedNote migration to the surge in inbound tourism. The dogmatism that still leads much of the Western left to withhold recognition of China’s decidedly socialist achievements, he argues, plays into a US grand strategy whose core is the encirclement and containment of China.

The lesson for developed and developing countries alike, Carlos concludes, is that public ownership is not inefficient but the precondition for any serious industrial policy, that long-term planning beats short-term shareholder value, and that the West must come to terms with an inevitably multipolar world – starting, at a minimum, with adherence to the United Nations Charter.

Nissan, Chery and the case for cooperation with China

In early June 2026, the Financial Times reported that Nissan’s Sunderland plant – the UK’s largest car factory, employing 6,000 people – has secured its long-term future through a deal to manufacture vehicles for the Chinese carmaker Chery from 2027. In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez argues that the agreement offers a concrete glimpse of a different economic path for Britain.

With Nissan’s global restructuring threatening thousands of jobs, and the motor industry’s own trade body admitting that Britain’s 2035 production targets are unreachable without Chinese manufacturers, Chinese industry is offering British workers what no British government has for forty years: high-quality jobs in a globally competitive, future-facing sector.

The predictable cries of ‘national security’ and ‘Chinese influence’, Martinez writes, are merely a manifestation of empire nostalgia. The real choice facing Britain is between embracing the multipolar transition or managing further decline in the service of a declining United States.

Jostein Hauge: This is why I’m Chinamaxxing

The following article by Jostein Hauge, political economist and an Associate Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, makes a clear and refreshing case for taking China’s achievements seriously. Hauge sets out the facts plainly – China’s unprecedented reduction of poverty, its leadership in clean energy, the scale and quality of its infrastructure, and its emergence as a counterweight to US hegemony – and insists that these gains are worth celebrating rather than treating, as so much Western commentary does, as a threat to be managed.

These are precisely the themes we explored in our recent webinar, Socialist Chinamaxxing: How China’s achievements are a product of its socialist system, which brought together speakers including George Galloway, Li Jingjing, Ben Norton, Danny Haiphong, Tings Chak, Chen Weihua, Ileana Chan, Keith Bennett and Qiao Collective to argue that China’s progress flows directly from its socialist system, and would not have been possible within a framework of capitalist rule.

We would, however, raise one friendly disagreement. Hauge writes that “China does not hold competitive national elections and practises considerable censorship”, and concludes that “China’s authoritarianism deserves real scrutiny”. In our view this concedes too much to the very liberal framework that the rest of his article so effectively challenges: the assumption that genuine democracy is defined by the Westminster parliamentary system, and that its absence amounts to “authoritarianism”.

This framing does not engage seriously with China’s socialist democracy. As we have argued, liberal democracy presents democracy as a purely procedural matter – periodic elections between rival capitalist parties – while obscuring the more fundamental question of which social class actually holds power. Meaningful democracy is not defined by what happens at the ballot box once every few years; it is about the ongoing participation of ordinary people in the running of society, and the degree to which the state is genuinely responsive to the needs of the majority. Measured this way – through its system of People’s Congresses combined with extensive structures of consultative democracy, and its consistent record of delivering for ordinary people – China’s socialist democracy can be considered to be more substantive than its Western counterparts, not less.

Xi Jinping has put the point sharply: a system in which “the people are awakened only at voting time and dormant afterward” is not true democracy.

Two railways, two systems: HS2 and the case for socialism

In the following article, originally published in the Morning Star, our co-editor Carlos Martinez uses the unfolding HS2 fiasco to illustrate the stark difference between the British and Chinese political economies, and to make the case for socialism.

On May 19, it was announced that Britain’s high-speed rail project will cost some £103 billion and will not carry passengers for at least another decade. Carlos sets these figures against China’s record: at roughly £736 million per mile, HS2 track is around 25 times more expensive than Chinese high-speed rail, and is being built at a fraction of the pace. China laid 31,000 miles of high-speed rail in 22 years; Britain may manage 140 miles in 19.

The explanation, Carlos argues, is not technical but political. Where China builds through vertically integrated state-owned enterprises under coordinated national planning, Britain’s project has been handed to a fragmented patchwork of private contractors, each adding its margin – the predictable result of four decades of privatisation and deindustrialisation.

The HS2 fiasco is not just a story about one botched railway project. It is a story, ultimately, about the fallacy of neoliberalism, about the consequences of four decades of deindustrialisation and privatisation, about the consequences of treating public infrastructure as an opportunity for private extraction rather than as a public good.

And it is a story about how, as Deng Xiaoping put it in 1984 (at the start of capitalism’s neoliberal era), “the superiority of the socialist system is demonstrated, in the final analysis, by faster and greater development of the productive forces than under the capitalist system.”

It was announced on May 19 that Britain’s ill-fated HS2 high-speed rail project is set to cost three times more than originally budgeted, and will not start running for at least another decade.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander stated that, following a review of the project, the estimated final cost will be £103 billion. What’s more, this only covers the first phase, between Old Oak Common (in west London) and Birmingham Curzon Street — a distance of 140 miles.

To put the figures in perspective: £103bn divided by 140 miles works out at around £736 million per mile. By comparison, the average cost of a mile of high-speed rail in China is in the region of £30m. HS2 track is therefore around 25 times more expensive than Chinese HSR.

The contrast in pace is if anything even more striking. Construction on HS2 began in 2017. If we see a train running in 2036, the pace of construction will have been a smidgen north of seven miles per year.

China’s green development is both anti-imperialist and socialist

Why is it China, and not one of the Western capitalist powers, that’s leading the global green industrial revolution? In 2023, China produced over 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and 60 percent of its electric vehicles. In the first half of 2025, China’s increase in renewable energy generation exceeded that of all other countries combined.

Such accomplishments are not accidental, nor are they a function of the ‘free market’. Rather, they are the product of a socialist developmental state that has, over decades, subordinated capital to social objectives – and in doing so, has transformed the global prospects for a sustainable future.

In this important contribution to the Journal of International Solidarity, A Shantha provides a rigorous political-economic analysis of how and why
China achieved this green industrial revolution, and what it means for the rest of the world.

The argument cuts to the heart of the debate about China’s economic system. As the author puts it: “Put simply, capitalism is the rule of capital. In a capitalist system, social objectives are subordinated to private capital accumulation. In China’s system, the opposite is true – capital accumulation is subordinated to broader social objectives.”

Through five-year planning, state ownership of the commanding heights, technology transfer mandates, the strategic use of subsidies and more, China’s government has been able to construct entire industries from scratch – not because the market demanded it, but because the projects of energy sovereignty, industrialisation and ecological sustainability required it.

Crucially, the author argues that this internal socialist orientation is inseparable from China’s anti-imperialist character. By achieving energy
sovereignty and technological sovereignty, China has directly undermined the mechanisms through which Western imperialism perpetuates uneven
development across the Global South. An energy-independent China cannot be strangled by dollar-denominated oil markets. A technologically sovereign China cannot be contained by Western export controls.

And the implications extend beyond China’s borders. China has now “done the heavy lifting of developing the cutting-edge of green technologies
that no longer have to be ‘discovered’, but can instead be engaged with commercially or through other forms of economic cooperation between
countries.” The dramatic reduction in the cost of solar panels globally is one direct consequence – a gift to every developing nation seeking a
sustainable path forward.

The article concludes:

While Western capitalism’s drive toward uneven development – necessarily involving the absolute cheapening, wasting, and violent destruction of human lives and the natural environment – is what has caused ecological breakdown in the first instance, it is likely no coincidence that socialist China is at the vanguard of developing the prerequisites for a sustainable, ecological civilisation that has major positive implications for the rest of humanity and the planet.

Since the turn of the century, China has been undergoing its own green industrial revolution. In 2023, China was responsible for the production of over 80% of the world’s solar panels and 60% of the world’s electric vehicles.¹ China’s domestic New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) — referring to battery/pure electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and fuel-cell electric vehicles (of which pure electric vehicles are now the most common) — make up more than 90% of sales, compared to the 50% market share held by gas-powered Chinese-branded vehicles.² In the first half of 2025, China’s increase in renewable energy generation exceeded that of all other countries combined, with solar power in China accounting for 55% of the global increase in solar output, and wind power in China accounting for 82% of the global increase in wind power output.³

In our era of exponential ecological decline and potential collapse, why hasn’t the Western world — supposedly the vanguard of capitalist ‘innovation’ — been able to make even meagre progress on this question?

How is it that the political and economic system of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was the one decisive in producing such world-changing outcomes?

The brief answers to these questions lie, first, in the fact that sovereignty — that is, resistance against capitalism’s tendency toward uneven development on a world scale — was a primary factor in pursuing this green development trajectory. And, second, that the pursuit of this sovereign development trajectory within a hostile imperialist world-system was only internally possible through the subordination and disciplining of capital to wider social objectives set out by China’s developmental state led by the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Sovereignty within the Capitalist World-System

The history of capitalist development is one of imposing — via imperialism — uneven development wherein core economies accumulate capital by draining wealth from imperial peripheries (exemplified by Britain’s extraction from India) producing stark disparities in productive capacity.⁴ In response to this, peripheral states pursue combined development to resist this dynamic, historically by mobilizing the state to build domestic industry and reclaim sovereign productive capacities. While combined development initially took capitalist forms as countries like the US and Germany used their state for infant industry development, this struggle to wrest productive capacity away from the polarizing tendency of capitalism increasingly adopted socialist forms after 1917 — most notably with the Russian and Chinese revolutions.⁵ What is clear from this is that the nature of combined development is closely linked to the question of national sovereignty, and that the (developmental) state has historically been used in pursuit of those two goals.

Upon founding the PRC in 1949, the CPC confronted a series of challenges: a distorted economy shaped over a century by foreign aggression, a US-led trade embargo, American aggression on its northeastern flank in Korea, and acute industrial underdevelopment. Thus, industrialization and sovereignty became intertwined priorities.

Nearly eight decades after the establishment of the PRC, it is clear that the state and the Communist Party continue to prioritize the mutually reinforcing imperatives of industrialization and sovereignty. Many point to the unleashing of the capital relation by reforms following 1978 as the definitive driver of Chinese industrialization.⁶ This is certainly true but the achievements of the post-1978 period are directly predicated on the developmental strides made between 1949 and 1976 (the ‘Mao period’) — namely the eradication of feudalism via land reform, human capital investment via education and welfare, and import-substitution industrialization.⁷

Through the pre- and post-reform development strategies, national sovereignty against imperialism has remained a core objective of the state throughout. This logic — of industry serving the goal of national sovereignty — continues to be apparent in the development of China’s green industries (in this article, NEVs and renewables).

The State-Led Development of China’s Green Industries

How did China mobilize the state to create the success of the NEV and renewable energy sectors?

In both these sectors, the state played an active role in:

strategic and long-term national planning;
the construction of markets (including both stimulating demand, and also fostering the development of the supply chain);
steering and disciplining markets;
knowledge production; and
technological upgrading.

The Chinese state does not only include the central government — even though it plays a major role in the development of a given industry — but also provincial and local governments who are chiefly responsible for the implementation of nationally-set policies, and whose officials must — alongside this — balance the considerations of their own respective constituencies, including local firms and workers.⁸ This means that the state-led development of China’s green industries is the result of complex interactions between different levels of government.

China’s NEV Sector

China’s NEV sector is the product of over 20 years of strategic, long-sighted planning.

2001-2005: The 10th Five-Year Plan launched the “863 Program,” allocating 2 billion RMB for NEV research and development (R&D) by manufacturers, universities, and research institutes.⁹
2010: NEVs were designated a strategic emerging industry
2012: ‘Energy-Saving and New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan’;
- The prioritization of pure electric drive technology (as opposed to that of hybrid vehicles) and introduction of purchase subsidies;
- Stricter emission standards for internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles; and
- Charging infrastructure mandates.¹⁰
2015: “Made in China 2025” strategy identified NEVs as one of ten high-tech manufacturing sectors that China aims to promote as a ‘dominant global player’, focusing on:
- Low-carbon electrification;
- Digitization; and
- Autonomous driving.¹¹

More recent advances in the NEV sector are undoubtedly built on the foundations laid by the 1994 Automotive Industry Policy, which leveraged China’s massive market access to secure technology transfer from foreign automotive companies via joint ventures (JVs) with state-owned firms.¹² This 1994 policy also gradually introduced more stringent local content requirements (i.e. government-mandated requirements that a certain percentage of inputs are locally derived), thus allowing the automotive supply chain in China to proliferate and modernize.¹³ The combination of these two factors — technology transfer and the shaping up of the automotive supply chain — allowed the emergence of indigenous automakers (like Chery) in the domestic market by 2004.

However, given the continued dominance of foreign auto brands (such as Volkswagen and General Motors) due to their name brand recognition, one of the few ways domestic auto firms would be able to compete would actually be to “leapfrog” into NEVs to bypass the ICE dominance of foreign auto firms.¹⁴ And given state policy and the market signals it produced, these domestic auto firms were well predisposed to doing so.

State intervention operated on both the supply and demand sides of the market. Supply-side support included:

An estimated US$25 billion in R&D subsidies between 2009–2023; as well as
Local municipal subsidies covering 30% of charging station construction costs in Shenzhen and Suzhou (2014–2015).¹⁵

Demand-side measures featured:

The “Ten Cities, Thousand Vehicles” program (2009) for public fleet procurement (later expanded to 25 cities);
Consumer subsidies up to 60,000 RMB per purchase of a pure EV (between 2010–2020).¹⁶
The granting of preferential license plates, preferential road access, and free parking for NEVs in cities like Beijing and Shanghai.¹⁷

In addition to supply- and demand-side supports from the state (in different forms of subsidies), the NEV sector has also developed qualitatively due to state policy that fosters innovation and technological upgrading.

Beyond just R&D subsidies, consumer subsidies for NEV purchases were made to vary by the driving range of different NEVs (i.e. how many kilometers can be travelled on one full charge of battery). Higher driving range vehicles were subsidized to a greater extent than lower range vehicles, and from 2014 onward, each year saw a progressive reduction in subsidies; this catalyzed automakers to innovate and engage in technological upgrading to maximize their production of NEVs that would receive the greatest subsidies.¹⁸

After progressively reducing national subsidies over the years, by 2020, purchase subsidies were replaced by a dual-credit policy requiring automakers to offset ICE emissions with NEV production credits — that is, the policy essentially regulated that a certain proportion of NEVs (relative to ICE vehicles) must be maintained by automakers in the Chinese market. Foreign firms — typically laggards in NEV output — were required to purchase credits from Chinese firms or form JVs, effectively transferring the burden of subsidizing the sector away from the state and toward foreign competitors, all while enabling further technology transfer.¹⁹

Innovation was further spurred by the “catfish effect” of Tesla’s inclusion and initial dominance in the market and a shift toward “manufacturing + service” models integrating smart driving technologies, thus also attracting tech capital.²⁰

As a result of these developmental state policies, the NEV sector grew from a market penetration rate of just over 1% in 2015 to just under 26% in 2022, reaching the central government’s target for 2025 three years early.²¹

China’s Renewables Sector

Just like the NEV sector, China’s renewables sector was a product of long-term planning and sustained developmental state coordination. The 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) designated wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies as strategic industries, complemented by the Renewable Energy Law of 2006 establishing four mechanisms:

National renewable targets;
Mandatory grid connection and purchase of renewable power (whereby grid companies — that are largely state-owned — are obligated to guarantee a market for power generation companies producing renewable energy, which are also largely state-owned);
Feed-in tariffs (whereby grid companies pay an above-market rate to power companies); and
A cost-sharing mechanism (charged on end-users of electricity), including a specific fund for renewable energy development.²²

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) coordinates sector development, leveraging state dominance in power generation and grid operations —primarily through state-owned enterprises (SOEs) —while private firms concentrate in manufacturing and innovation.²³ In this way, private actors are being made to serve the state sector, at the same time as pursuing opportunities for profit. SOEs face binding renewable capacity quotas with penalties for non-compliance, allowing the state to steer sectoral development in a given direction.

The state also played an important role in forging connections with academia and research institutes for knowledge production in the renewable energy sector. For example, the NDRC collaborated with research institutions, such as the China Association for Science and Technology and Jiangsu’s provincial Energy Research Society, to draft energy conservation strategies and execute technology projects.²⁴

Wind power scaled rapidly after the 2002 National Wind Concession Program introduced competitive bidding for the construction of larger-scale farms, which were largely being approved by local governments through the 2000s.²⁵ Critical to the development of a domestic supply chain of wind power manufacturing equipment were a 70% local content requirement (from 2004) and a 17% import tariff on preassembled turbines (from 2007), which spurred technology transfer. For example, Chinese wind power heavyweight Goldwind licensed designs from German firms Jacobs, RE Power, and Vensys.²⁶ Further, bidding criteria evolved from simply ‘lowest price wins’ to progressively account for domestic manufacturing content and technical capability.²⁷ Thus, overall, local content policies, technology transfer, protective tariffs, and the growing stringency and sophistication of bidding requirements allowed the domestic supply chain for wind power equipment to more fully take shape in China during the 2000s, allowing Chinese wind power companies to “[move] quickly up the technological ladder, [win] local market share and, as the sector matured, [strengthen] global competitiveness”.²⁸

Solar development initially differed from the trajectory of wind power development: pre-2009 growth was export-driven (delivering to markets in the global North, primarily Europe), privately-led, and minimally state-supported.²⁹ From 2006, firms purchased turnkey production lines to scale manufacturing, while over 60% of solar company executives in China had studied or worked abroad, facilitating North-to-South knowledge transfer in the sector.³⁰ The 2008–09 financial crisis and subsequent 2011 EU/US ‘anti-dumping’ probes triggered a pivot to the Chinese domestic market, given the collapse of Northern markets where PV cells were traditionally being sold. In 2011, a feed-in tariff catalyzed a 500% surge in PV cell installations that year; growth accelerated further after 2013 when local governments gained approval authority for solar projects.³¹

These coordinated policies yielded dramatic results: by 2025, China accounted for 55% of global solar power growth and 82% of wind power expansion, cementing its renewable energy leadership through developmental state orchestration of markets, technology transfer, and industrial upgrading.³²

Green Industrialization, Sovereignty, and Socialism

China’s green development is both anti-imperialist and socialist. Let us first look at how it is anti-imperialist. It is anti-imperialist in two ways — in its pursuit of 1) energy sovereignty and 2) technological sovereignty.

Energy Sovereignty

The Chinese government views the development of green industries as an important part of guaranteeing national energy sovereignty and security — these connections are explicitly made in state documents.³³

Though coal still accounts for approximately 54% of China’s energy consumption, it has come with less-than-desirable consequences, including severe air pollution, which only recently has been reducing. The primary alternative to coal (discounting renewables for now) has been oil and gas, which — though only making up about 27% of China’s total energy consumption — sees an external procurement rate of 72%.³⁴ This means that 72% of oil consumed in China is imported from abroad, amounting to a notable energy vulnerability. In 2015, around 80% of China’s oil consumption was used by vehicles.³⁵

Given that coal-based development causes serious ecological damage, and an extensive reliance on foreign-imported oil and gas poses energy security vulnerabilities, it was squarely in the interest of China’s national energy sovereignty that the state rapidly develop and scale up both the renewable energy sector as well as the NEV sector. Today, China’s energy self-sufficiency rate stands at about 85%, reflecting a deliberate shift away from ecologically damaging coal and geopolitically vulnerable fossil fuel imports.³⁶

China’s growing energy sovereignty means that it has deprived Western imperialism of a crucial point of leverage in determining China’s developmental trajectory. In other words, access to energy is decreasingly a means through which the West can attempt to de-develop China, as it does with the rest of the global South by linking the US dollar to oil purchases, therefore constraining the fiscal space of many governments across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Samir Amin listed ‘Five Monopolies of the Center’ which are, briefly put, responsible for the continued underdevelopment of the South and overdevelopment of the North, the third of which is the global North’s ‘monopolistic access to the planet’s natural resources’ — that is, the North’s monopolistic access to the earth’s energy resources.³⁷ China’s energy sovereignty directly undermines this monopoly, thus structurally threatening capitalist-imperialism’s drive toward uneven development at a world scale.

Technological Sovereignty

Beyond energy sovereignty, China’s green development prioritized technological sovereignty by indigenizing production.

China’s developmental state actively shaped end-to-end domestic supply chains through local content requirements, JVs (facilitating technology transfer), extensive R&D funding, and the strategic and dynamic use of subsidies. China’s NEV sector, for instance, produced a “self-sufficient and controllable supply chain, without any chokepoints in the supply of critical components that could be constrained by other countries.”³⁸

Crucial to indigenizing production is indigenizing production technologies. This emphasis on indigenizing production is referred to by Chu Wan-wen as the ‘catch-up consensus’ — that is, that production in China should strive to catch up with that of the global North and that it should be indigenized.³⁹ Meng Jie & Zhang Zebin argue that this catch-up consensus is in fact the ‘core of the CPC’s ideology’:

Lu Feng [Emeritus Professor of Economics and former Deputy Dean at Peking University’s National School of Development] has pointed out a deeply rooted political correctness in China about the need for technology to be primarily developed independently in order to be regarded as an outstanding achievement. This stems from the fact that the CPC relied on the popular demand for independence to seize power, and that political independence was a pre-condition for establishing China’s industrial system. Therefore, whenever industrial development faces fundamental strategic choices, the CPC’s ideology will guide policies back toward independence.⁴⁰

This once again reinforces that, for the CPC, industrialization (and the technological indigenization implied therein) and national sovereignty were dual imperatives intertwined with one another since the establishment of the PRC in 1949 continuing until today. China’s technological sovereignty undermines the global North’s monopoly over advanced technologies, therefore also undermining the structure of capitalist-imperialism by resisting its world-systemic drive toward uneven development.⁴¹

Socialist-Oriented Green Development

China’s green industrialization — with sovereignty as a central consideration — depends to a high degree on its ability to ‘govern capital’, both foreign and domestic. In both the NEV and renewables sectors, capital was made to serve national goals set by the government through a combination of carrots and sticks.

It would be incorrect to identify the use of a market economy in China’s developmental trajectory and reductively equate it with (state) capitalism. Put simply, capitalism is the rule of capital — both in particular countries and at a world scale. In a capitalist system, social objectives (such as creating entirely new green industries of the future or reversing severe air pollution via automobile electrification) are subordinated to private capital accumulation. In China’s system, the opposite is true — capital accumulation is subordinated to broader social objectives. This is characteristic of how the CPC understands its own economic system: as a ‘socialist market economy’. As part of this socialist market economy, the commanding heights of the economy (finance, telecommunications, public utilities, infrastructure, etc.) remain in the hands of the state and thus can be steered in favour of social objectives. For China’s Party-State, there is a particular logic in governing capital — this is encapsulated in Meng & Zhang’s concept of ‘constructive markets’:

Constructive markets in the socialist market economy have two main characteristics. First, the state assumes the task of constructing markets on both the supply and demand sides, often acting as a special agent embedded in the market in various ways to continuously guide market development and coordinate the division of labour. Second, the state’s development strategy introduces a use value goal into the market which interacts with the exchange value objectives pursued by enterprises, placing the former in a relatively dominant position.⁴²

The Chinese developmental state governs capital by constraining enterprises’ ‘exchange value objectives’ — the profit motive — within a broader framework of national developmental goals based on ‘use value’. This is largely by using regulatory tools. Foreign automakers were required to form JVs with domestic firms (capped at 50% foreign ownership) to access China’s vast market, facilitating technology transfer. Later, the dual-credit policy disciplined laggard foreign firms into potentially subsidizing domestic NEV producers or forming new JVs to offset negative credits.⁴³ Similarly, the 70% local content requirements and 17% tariffs on imported wind turbines placed constraints on capital that forced it to pursue technological upgrading.⁴⁴

Therefore, an internal socialist orientation — one that subordinates capital to broader ecologically sustainable and people-centered social objectives — is actually what enables a sovereign development path in China that is able to resist capitalist-imperialism’s drive toward uneven development.

Concluding Remarks

We are currently in a transition from capitalism towards socialism.⁴⁵ Relatedly, Marx wrote:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or . . . with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.⁴⁶

Our current moment of global capitalist crisis and decay is exactly resonant with Marx’s description of the conflict between capitalist social relations and our societies’ productive forces. Capitalist social relations are currently acting as a fetter on — or blocking — the further development of the productive forces in such a direction that can even begin to address the central crisis of our time: capitalist-induced ecological breakdown. It is precisely for this reason that the Western capitalist powers have been unable to innovate and sufficiently scale up green technologies to meet the needs of our moment.

Instead, it is China — whose social revolution (gestured at in the Marx quote) is ongoing — that has begun to break capitalist-imperialism’s polarizing dynamic and, in this context, has been able to innovate, scale up, and widely adopt new green productive forces.⁴⁷

This green revolution initiated by China has major global significance given that — through its investments in R&D and technological upgrading — China has now done the heavy lifting of developing the cutting-edge of green technologies that now no longer have to be ‘discovered,’ but can instead now (in most cases) be engaged with commercially or through other forms of economic cooperation between countries. Also the rapid development of China’s solar industry and the corresponding magnitude of its productive output have driven the cost of PVs down globally.⁴⁸ These have major implications for other global South countries looking to pursue alternative development paths that are both ecologically sustainable and that do not further indebt them.

While Western capitalism’s drive toward uneven development — necessarily involving the absolute cheapening, wasting, and violent destruction of human lives and the natural environment — is what has caused ecological breakdown in the first instance, it is likely no coincidence that socialist China is at the vanguard of developing the prerequisites for a sustainable, ecological civilization that has major positive implications for the rest of humanity and the planet.

[1] Ji Siqi, “China’s new green-transition guidelines show how the embattled industry will power on,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong, China), Aug. 12, 2024. https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3274218/chinas-new-green-transition-guidelines-show-how-embattled-industry-will-power. ↩︎

[2] Godfrey Yeung, “‘Made in China 2025’: The development of a new energy vehicle industry in China,” Area Development and Policy 4, no. 1 (2019): 46. ↩︎

[3] “China Steps Up as the Adult in the Room on Climate,” The China Academy, October 10, 2025, https://thechinaacademy.org/china-steps-up-as-the-adult-in-the-room-on-climate/. ↩︎

[4] Radhika Desai, Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy (New York: Routledge, 2022). ↩︎

[5] Desai, Capitalism, Coronavirus and War. ↩︎

[6] It is important to note that it is not the unleashing of the capital relation in an unguarded way and according to neoliberal logic that occurred in China that was responsible for industrialization, but rather the unleashing of capital within a broader social framework that prioritized holistic national development (Kadri, 2020; Lauesen, 2024). ↩︎

[7] Ali Kadri, “Neoliberalism vs. China as a Model for the Developing World,” The IDEAs Working Paper Series 1 (2020). ↩︎

[8] Chu Wan-wen, “Industry policy with Chinese characteristics: a multi-layered model,” China Economic Journal 10, no. 3 (2017); Meng Jie and Zhang Zibin, “Industrial Policy with Chinese Characteristics: The Political Economy of China’s Intermediary Institutions,” Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought 3, no. 1 (2025). ↩︎

[9] Liu Yingqi and Ari Kokko, “Who does what in China’s new energy vehicle industry?,” Energy Policy 57 (2013): 22. ↩︎

[10] Feng Kaidong and Chen Junting, “A New Machine to Change the World? The Rise of China’s New Energy Vehicle Industry and its Global Implications,” Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought 2, no. 2 (2024): 35.; Alexandre De Podestá Gomes, Robert Pauls, and Tobias ten Brink, “Industrial policy and the creation of the electric vehicles market in China: Demand structure, sectoral complementarities and policy coordination,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 47, no.1 (2023). ↩︎

[11] Yeung, ‘Made in China 2025’, 44. ↩︎

[12] Gregory Thomas Chin, China’s Automotive Modernization: The Party-State and Multinational Corporations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).; Chu, Industry policy with Chinese characteristics. ↩︎

[13] Chin, China’s Automotive Modernization. ↩︎

[14] Feng & Chen, A New Machine to Change the World?. ↩︎

[15] Stephen Ezell, How Innovative Is China in the Electric Vehicle and Battery Industries? (China Innovation Series), Information Technology & Innovation Foundation – Hamilton Center on Industrial Strategy (2024); Gomes et al., Industrial policy and the creation of the electric vehicles market in China. ↩︎

[16] Feng & Chen, A New Machine to Change the World?.; Liu & Kokko, Who does what in China’s new energy vehicle industry?. ↩︎

[17] Gomes et al., Industrial policy and the creation of the electric vehicles market in China.; Yeung, ‘Made in China 2025’. ↩︎

[18] Yeung, ‘Made in China 2025’. ↩︎

[19] Feng & Chen, A New Machine to Change the World?.; Yeung, ‘Made in China 2025’. ↩︎

[20] Feng & Chen, A New Machine to Change the World?. ↩︎

[21] Ibid. ↩︎

[22] Joanna I. Lewis, Cooperating for the Climate: Learning from International Partnerships in China’s Clean Energy Sector (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2023).; Sara Schuman, Improving China’s Existing Renewable Energy Legal Framework: Lessons from the International and Domestic Experience, Natural Resources Defense Council (2010), https://www.nrdc.cn/Public/uploads/2016-12-03/5842d7a44bfa2.pdf. ↩︎

[23] Geoffrey C. Chen and Charles Lees, “Growing China’s renewables sector: a developmental state approach,” New Political Economy 21, no. 6 (2016). ↩︎

[24] Chen & Lees, Growing China’s renewables sector, 581. ↩︎

[25] Marius Korsnes, “The emergence of China’s wind and solar industries,” in Wind and Solar Energy Transition in China (Routledge, 2019).; Chu, Industry policy with Chinese characteristics. ↩︎

[26] Chen & Lees, Growing China’s renewables sector, 578. ↩︎

[27] Korsnes, The emergence of China’s wind and solar industries, 72. ↩︎

[28] Chen & Lees, Growing China’s renewables sector, 578. ↩︎

[29] Lewis, Cooperating for the Climate; Korsnes, The emergence of China’s wind and solar industries. ↩︎

[30] Lewis, Cooperating for the Climate, 34. ↩︎

[31] Korsnes, The emergence of China’s wind and solar industries. ↩︎

[32] China Steps Up as the Adult in the Room on Climate, The China Academy. ↩︎

[33] China’s Energy Transition [中华人民共和国国务院新闻办公室], The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China (2024), http://www.scio.gov.cn/zfbps/zfbps_2279/202408/t20240829_860523.html. ↩︎

[34] “China’s Energy Security Realities and Green Ambitions,” The China Academy, July 30, 2025, https://thechinaacademy.org/chinas-energy-security-realities-and-green-ambitions/. ↩︎

[35] Yeung, ‘Made in China 2025’. ↩︎

[36] China’s Energy Security Realities and Green Ambitions, The China Academy. ↩︎

[37] Samir Amin, Capitalism in the age of globalization: The management of contemporary society (Zed Books, 2014). ↩︎

[38] Feng & Chen, A New Machine to Change the World?, 37. ↩︎

[39] Chu, Industry policy with Chinese characteristics. ↩︎

[40] Meng & Zhang, Industrial Policy with Chinese Characteristics, 59. ↩︎

[41] Amin, Capitalism in the age of globalization. ↩︎

[42] Meng & Zhang, Industrial Policy with Chinese Characteristics, 39. ↩︎

[43] Feng & Chen, A New Machine to Change the World?; Yeung, ‘Made in China 2025’. ↩︎

[44] Chen & Lees, Growing China’s renewables sector. ↩︎

[45] Torkil Lauesen, The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism (Iskra Books, 2024). ↩︎

[46] Lauesen, The Long Transition, 21. ↩︎

[47] Cheng Enfu and Yang Jun, “China’s “Triple Revolution Theory” and Marxist Analysis,” Monthly Review 77, no. 1 (2025). ↩︎

[48] China Steps Up as the Adult in the Room on Climate, The China Academy. ↩︎

The 15th Five-Year Plan and China’s economic outlook

We are pleased to republish the below article by the distinguished Marxist economist Michael Roberts, which looks at the reality of the Chinese economy and its prospects in the context of the adoption in March of the 15^th Five-Year Plan, by the country’s highest legislative body, the National People’s Congress (NPC).

Adopting the Marxist standpoint of seeking truth from facts in his economic analysis, Michael deals with a number of erroneous claims often made regarding the Chinese economy in a rigorous but comprehensible fashion, which also does not shy away from some of the very real challenges it faces.

He sees the economic growth target set for this year of around 4.5-5% as being well justified and goes on to explain:

“In 2025, China’s real GDP growth was 5%, a rate among the major economies of the world only surpassed by India (which exaggerates its GDP data) and more than twice the US growth rate and three times that of the rest of the top G7 capitalist economies.

“Since 2020, the government has set a target for China to become a ‘mid-level’ economy, (as defined by the World Bank at $20,000 per person at 2020 prices) by 2035. That meant effectively doubling its per capita GDP over those 15 years. It is clearly on target to do that as China’s per capita income would need to grow only at an average annual rate of about 4.17% a year from hereon. Assuming China averages an annual real per capita GDP growth rate from hereon of about 4.5%, then it will surpass the World Bank definition by 2034.”

Making an important comparison, he further notes: “China’s per capita GDP would still be only 27% of that of the US (assuming the US per capita GDP grows at a 1.5% average rate from here). In contrast, India’s per capita GDP would be only 5% of the US by 2035.”

He then proceeds to deal with the fact that: “China’s GDP and growth rates are continually dismissed by many mainstream Western economists as well as by some on the heterodox left,” but points out:

“Recently the prestigious Penn World Tables have confirmed that they consider China’s growth data as broadly accurate and no longer attempt to ‘adjust’ it downwards… Yes, corporate debt is high, and the property market is still falling. But nearly all this debt is financed entirely from domestic savings, unlike many examples of rapid credit expansion elsewhere. So, this debt is perfectly manageable.”

He also deals with the balance and relationship between investment and consumption, another issue on which a measure of confusion abounds:

“China’s household consumption is not stagnating, it’s growing 4.4%, more or less in line with GDP growth. Exports are not driving growth. Net trade accounted for about 20% of 2025 growth, the rest was driven by domestic consumption and investment.”

China’s new high quality growth benefits humanity as a whole

The video embedded below is the full recording of an interview and discussion conducted by Jingjing Yang of China Media Group (CMG) with our co-editor Keith Bennett on March 5 regarding issues raised by China’s then ongoing two annual parliamentary sessions of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

Reviewing the achievements of Chinese-style modernisation over the last year, Keith notes that we are living through a dramatic period of history, one in which events move very fast and we are experiencing, as Xi Jinping puts it, changes unseen in a century.

China’s growth is now expressed above all in qualitative terms, with advances in AI, robotics and other fields all contributing to what many people in the world, young people in particular, are describing as “a very Chinese moment” in their lives.

The really important figures in China’s development in the present period are those such as in the growth of renewable energy or in the reduction and elimination of extreme poverty. And China’s work to prevent climate catastrophe benefits people throughout the world. The main themes of the incoming 15^th Five Year Plan provide further evidence that what is good for China is also good for humanity as a whole. The emphasis placed on new high quality productive forces, on robotics, EVs and AI, provide new opportunities particularly for those other developing countries that wish to learn from the Chinese example.

However, all this is unfolding against a capricious and dangerous international environment, as shown not only by the egregious use of tariffs as a weapon of economic warfare but even in the kidnapping and murder of leaders of sovereign states. China’s policies are a factor for stability in this situation but, contrary to what some people seem to imagine, China does not possess a magic wand capable of miraculously solving all problems on the global stage. China’s Global Security Initiative has been welcomed by the overwhelming majority of countries in the world as it is based on shared interests and common benefit. The countries standing against it are few in number, but unfortunately they remain powerful.

Extracts from the interview were shown on CCTV coverage during the Two Sessions.

Chinese Embassy in London hosts briefing and discussion on Two Sessions

The Chinese Embassy in London hosted a symposium on March 19 for Ambassador Zheng Zeguang to brief on the recently concluded annual ‘Two Sessions’ – of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) – held in Beijing, which he had attended as a CPPCC member, and to exchange views in this regard with British friends from various walks of life.

He began, however, with remarks concerning current events in West Asia, which he correctly noted is an issue with which everyone is concerned. The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran is, he noted, a war that should never happened and Iran had been attacked while negotiations were ongoing; it is a war that does no good to anyone, that had no authorisation from the UN, and that violates international law.

The Ambassador further outlined the ongoing diplomatic efforts to restore peace being undertaken by Foreign Minister Wang Yi as well as by Zhai Jun, special envoy of the Chinese government on the Middle East issue, who was still in the region at time of speaking.

Ambassador Zheng noted that the Two Sessions reviewed and adopted the Government Work Report and the Outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan, setting key priorities for China’s economic and social development in 2026, and providing top-level design for development over the next five years.

They are, he explained, a vivid example of whole-process people’s democracy under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. During the Two Sessions, deputies to the National People’s Congress and members of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference gather in Beijing to deliberate on state affairs. Both the Government Work Report and the Outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan were formulated after extensive consultation with all sectors of society, bringing together the broadest possible wisdom and consensus, and reflecting the shared will of the Chinese people.

Ambassador Zheng identified the scientific formulation and implementation of Five-Year Plans as an important governance experience of the Party and a distinctive political advantage of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Through successive Five-Year Plans, China has worked with perseverance to translate its blueprint into reality, creating the twin miracles of rapid economic growth and long-term social stability. By implementing the 15th Five-Year Plan, China will continue to write new chapters in these two miracles and provide stability and positive energy to the world.

He also pointed out that the world is undergoing growing transformation and volatility. Unilateralism and acts of bullying are on the rise, regional conflicts persist, and the international order is facing serious challenges. The more turbulent the world becomes, the greater the need to promote dialogue and cooperation. China always stands on the side of international fairness and justice and on the right side of history. China stands ready to strengthen cooperation with all countries in implementing the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilisation Initiative, and the Global Governance Initiative, with a view to a community with a shared future for humanity.