Original analysis Archives - Friends of Socialist China

Sunlight and sovereignty: the Chinese technology behind Africa’s solar boom

Africa’s solar installations rose by a record 54 percent in 2025, and 15 major African markets imported more than $400 million worth of solar panels in the first quarter of 2026 alone – more than two-thirds of the total for the whole of the previous year. In this article, Carlos Martinez looks at what lies behind those numbers.

The projects driving the continent’s green transition are overwhelmingly built and financed by China, from the Benban Solar Park in Egypt and the Adama wind farms in Ethiopia to De Aar in South Africa and a solar plant with battery storage in every one of Zambia’s 156 constituencies. What has made them viable is two decades of sustained Chinese public investment, which has driven the global cost of renewable energy down to a fraction of what it was 15 years ago.

Carlos also takes on the charge, increasingly fashionable in parts of the Western left, that this amounts to a new “green imperialism”. Market share, he argues, describes a trade relationship, not domination and coercion – and the function of the accusation, whatever the intention behind it, is to manufacture consent for the New Cold War.

A report in the South China Morning Post on 7 September highlights the contrast in energy policy between the United States, where, particularly under the present administration, the watchword is “drill, baby, drill”, and China, where the national strategy is to “walk towards the light”. Two energy behemoths, two approaches to the future of the planet, and the resulting choice facing the people of Africa.

The SCMP article observes that, for African governments seeking to expand access to electricity, the principal deciding factor is cost. And on cost, the argument is now over.

Africa’s solar installations rose a record 54 percent in 2025, adding 4.5 gigawatts of new photovoltaic capacity, and that record is likely to be broken again this year. The International Energy Agency reports that 15 major African markets imported more than $400 million worth of solar panels in the first quarter of 2026 alone – against $600 million for the whole of 2025.

“Africa’s solar revolution is here,” says Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council. “Growth is spreading to new markets across the continent, and rooftop and distributed systems are putting power directly into the hands of households and businesses.”

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.

Was Chairman Mao the greatest person to have ever lived?

The following is the full text of the remarks prepared by our co-editor Keith Bennett, as the final speaker at our webinar, organised in conjunction with the International Manifesto Group (IMG), on Sunday September 6, marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.

Keith’s speech was delivered in slightly abbreviated and adapted form due to time constraints. A report on the webinar can be read here. The livestream of the event is also available on YouTube.

I’m not sure whether having to speak last after such a galaxy of brilliant speakers is a blessing or a curse. Perhaps it is both.

Let me try to draw together some threads that I believe constitute the theme of this webinar.

It will be 50 years since the death of Chairman Mao this coming Wednesday. I was one of those strange teenagers whose bedroom wall, much I’m sure to my parents’ bemusement, was not decorated with posters of footballers or rock stars but rather of Mao.

So, I remember so well when I heard the news that he’d died. I’d just turned 18. It was the summer between finishing school and starting university and, as part of my holiday job, I was on my hands and knees washing a kitchen floor when the lunchtime news on the radio led with this story.

Such are the kind of memories this anniversary evokes for me.

But the passage of half a century should allow for at least the beginnings of an objective assessment of a person’s life, work and legacy.

And in this spirit, let me express a perhaps controversial view that no single person in history has ever made a greater contribution to the liberation of humanity as that made by Mao Zedong. Further, if that is the case, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that he is the greatest person to have ever lived.

In the brief time available let me try to sketch a pathway to that bold assertion.

First, regarding his style of work, Mao insisted on careful study and social investigation.

Slander over solidarity: the BBC reports a Himalayan disaster

The following article by Carlos Martinez examines the BBC’s coverage of the catastrophic glacier collapse of 26 August, which sent a wall of ice, rock, mud and water down the river valleys straddling the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet (Xizang) Autonomous Region, killing well over a thousand people.

Rather than report on the disaster itself, or on its underlying cause in the accelerating warming of the world’s highest mountain range, the BBC’s China correspondent chose to run a story alleging that Beijing was suppressing footage of the event – footage which, as Carlos points out, had been released by the Chinese port authorities at Gyirong and was circulating widely on Chinese platforms. A massive rescue operation, with the direct involvement of China’s top leadership, becomes a “muted response”; Communist Party members being asked to assist their neighbours becomes evidence of authoritarian anxiety.

The article also takes apart the BBC’s assertion that Tibet was “annexed” by Beijing in the 1950s – a formulation at odds even with the declared position of the British government, which abandoned the colonial-era doctrine of “suzerainty” in 2008.

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.

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.

Study shows Belt and Road Initiative cuts debt and corruption

A team at Nanjing University’s Centre for Asia-Pacific Development Studies has published what appears to be the most comprehensive statistical test yet attempted of the “debt trap diplomacy” thesis – examining 197 countries and regions over 2000 to 2023, including the 146 that have signed Belt and Road cooperation agreements. It found no evidence that participation raised financial vulnerability. Indeed, it found the opposite: the more Belt and Road infrastructure a country actually built, the further its debt burden fell.

The following article by Carlos Martinez sets out the study’s findings and the mechanism behind them – productive assets generating returns, widening the tax base and reducing the need to borrow simply to service previous borrowing – along with the associated gains the researchers identify in political stability, government effectiveness and the reduction of corruption. It notes that these conclusions are consistent with what Chatham House, Deborah Bräutigam of Johns Hopkins and the campaign group Debt Justice have found whenever they have examined the evidence.

For a decade, anyone following Western coverage of the China-initiated Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been fed the same story: that Beijing lends recklessly to poor countries, waits for them to default, and then seizes their assets. This notion of “debt trap diplomacy” has been repeated so often as to acquire the status of established fact.

A team from Nanjing University’s Centre for Asia-Pacific Development Studies, led by Professor Mao Weizhun, has now published in the peer-reviewed Quarterly Journal of International Politics what appears to be the most comprehensive statistical test of the thesis yet attempted. Reported by the South China Morning Post, the study examined data from 197 countries and regions over the period 2000 to 2023, covering the 146 countries that have signed Belt and Road cooperation agreements and the 135 where projects have actually been launched or completed.

The headline finding is unambiguous. Testing whether participation in the BRI raised debt risk – using indicators including government debt and fiscal capacity – the researchers found no evidence whatsoever that taking part in the initiative increased financial vulnerability. Indeed, they found the opposite.

The research team tracked countries across three distinct stages: signing up to BRI projects, beginning construction, and bringing completed projects into operation. At the first stage the effect on debt was slightly negative but statistically insignificant. Once construction was under way it became significant, and once the infrastructure was operating it was stronger still. In other words, the more Belt and Road infrastructure a country actually built, the further its debt burden fell. Mao Weizhun writes that “this parallel trend test on debt levels shows the fallacy of the ‘debt trap’ argument”.

How does the BRI reduce debt?

The mechanism is not particularly mysterious. The investment gives rise to productive assets – ports, railways, power networks, communications systems, industrial estates – and productive assets generate returns. Better logistics and energy supply raise industrial output, which in turn widens the tax base, allowing the debt to be serviced.

The study’s authors write that “large-scale infrastructure construction not only brings direct economic benefits to the countries taking part but also optimises their economic structures and strengthens their independent development capacity”. As that capacity grows, participating states “can make better use of domestic resources rather than relying on external borrowing to repay debts”.

Borrowing simply to service existing loans is precisely the pattern that has historically undermined developing economies. Borrowing to build a railway is not the same act as borrowing to service previous borrowing – and the latter is what a great deal of Global South sovereign debt actually finances.

The study also found a number of associated gains: improvements in political stability, in government effectiveness, and in reducing corruption. Public infrastructure, the researchers argue, goes beyond steel and concrete; it strengthens a state’s capacity to allocate resources, deliver public services and integrate remote regions. They describe the result as a “development-infrastructure-security” cycle, citing the China–Laos Railway, the Jakarta–Bandung high-speed line and the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor.

The researchers cite estimates that participating countries’ combined GDP rose by 39.6 percent in the five years after joining, with over half of that growth attributable to infrastructure improvements. The World Bank has estimated that Belt and Road infrastructure could deliver annual benefits worth 1.3 percent of global GDP – some $1.6 trillion – by 2030, with around 90 percent of the gains accruing to participating countries.

Consistent findings

Critics will point out that this is a study by Chinese academics in a Chinese journal. This is true. But its conclusions are entirely consistent with what Western researchers have found whenever they have troubled to examine the evidence.

Chatham House dismantled the thesis as long ago as 2020, noting that the BRI “is not geared towards advancing coherent geopolitical aims” and that “recipient countries (such as Sri Lanka and Malaysia) are not hapless victims, but actively shape outcomes within China’s development financing system”. Deborah Bräutigam of Johns Hopkins University, who runs a detailed empirical research programme on Chinese lending, has spent years documenting that the “debt trap” narrative does not survive contact with the data. Chinese lending to Africa is overwhelmingly infrastructure finance: some 40 percent has gone to power generation and transmission, and around 30 percent to transport, on a continent where more than 600 million people still have no reliable electricity.

Who is actually responsible for debt distress in the Global South? According to World Bank figures, Western multilateral institutions and commercial creditors between them hold close to three-quarters of Africa’s external debt. Research by the British campaign group Debt Justice found that African governments owe just 12 percent of their external debt to Chinese lenders, against 35 percent to Western private lenders – and that the private loans carry an average interest rate of 5 percent, compared with 2.7 percent on Chinese lending.

“Western leaders blame China for debt crises in Africa”, Debt Justice’s Tim Jones has said, “but this is a distraction. The truth is their own banks, asset managers and oil traders are far more responsible, but the G7 are letting them off the hook”. When the G20 established its debt service suspension initiative during the pandemic, China took part, deferring roughly $5.7 billion in debt service payments, representing 63 percent of total bilateral suspensions. Western private creditors did not participate.

The debt trap does exist. It has been laid over decades by Western banks, bondholders and the international financial institutions that discipline debtors on their behalf, and it works by lending at punitive rates for consumption and refinancing rather than for production – often accompanied by conditions of structural adjustment: privatisation, deregulation, liberalisation, and the sale of public assets.

The Belt and Road is something else entirely: a programme of South–South cooperation that builds the productive capacity by which countries might eventually escape that trap altogether. That, rather than genuine concern for the financial wellbeing of Zambia or Sri Lanka, is why it attracts such sustained hostility from the mainstream media.

China’s poverty alleviation: lessons to study and obstacles to global poverty reduction

Concluding his series of articles on his recent visit to China at the invitation of the International Department of the Communist Party of China (IDCPC), David Peat, Secretary of Friends of Socialist China Britain Committee, was requested to write a paper on the topic of China’s poverty reduction, and its impact globally, including any possible application to the writer’s home country and local conditions, in connection with the ‘Path to Modernisation: Takeaways from China’s Theory and Practice of Poverty Alleviation’ conference which took place in Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, in July 2026.

In his paper, David charts the world-historic achievement of China’s poverty alleviation and notes how Global South countries in particular are paying close attention and applying what lessons they deem appropriate for their national conditions from China’s experiences. The paper goes on to contrast this achievement to the resurgent and under-reported levels of poverty in the “developed” western countries. He emphasises that the primary global obstacle to achieving sustainable poverty alleviation in any country (Global South or North) remains US-led imperialism, and even the best-intentioned and best practice examples can be undermined or even reversed by US economic and military action. As such, Global South nations seeking lessons from China’s experience should also recognise that the foundation of its success has been built fundamentally on the basis of its own hard-won political and economic sovereignty. Though China was able to achieve this sovereignty through its successful revolution, that is not necessarily the only path for other countries to do likewise, and newly emerging forms of alternative global development infrastructure, such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), BRICS+, and others, can be successfully utilised, in collaboration with the demands of their own citizens, to forge new development paths, not dependent on (or subjugated by) the imperialist-dominated system.

The earlier articles in the series reported from Gansu, where poverty alleviation was examined in theory and practice, and from Ningxia, where the Global South gathered to study China’s ‘Long March’ to abolish absolute poverty.

Holding the line: Jiang Zemin at 100

Monday 17 August marks the centenary of the birth of Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989 to 2002 and President of the country from 1993 to 2003 – the leader of the People’s Republic whom much of the Western left finds it easiest to write off as a “capitalist roader”.

The following article argues that the charge rests on a false premise: that the realistic alternative available to China between 1989 and 2003 was some purer or more advanced form of socialism. It was not. Jiang took office six months before the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe fell, and two years before the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and the working assumption in most Western capitals was that China would be next.

The article weighs the real costs of the period – a Gini coefficient rising from around 0.32 to over 0.42, state enterprise employment falling from 77 million to 42 million, corruption and ideological decay – against what was achieved, and against what happened in Russia over the same decade, where economic output halved and male life expectancy collapsed to around 57. It also examines the admission of private entrepreneurs to the Party, the Theory of the Three Represents, and Jiang’s record of solidarity with Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam and Laos.

The following original article is by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez. It has been translated into Dutch by our friends at China Square.

Monday 17 August marks the centenary of the birth of Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989 to 2002 and President of the country from 1993 to 2003. Of all the leaders of the People’s Republic, he is perhaps the one that many on the Western left find it easiest, at least according to their own paradigm, to dismiss as a “capitalist roader” and revisionist.

Such labels are applied because Jiang presided over a period of extraordinarily rapid economic growth and integration into the global economy; the dismantling of the “iron rice bowl” of job security for life, steady income and public benefits; and because he allowed suitably qualified private entrepreneurs to join the Communist Party.

But the charge as usually made rests on the assumption that the realistic alternative available to China between 1989 and 2003 was some kind of pure or more advanced socialism. It was not. The alternatives on offer at that moment in history were rather more brutal, as we discuss below.

A revolutionary life

Jiang was born in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, in 1926, into a country under warlord rule and, before he reached his teens, under Japanese occupation of much of China. His uncle and adoptive father, Jiang Shangqing, died fighting Japan in 1939. Jiang took part in the anti-Japanese student movement, and joined the CPC in 1946 while studying electrical engineering – three years before liberation, at a time when Party membership under Kuomintang rule was an extremely risky business; in many instances a death sentence.

He then spent three decades as an industrial cadre rather than a politician. He organised the production of canned food for the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Korea. He trained at the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow in 1955, and also worked as an engineer in Romania for several years in the 1970s. He oversaw the design of China’s first domestically produced turbo-generator. He was Minister of the Electronics Industry, then mayor and Party secretary of Shanghai. He came to the leadership as an engineer who had spent his working life building things and making them work.

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.

Sunlight against the blockade: China and Cuba’s solar revolution

China has delivered a second consignment of 5,000 photovoltaic systems to Cuba, destined for rural communities, health centres, day nurseries and bank branches – the latest instalment in what has become one of the fastest energy transitions anywhere in the world. With Chinese equipment, finance and technical support, Cuba has installed around 1,000 MW of new solar capacity in two years, with 92 medium-sized parks due for completion by 2028, while Chinese solar exports to the island have risen from $3 million to $117 million in as many years. All of this is taking place against a grid pushed towards collapse by Washington’s energy siege, with available capacity at times barely a third of peak demand.

The following article by Carlos Martinez sets out why this amounts to considerably more than an infrastructure project: oil tankers can be intercepted, suppliers threatened and banks sanctioned, but sunlight cannot be blockaded.

China has delivered a second consignment of 5,000 photovoltaic systems to Cuba, destined for rural communities, health centres, day nurseries and bank branches. Receiving them, President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Cuba “deeply appreciates this gesture by the Chinese people and government, which adds to the efforts Cuba is making to change its energy mix, amid the genocidal blockade”.

The donation is a small part of what has become one of the fastest energy transitions anywhere in the world. Over the past two years, with Chinese equipment, financing and technical support, Cuba has installed around 1,000 MW of new photovoltaic capacity. This forms the first half of a programme to construct 92 medium-sized parks, each generating approximately 21.8 MW, with a combined capacity approaching 2,000 MW by 2028. Alongside this credit-financed programme, China is donating a further 120 MW through a network of smaller parks. Solar supplied roughly 10 percent of Cuba’s electricity over the course of 2025; during daylight hours its contribution is now considerably higher, at times approaching half of national generation around midday.

The scale of this expanding cooperation can be read in the trade figures. Chinese exports of solar equipment to Cuba came to $117 million in 2025, against just $3 million two years earlier. Havana furthermore has scrapped tariffs on photovoltaic systems, solar water heaters, wind turbines, biodigesters and renewable-powered air conditioning.

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.

DPRK’s solidarity with China and Cuba has socialism as the core

The following is the text of a speech given by Keith Bennett to a recent public meeting on the theme of ‘The Importance of Solidarity with the DPRK and its People in Today’s Global Situation’.

Keith concentrates his remarks on two aspects of this question. First, the recent developments in the comradely relations between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China, which Kim Jong Un stresses have socialism as their core, as illustrated by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s state visit to the DPRK in June 2026 and subsequently by Kim Jong Un’s greetings on the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China.

Second, Keith analyses a 1968 article written by DPRK founding leader Kim Il Sung marking the first anniversary of the death of Che Guevara, noting in particular its continuing relevance to understanding the vital need to defend the Cuban revolution and its relationship to the situation in Latin America as a whole.

A reply to Greg Godels on China’s road to socialism

Greg Godels has published a thoughtful response in ML Today to Carlos Martinez’s recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Godels argues that the exploitation of the many by the few remains a central driving force of the Chinese economy, and questions whether China’s market reforms and its billionaire class can be squared with a socialist trajectory.

In the article below, Carlos argues that the decisive Marxist question is not simply whether wage labour and surplus value exist, but which class holds state power and in whose interest the economic surplus is directed. On that test – the class nature of the state – China’s billionaires answer to the state rather than command it; its reforms were a conscious strategy to develop the productive forces and build the material basis for a more advanced socialism; and China provably does not participate in imperialist super-exploitation.

Greg Godels has written a considered response in ML Today to my recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Unlike much of what passes for left commentary on China, Godels writes as a comrade, not a Cold Warrior. He admires the Chinese revolution, insists that China’s fate must be decided by the Chinese people, and closes by affirming that, whatever its difficulties, “it is China’s road”. On all of that we agree. Where we part company is over a question that Godels, for all his fidelity to the classics of Marxism, never quite poses: which class holds state power?

State and revolution

Godels’s central charge is that the debate over China too rarely invokes “the exploitation of the many by the few”, and that when I ask for exploitation to be “contextualised”, I am really relativising and rationalising it. He is right that exploitation belongs at the centre of any Marxist analysis. But there is a second important category that is missing from his account entirely: the class nature of the state.

For Marx and Lenin alike, the question of whether a society is advancing towards socialism was never settled simply by cataloguing the presence or absence of wage labour and surplus value at the point of production. It was settled principally by asking which class holds power, and in whose interest the state directs the economic surplus. This is the whole point of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and of Lenin’s insistence, throughout the period of the New Economic Policy, that market mechanisms within a workers’ state are something categorically different from capitalism under a bourgeois state.

Under the NEP in the Soviet state, private capital, wage labour, rich peasants and market relations all flourished. Lenin did not conclude that the October Revolution had thereby been cancelled. He concluded that the proletarian state would make use of capitalist forms, on its own terms and under its own control, in order to build the material foundations of socialism.

Chinese AI models achieve Mythos-level performance in cybersecurity benchmark

The following original contribution for Friends of Socialist China is by İbrahim Can Eraslan, a Turkish socialist and student of Chinese Law and Governance at Tongji University in Shanghai. He examines a striking development in the global technology race: the emergence of Chinese artificial intelligence systems that now rival the most advanced Western models in the strategically sensitive field of cybersecurity – achieved, remarkably, under conditions of escalating US technological warfare.

Eraslan shows how Washington’s campaign of export controls and suppression is producing the opposite of its intended effect. By restricting access to the United States’ AI systems – even shutting down Anthropic’s frontier models worldwide at three days’ notice – the US is driving governments and enterprises across the Global South towards cheaper, open-weight Chinese alternatives that cannot be embargoed or switched off by executive order. In closing the gap through algorithmic ingenuity and open development rather than raw computing power, he argues, China’s socialist system is once again outcompeting monopoly capitalism in the technologies that will define the twenty-first century.

Around the world, China is viewed more positively than the United States

A newly published survey by the Pew Research Center – covering more than 42,000 people across 36 countries – has found that China is now viewed more positively than the United States in most of the countries polled, with more people worldwide expressing confidence in Xi Jinping than in Donald Trump. It is a striking measure of how far Washington’s global standing has fallen.

In the following article, Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, examines what lies behind this historic shift. He argues that the single most important factor is the war on Gaza – a genocide watched in real time by a global public that has also seen the governments of North America and Western Europe arm, finance and shield it, all while lecturing the world about a “rules-based order”. The same collapse of credibility, he notes, has quietly buried the “Uyghur genocide” narrative, and has been compounded by the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.

Manufactured outrage: the truth about China’s ethnic unity law

The following article by Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, responds to the coordinated storm of condemnation that greeted the entry into force on 1 July of China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress – a campaign that seeks to revive the discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative and extend it to Xizang (Tibet) and beyond.

Carlos examines what the law actually says, and contrasts China’s record on minority rights – rising life expectancy, the elimination of absolute poverty, and the protection and flourishing of minority languages – with the treatment of minority communities in the West.

He traces the long history of Western sponsorship of separatism in China, from the CIA’s two-decade Tibetan programme to the National Endowment for Democracy’s funding of exile groups today, and locates the current hysteria in the failure of the propaganda war: as polling shows steadily warming attitudes towards China, particularly among the young, the ideologues of the New Cold War are increasingly desperate to re-toxify China’s image. What China is building is strength through unity in diversity; what its adversaries want to see is disunity and disintegration.

NB. This article has been translated into Dutch by our friends at China Square.

On 1 July, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress came into force – the country’s first comprehensive national law on ethnic affairs, adopted by the National People’s Congress in March.

Within days, a remarkably well-coordinated storm of condemnation had been whipped up: denunciations from Washington and Brussels, a resolution in the European Parliament, and a wave of media coverage announcing that China had ordered its minorities to “assimilate”. The thoroughly discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative is being dusted off and relaunched – this time with Xizang (Tibet) added to the charge sheet for good measure.

What does the law actually say? It stipulates that upholding national unity and ethnic solidarity is the responsibility of all Chinese citizens, and it prohibits discrimination and suppression against any ethnic group. It strongly re-affirms the right of all peoples to use and develop their own spoken and written languages. It directs central and local government to strengthen infrastructure, industry, public services and environmental protection in minority regions, and to ensure that no ethnic group is left behind in China’s modernisation.

As such, it continues a long-standing programme of what would be called, in Western terminology, affirmative action: preferential university admissions for minority students, bilingual education, protected minority-language broadcasting, and formal autonomy arrangements from Inner Mongolia to Yunnan – to which one might add that China’s national minorities were exempt from the one-child policy throughout its existence. Altogether, strange provisions indeed for a programme of persecution.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port and the complete collapse of the “debt trap” narrative

For years, Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port was the textbook example of what Western politicians called Chinese “debt-trap diplomacy” – the claim that Beijing lures poor countries into unpayable loans and then seizes their strategic infrastructure. In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez shows how comprehensively that story has collapsed.

Drawing on studies by Chatham House, the Johns Hopkins economist Deborah Bräutigam and Sri Lankan officials themselves, Carlos sets out the facts: the port was a Sri Lankan initiative, not a Chinese one; Washington and Delhi were asked to fund it and declined; and Chinese loans made up just 9 percent of Sri Lanka’s government debt. As the country’s then ports minister put it, “We thank China for arranging this investor to save us from the debt trap.” Sri Lanka’s debt crisis “was made on Wall Street, not in Beijing.”

Far from a predatory white elephant, Hambantota has become one of the fastest-growing trans-shipment hubs in the Indian Ocean, drawing the largest foreign investment in Sri Lankan history. The real debt trap, the article argues, is sprung by the IMF, the World Bank and Western bond markets – and the campaign against the Belt and Road is “a blatant act of self-projection.”

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.

China’s courts draw a line in the sand: AI cannot be an excuse to fire workers

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of work at breakneck speed, and almost everywhere the same question is being asked: who pays the price when a machine can do your job? Across much of the capitalist world the answer has been brutally simple – the worker does. In China, the courts are giving a very different answer.

In this detailed original analysis for Friends of Socialist China, İbrahim Can Eraslan examines a landmark ruling handed down by the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court on the eve of International Workers’ Day 2026, which found that a technology company had unlawfully dismissed an employee after replacing his role with AI. Far from being an isolated case, Eraslan shows how it builds on a consistent and growing body of jurisprudence in Beijing, Guangzhou and beyond, all resting on a single principle: that voluntary AI adoption is a business decision, and that companies which automate must therefore shoulder the corresponding social responsibilities rather than dumping the costs onto their workforce.

Crucially, Eraslan situates these rulings within China’s wider policy architecture – from the 15th Five-Year Plan’s commitment to assessing AI’s employment effects, to proposals for compulsory employment impact assessments before large-scale AI deployment – and contrasts this socialist, employment-first approach with the ‘employment at will’ doctrine of the United States and the patchwork protections of the European Union. The result, he argues, is one of the first coherent national legal frameworks anywhere in the world for managing AI-driven job displacement: not Luddism, but a principled insistence that the fruits of technological progress be shared and that its costs not be socialised onto working people.

He concludes:

China’s courts have drawn a line in the sand. AI is welcome. But AI cannot be an excuse to fire workers. The cost of progress must be shared, and the burden must not fall on those who can least afford to bear it. In a world where capital everywhere is racing to automate labor out of existence, China’s socialist legal system is saying: not so fast.