Original analysis Archives - Friends of Socialist China

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.

A familiar slander: Counterpunch and the recycling of anti-China talking points

In a recent article for Counterpunch, Joshua Frank accuses China of “green economic imperialism” in Africa and Latin America – alleging that Chinese investment in critical minerals and renewable supply chains amounts to a new form of colonial plunder. The piece appeared just days after French President Emmanuel Macron, at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, condemned China for operating with a “predatory logic” across the continent.

In the following article, our co-editor Carlos Martinez responds. He shows that Frank’s case rests on a series of substantive misrepresentations – about China’s energy transition, its mining operations, its lending practices, and the meaning of imperialism itself. Whatever Frank’s intentions, the function of his piece is to manufacture left-wing consent for the US-led New Cold War on China.

In a recent article for Counterpunch, Joshua Frank revives a now-familiar accusation: that China is engaged in “green economic imperialism” in the Global South, plundering critical minerals to fuel its renewable-energy industries while propping up dependent regimes through resource-backed loans. Chinese engagement with the Global South, Frank concludes, is “economic imperialism (which is very much rooted in colonial policies)”.

This is a remarkably timely reproduction of the argument made by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi the previous week. Macron accused China of operating with a “predatory logic” across Africa and of “creating dependencies” by insisting that critical mineral processing takes place on Chinese soil.

That should give pause. As observed on this website, Macron made his Nairobi remarks at a summit explicitly designed to “rebuild French influence in Africa” after France’s humiliating expulsion from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. He spoke as the head of a former colonial power controlling a currency, the CFA franc, which is used to extract foreign-exchange reserves from 14 African states into a French Treasury account. When the head of an actually-existing neocolonial entity denounces Chinese “predatory logic”, it’s not a bad idea for leftists to do their due diligence.

The coal canard

Frank opens by noting that China is “still building coal-fired power plants at a faster pace than any other country” and that “air pollution in China kills 2 million a year”. Both claims are substantively misleading.

A successful visit to Beijing: is the US ruling class starting to face reality?

In the following article, our co-editor Carlos Martinez assesses Donald Trump’s 13-15 May state visit to China, arguing that the positive mood music between Trump and Xi Jinping reflects a (slowly) growing understanding in US policy circles that a hawkish anti-China strategy simply is not working. The semiconductor war has accelerated Chinese self-sufficiency rather than slowed it; Trump’s 145 percent tariffs collapsed within days of Beijing tightening rare-earth export controls; and the US-Israeli criminal war on Iran has strengthened, rather than weakened, the multipolar trajectory.

The deeper meaning of this summit is that the US ruling class is having to, very reluctantly, start to come to terms with the world as it actually is. It does not “hold the cards”. As Xi put it at the Great Hall of the People, “the world is big enough to accommodate both countries, and one country’s success is an opportunity for the other.” The Chinese have been consistently saying this for years. The difference now is that, as a growing number of US analysts are admitting that they’re right: win-win cooperation between major powers is possible; what isn’t possible is the indefinite extension of unipolar US hegemony.

NB. An expanded version of this article, including analysis of Vladimir Putin’s visit a few days later, has been published in Beijing Review.

Donald Trump’s 13-15 May state visit to China has produced a raft of headlines that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. “This time, Trump and Xi meet as equals”, declared The Times. The White House spoke of a “constructive relationship of strategic stability”.

A delegation of CEOs – Nvidia’s Jensen Huang (who joined at the last minute), Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook and more – accompanied the president to Beijing, signalling that the decoupling project has, at least for the moment, run its course. Trump publicly defended the right of half a million Chinese students to attend US universities. He called Xi a “great leader” and said “the relationship is a very strong one”. The Times columnist Gerard Baker, who has spent years cheerleading for the China hawks, conceded that “the unipolar moment was fleeting” and that “there are two true superpowers”.

This is a remarkable shift. Trump has cast himself as a China hawk since at least his 2016 campaign. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country”, he infamously told a rally in Indiana. He pledged to label China a currency manipulator on day one, accused Beijing of “stealing our jobs” and made tariffs on Chinese goods a centrepiece of his platform. Once in office, he initiated the trade war, banned Huawei from US 5G networks, expelled Chinese journalists, signed bipartisan legislation funnelling weapons to Taiwan, and oversaw the 2017 National Security Strategy that designated China as a “strategic competitor”.

The message of the Victory Day parade: justice will prevail, peace will prevail and the people will prevail

In the following report, our co-editor Keith Bennett reflects on witnessing the grand parade in Beijing marking the 80th anniversary of China’s victory in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the Global Anti-Fascist War.

Keith notes that the parade impressively showcased advanced military technology—ranging from hypersonic missiles and drones to nuclear-capable systems—demonstrating China’s defensive strength. Yet, the article stresses, China’s military power is not for domination but to safeguard the Chinese people and contribute to world peace.

President Xi’s address summed up the principal lesson of China’s victory: that justice will prevail, peace will prevail and the people will prevail. Keith observes:

That this vision enjoys ever greater support was shown by the presence of more than two dozen heads of state and government, along with numerous other dignitaries, the majority of them from the Global South, or Global Majority. This underlined, as did the largest ever gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation just two days previously, that the days when a handful of colonialist, imperialist or hegemonist powers could dominate world affairs have gone forever. If some countries choose to stay away from or seek to undermine this inexorable multipolar dynamic it will only precipitate their decline.

The article was also published by China Today and Morning Star, and is quoted extensively in China Daily.

To be able to witness the grand military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War was an unforgettable experience.

As President Xi pointed out, this was the first complete victory won by the Chinese people in their struggle against foreign aggression and also made a major contribution to the triumph of the people of the world against fascism.

China had promised to show the world the advances in its defensive capabilities. And with an array of new equipment displayed for the first time, including nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles; a land, sea and air nuclear triad; all-weather hypersonic missiles; reconnaissance and strike drones; unmanned ship-based helicopters; advanced electronic counter-measure equipment; cyberspace warfare equipment; unmanned aerial vehicles; hypersonic anti-ship missiles; long range artillery and new generation tanks, among others, it certainly didn’t disappoint on that front.

But that was not all that left a lasting impression. Unlike some other countries, China’s military might is not there to dominate others, not to bully, oppress, occupy or exploit, but solely to provide a secure basis, a great wall of iron and steel, for the Chinese people to live a peaceful and happy life and to help secure, preserve and defend world peace.

In stark contrast to those who grotesquely speak of other countries being “on the menu”, President Xi again pledged his country to peaceful development. Only when nations across the world treat each other as equals and mutually support one another, he pointed out, can the root cause of war be eliminated, and can we prevent historical tragedies from recurring, by building a community of shared future for humanity.

The lesson of the great victory, he pointed out, was that justice will prevail, peace will prevail and the people will prevail.

That this vision enjoys ever greater support was shown by the presence of more than two dozen heads of state and government, along with numerous other dignitaries, the majority of them from the Global South, or Global Majority. This underlined, as did the largest ever gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation just two days previously, that the days when a handful of colonialist, imperialist or hegemonist powers could dominate world affairs have gone forever. If some countries choose to stay away from or seek to undermine this inexorable multipolar dynamic it will only precipitate their decline.

The western media may express consternation, whether real or feigned, at the foregrounding of Russian President Vladimir Putin and DPRK leader Kim Jong Un among the honoured foreign guests. They choose to overlook the undeniable fact that it was the peoples of China and the Soviet Union who made the greatest national sacrifice to rid the world of fascist barbarism and save human civilisation. And they equally choose to overlook that Kim Jong Un’s own grandfather fought shoulder-to-shoulder with his Chinese comrades-in-arms against the Japanese aggressors in northeast China. All this found poignant expression as the three leaders greeted war veterans together at the start of the ceremony.

Many other things touched me today. The culmination featuring the release of 80,000 doves and 80,000 multicoloured balloons, reminding us that everything China does is for the sake of peace.

The pride, passion and patriotism with which service men and women and civilians alike joined in singing the national anthem and the Ode to the Motherland.

As you would expect for an event of this scale, organisation was meticulous and logistics were complex but flawless. Security was, of course, necessarily tight. But unlike in any capitalist country none of the security personnel carried arms. And whilst they were there to assist people as much as anything else, they were by far outnumbered by the kind, self-confident and enthusiastic young women and men volunteers one encountered every few steps, on hand to offer whatever help anyone might need. Every one of them a credit to socialist China and a guarantee of its bright future. Every one of them able to realise their dreams thanks to the heroes and martyrs who laid down their lives 80 years ago.

From containment to confrontation, from cold to hot: the US drive to war on China

In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez argues that the US-led New Cold War against China is failing. Despite extensive efforts to contain China’s rise – through tariffs, sanctions, and attempts at economic decoupling – China continues to grow economically and technologically. It now leads globally in multiple areas including renewable energy, electric vehicles, and advanced manufacturing. Its global reach is expanding, as evidenced by its central role in BRICS, the Belt and Road Initiative, and its status as the top trading partner for three-quarters of the world’s countries.

The West’s tariffs and sanctions have clearly backfired, invigorating China’s domestic industries rather than weakening them.

However, Carlos warns that the failure of “cold” methods could well provoke a shift toward direct military confrontation. The article identifies Taiwan as the most likely flashpoint, with the US escalating arms sales to the island and increasing its military deployments in the region. In the last two decades, successive US administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have undermined the One China policy and fanned separatist sentiment, in defiance of international law.

Military preparations, including AUKUS, the rearmament of Japan, and new US bases in the Philippines, reflect a growing bipartisan consensus in Washington in favour of war planning.

This all adds up to accelerating preparations for war with China – a war with the objective of dismantling Chinese socialism, establishing a comprador regime (or set of regimes), privatising China’s economy, rolling back the extraordinary advances of the Chinese working class and peasantry, and replacing common prosperity with common destitution. Needless to say, this would be disastrous not just for the Chinese people but for the entire global working class.

Carlos calls for resolute opposition to this dangerous escalation.

The New Cold War is not working

The US-led ‘cold’ war against China is manifestly failing in its objectives of suppressing China’s rise and weakening its global influence.

China’s economy continues to grow steadily. In purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, it is by now the largest in the world. Its mobilisation of extraordinary resources to break out of underdevelopment and become a science and technology superpower appears to be paying substantial dividends, with the country establishing a clear lead globally in renewable energy, electric vehicles, telecommunications, advanced manufacturing, infrastructure construction and more. It is by far the global leader in poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Sanctions on semiconductor exports have not slowed down China’s progress in computing, and indeed have had an enzymatic effect on its domestic chip industry. The spectacular success of DeepSeek’s open-source R1 large language model indicates that the US can no longer take its leadership in the digital realm for granted.

Meanwhile, the West’s attempts to ‘decouple’ from China have yielded precious little fruit. While a handful of imperialist countries have promised to remove Huawei from their network infrastructure, and while sanctions on Chinese electric vehicles mean that consumers in the West have to pay obscene sums for inferior quality cars, China’s integration and mutually-beneficial cooperation with the world has continued to expand. China is the largest trading partner of approximately two-thirds of the world’s countries. Over 150 states are signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative. China lies at the core of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

Trump’s tariffs were meant to coerce China into accepting the US’s trade terms and to force other countries to unambiguously join Washington’s economic and geopolitical ‘camp’, thereby alienating China. Nothing of the sort has taken place. Even the normally supine European Union has denounced the tariffs and signalled its intention to expand trade with China.

In summary, the Project for a New American Century is not going well. Zbigniew Brzezinski famously wrote in his The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997) that “the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.” Precisely such an anti-hegemonic coalition exists, and is uniting the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific in a project of building a multipolar future, thereby posing an existential challenge to the so-called ‘rules-based international order’ based on the principles of unilateralism, war, destabilisation, coercion and unequal exchange.

Trump’s tariffs and the New Cold War on China

The article below is based on a speech by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez to a webinar held by the Black Liberation Alliance on the subject of ‘Trump’s Tariff Wars on the Global South and the New Cold War’, held on 8 May 2025.

Carlos positions the tariff war within the broader US-led New Cold War on China. The tariffs are essentially “a continuation and a deepening of Obama’s so-called Pivot to Asia, designed by Hillary Clinton and first announced in 2011”.

The Trump administration’s justifications for its tariff war – that it will result in re-industrialisation of the US and increase in income – are patent nonsense. “In fact, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent stated openly last month that the objective for the tariffs is to persuade Japan, South Korea and India to participate in a ‘grand encirclement’ strategy to isolate and weaken China.”

Carlos writes that “the US is seeking to punish China for its success in building a modern economy, for developing its sovereignty, and for its refusal to bow down to US hegemony… China’s rise disrupts the whole imperialist system. It gets in the way of the relationship the US wants to have with the rest of the world, whereby it can design the global economic and financial system in its own interests.”

The article observes that the tariff war has no chance of being successful: “The US ruling class wants to isolate China, but actually it will end up isolating itself.” However, with the failure of the tariff war comes the possibility of further dangerous developments:

The obvious concern following on from that is that US imperialism’s next weapon against China may be not be a metaphorical one; that the New Cold War will turn hot. Anti-war movements in the West need to be highly vigilant on that score.

The other speakers on the panel were Radhika Desai (International Manifesto Group), Margaret Kimberley (Black Agenda Report) and Myriam Kane (Black Liberation Alliance).

The first thing to say about the Trump administration’s tariff war is that it is primarily designed to weaken, undermine and isolate the People’s Republic of China.

It’s part of a broader program of “decoupling” from China and a broader New Cold War on China – a system of hybrid warfare incorporating economic measures, diplomatic measures and propaganda measures, along with a significant military component: the deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops to the Pacific region; the US military bases in the Philippines, Guam, Okinawa, Japan, South Korea, Australia; the deployment of sophisticated weapons systems to the region; and the various attempts to create some sort of Asian NATO.

Friendship between China and Ireland rooted in history and culture

The following is a brief commentary written by our co-editor Keith Bennett following the recent visit to Ireland by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in which he draws attention to the long history of friendly relations between the peoples of Ireland and China, rooted in shared experiences of struggling for national liberation, economic ties, culture and sports.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently reaffirmed his country’s strong commitment to friendship with Ireland, saying that Beijing is committed to enhancing mutually beneficial cooperation with Dublin so as to achieve shared development and prosperity.

Wang made these remarks at a February 17 meeting with Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Michael Martin. Although Ireland is a small country, it evidently enjoys an important place in Chinese diplomacy. Wang’s visit came just 13 months after that by Premier Li Qiang, which marked 45 years of bilateral diplomatic relations.

With its welcoming attitude to foreign investment, a number of Chinese companies have chosen Ireland for their European headquarters. They include TikTok, Huawei, Temu and Shein. As Wang observed, relations with Ireland have developed in tandem with China’s reform and opening up. In 1980, late President Jiang Zemin, then holding vice-ministerial rank, took part in a three-week training program in the Shannon free trade zone. China’s first special economic zone, in Shenzhen, was established that same year.

However, the friendship between the Chinese and Irish peoples is also underpinned by their common history of struggling against foreign aggression and occupation and to achieve national liberation and reunification.

During his stay in Europe, of the fifty-seven articles that China’s future Premier Zhou Enlai wrote between 1921-22 for the progressive newspaper Yi Shibao, a number were on the brutality of British attempts to suppress the Irish war of independence.

From Japan, Guo Moruo, subsequently famous for his poetic dialogue with Mao Zedong, had followed the 1920 hunger strike of the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney in south London’s Brixton prison with four poems, later included in his ‘Selected Poems from The Goddesses’.

Indeed, culture has played a significant part in the people-to-people friendship between China and Ireland.

In 1890, the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, whose own works were first translated into Chinese in 1909, wrote a review of the first complete translation into English of Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou), the Daoist scholar from the Warring States period (4^th century BCE). In Zhuangzi, Wilde is said to have discovered a kindred spirit, one whose ideas resonate in his own only explicitly political essay, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’.

During his December 2014 state visit to China, Irish President Michael D. Higgins, in a speech delivered at the former Shanghai residence of Sun Yat Sen, the leader of China’s 1911 democratic revolution, and his wife Song Qingling, later the Honorary President of the People’s Republic of China, recalled the 1933 visit to the same house of the great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw:

“Today’s gathering… is not just an opportunity to recall the seminal role played by these three figures in the history of Ireland and China. Commemorating Shaw’s encounter with Song Qingling and several other Chinese writers and intellectuals [who included Lu Xun] also provides a valuable occasion to celebrate and assert, together, the value and abiding importance of international exchanges of ideas.”

Describing Shaw as “an essayist and polemicist, a free-thinker and a stout defender of the rights of the working classes and the marginalised,” President Higgins added that his “visit to Shanghai coincided with an era of great turbulence globally – a period when foreign powers were pushing rival claims onto China, as the Chinese people struggled to assert national sovereignty and define both an appropriate form of government and a new model of society for themselves.

“As a Fabian, Shaw was undoubtedly alive to the possibilities of a wider socialist awakening in China. As an Irishman, he would have been sensitive to the Chinese calls for national sovereignty. At the same time, he was mindful not to be prescriptive in his conversation with his Chinese counterparts… In the message he addressed to the Chinese people on the occasion of his visit, Shaw thus wrote:

“‘It is not for me, belonging as I do to a quarter of the globe which is mismanaging its affairs in a ruinous fashion to pretend to advise an ancient people striving to set its house in order.’”

Words which surely have lost none of their contemporary resonance.

The following day, speaking at Fudan University, Higgins noted that Marco Polo’s chronicles of his adventures in China had been translated into the Irish language within a century and around 150 years before an English translation. And although diplomatic relations were not established until 1979: “Ireland was one of a small number of Western countries who, between 1957 and 1971, was anxious to support the process which led to the representation of the People’s Republic of China at the United Nations… In 1971, Ireland therefore supported the People’s Republic of China’s recognition and admission to the UN.”

The build up to the establishment of diplomatic relations saw an intensification of people-to-people ties in which sport also played a significant part.

At his reception to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, then Chinese Ambassador to Ireland He Xiangdong gave a special welcome to Kevin Carey, Patrick Dwyer, John McGrath, Norman Plunkett, Brian Purcell and Martin Moran, describing them as among the earliest Irish ” envoys” to the new China. In 1976, three years before the establishment of diplomatic relations, together with their teammates of the University College Dublin (UCD) football team, they had paid a three-week visit to six cities in China and had “shared their experiences in Irish newspapers, opening a window for the Irish people at that time to know something about China.”

On his February 2012 visit to Ireland, Xi Jinping, then Vice-President of China, displayed his skills at both Gaelic football and hurling at Dublin’s Croke Park. The home to Ireland’s Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), Croke Park is also a hallowed place in the Irish people’s struggle for independence, being the scene of the November 21, 1920 ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of 13 spectators and one player by paramilitary police.

Xi Jinping’s passion for sport, and particularly his respect for Ireland’s indigenous games, made a tremendous impression on people in Ireland (although in the British media it was generally misreported as soccer), and years later keen observers of his New Year message noted the photo of his kicking off displayed in his office. It remains a powerful and touching symbol of the deep-rooted friendship and mutual respect between the peoples of China and Ireland – one that has the potential to make their bilateral relationship a model for those between countries of different sizes and with different social systems.

The US seeks to reverse China’s progress and bring it to heel

The International Manifesto Group (IMG) organised a webinar on ‘Trump’s Presidency and the Prospects for Peace in 2025’ on Sunday 19 January, the day before the US presidential inauguration.

The speakers were:

Ramzy Baroud (Palestine Chronicle)
Jacquie Luqman (Black Alliance for Peace)
Andrew Murray (Stop the War Coalition)
Gabriel Rockhill (Critical Theory Workshop)
Keith Bennett (Friends of Socialist China); and
Sara Flounders (International Action Center)

The event was moderated and introduced by Radhika Desai on behalf of the IMG and was also sponsored and supported by Friends of Socialist China, Palestine Chronicle, Critical Theory Workshop and the International Action Center.

Building for the event, the IMG wrote: “Given that the US is usually the prime instigator of our world’s conflicts and given that Trump sometimes spoke on the campaign trail about ending at least some of them, we ask what prospects the incoming Trump administration offers for peace. Will Trump’s second term be more or less aggressive than his first? Will he honour his campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine? Will he double down on his enthusiastic support for Israeli genocide? Will he escalate the New Cold War on China or attempt another ‘deal’? Will opportunities for peace in Korea and Iran be seized or squandered? What to make of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric in relation to Central America? How will the new administration affect humanity’s trajectory towards peace and multipolarity?”

Keith’s contribution focused on China and Korea and we reproduce his remarks below. Videos of all the contributions can be viewed on the IMG’s YouTube channel.

Meeting on the theme of Trump’s Presidency and the Prospects for Peace in 2025, it is natural we look especially at the war raging in Ukraine for nearly three years and at the situation in West Asia, as a tentative ceasefire emerges after more than 15 months of unrelenting genocide in Gaza. With so many thousands of lives being lost is it self-indulgence or overreach to also turn our attention to the Asia Pacific region?

But today, no bilateral relationship is more important, more strategic and more fraught with dangers of global conflict than that between the United States and China.

Faced with the peaceful rise of China, a rise unparalleled in human history, it has essentially become a consensus among the otherwise contending wings of the US ruling class that the preservation of US global hegemony necessitates taking China as Washington’s principal adversary. From Greenland to the South Pacific. And from semiconductors to social media.

As with Cold War One and the Soviet Union, the US seeks to reverse China’s progress and, at best, bring it to heel, through a combination of a debilitating arms race, ideological subversion and economic and technological strangulation. A key difference is that not only has China drawn lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whereas the USA and the USSR were essentially economically insulated from one another, China has spent the best part of half a century integrating itself into the global economy, creating such facts on the ground in the process as ever more complex global supply chains, and with China accounting for some 11% of US foreign trade.

So, what does Trump’s return mean for China/US relations?

First, Trump revels in his role as Disruptor-in-Chief, so the first thing we should expect is the unexpected. Certainly, if he carries through on even a fraction of his recent threats regarding tariffs, not only will China face an economic challenge. The entire global economy, in a parlous enough state as it is, and not least the US economy itself, will be plunged into crisis.

But overall, there seems little reason to anticipate a fundamental change of direction. When Biden assumed the presidency, many had hopes for a return to a more rational and constructive China policy in Washington. This did not materialise. Far from reversing Trump’s anti-China measures, the Biden administration ratcheted them up substantially, especially in terms of trying to restrict China’s access to computer chips and other advanced technology.

To the extent there was change under Biden, it came essentially in two areas:

• His administration largely eschewed the openly racist rhetoric of Trump (kung flu, Chinese virus, etc.), which undoubtedly made life somewhat more tolerable for many Chinese and other Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.

• Whereas Trump was an ‘equal opportunities bully’ when it came to insulting and threatening allies and adversaries alike, Biden’s team worked hard, and with a considerable degree of success, to reinforce cohesion in NATO, get the EU onside, and reinvigorate and reinforce old alliances, such as those with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, all with a view to confronting China, along with Russia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and other states in Washington’s crosshairs.

So, even if Trump ups the ante with China, it will not break the essential continuum established by Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton with their 2011 ‘pivot to Asia’.

Xi Jinping visit to Peru and Brazil strengthens pivotal China-Latin America relationship

In the following article, commissioned by China Daily, Carlos Martinez provides a brief overview of Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Latin America, where he attended the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Lima, paid a state visit to Peru, attended the G20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and paid a state visit to Brazil.

Carlos highlights the significance of the newly-inaugurated Chancay Port, which is set to provide enormous economic benefit not only to Peru but all the countries of the region, and which will substantially strengthen Latin American integration and trans-Pacific trade relationships.

Carlos contrasts the mutually-beneficial relationship between China and Latin America – and indeed the Global South more generally – with that between the US and Latin America, the US’s supposed “back yard”. China’s approach of respect for sovereignty, support for development, and non-interference in other countries’ affairs “stands in stark contrast to the neoliberal hegemony of the ‘Washington Consensus’, with its wars, destabilisation, unilateral sanctions, economic coercion, blackmail, tariffs, nuclear bullying, military alliances and overseas military bases.”

A version of this article is expected to appear in China Daily Global Edition in the coming days.

Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Lima, Peru, on 14 November to attend the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting and to pay a state visit at the invitation of Peruvian President Peru Dina Boluarte Zegarra.

While in Peru, Xi participated by video link in the opening of the Chancay Port, about 48 miles north of Lima. Chancay is a deep-water port with 15 berths, capable of accommodating some of the world’s largest ships. A shared project of China and Peru, built as part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), it will serve as a crucial gateway linking Latin America and Asia, as well as promoting Latin American economic integration. Furthermore, it is Latin America’s first smart, green, low-carbon port, featuring advanced technologies such as automated cranes and electric driverless trucks.

With the opening of the port, average transportation time from South America to the Asian market will be reduced from 35 to 25 days. The Chancay Port will be a major boost for the regional economy, will create vast numbers of jobs, and will help to reduce poverty and inequality. In Peru alone, the port is expected to generate an additional 4.5 billion US dollars of revenue – just under 2 percent of the country’s GDP – and to create thousands of jobs.

Given that Peru shares borders with Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia, the port will serve as the starting point of a land-sea corridor between China and Latin America, giving rise to a dramatic increase in trade, investment, cooperation and friendship.

On 17 November, President Xi travelled from Peru to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to attend the 19th G20 Summit and to pay a state visit at the invitation of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Particularly under the Workers Party (PT) governments of Lula and Dilma Rousseff, China-Brazil relations have gone from strength to strength in recent years. China has been Brazil’s largest trading partner for the last 15 years, and is a major investor in Brazilian industry and agriculture. Furthermore, Brazil is the largest supplier of agricultural imports to China.

At the conclusion of their bilateral meeting on 20 November, Presidents Xi and Lula announced that China Brazil ties would be elevated to a “community with a shared future for a more just world and a more sustainable planet”. Furthermore, the two sides will cooperate closely to align Brazil’s development strategy with the BRI.

Far from treating Brazil simply as a source of primary goods, China is increasingly cooperating with the Latin American giant on green energy, digital innovation, economic diversification, advanced infrastructure and industrial modernisation.

Unlike the West, which has always jealously guarded its technological supremacy, China’s vision of a global community of shared future involves encouraging sustainable development and modernisation throughout the Global South. With China’s support, the countries of Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific are starting to break the chains of underdevelopment that were imposed by the colonial and imperialist powers.

Aside from the growing economic relationship, Xi Jinping wrote in a signed article in Brazilian media that “China and Brazil, embracing our roles and responsibilities as major countries, have contributed to a multipolar world, promoted greater democracy in international relations, and injected positive energy into global peace and stability”.

China and Brazil have taken the lead in trying to reach a political settlement of the Ukraine crisis and are aligned on attempting to bring about an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Both countries are pursuing sustainable development and modernisation, and both support a fair globalisation characterised by equality and common prosperity. In short, this is a relationship that is not only of great benefit to the two countries, but to the world as a whole.

In his speech at the G20 Summit, President Xi made a powerful call to “see the world as one community with a shared future, and shoulder our responsibility for history, take historical initiative and move history forward”. He insisted on the crucial importance of addressing global inequality, of supporting developing countries to achieve modernisation and pursue sustainable development, of supporting developing countries to adopt and integrate digital technologies, and of cooperating globally to tackle the environmental crisis.

The speech resonated loudly with the peoples of the Global South in particular. Xi’s words were a clear reiteration of China’s global vision of peace and common prosperity – which stands in stark contrast to the neoliberal hegemony of the ‘Washington Consensus’, with its wars, destabilisation, unilateral sanctions, economic coercion, blackmail, tariffs, nuclear bullying, military alliances and overseas military bases.

As the great Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro wrote in 2004, “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries … an important element of balance, progress and safeguarding of world peace and stability”.

For that reason, the US is desperate to throw a spanner in the works; to disrupt the growing ties between China and Latin America, and between China and the Global South more generally. In October, Biden’s trade representative Katherine Tai said she “would encourage our friends in Brazil to look at the risks” of closer ties to China, hinting that the US would punish such unacceptable behaviour.

Shortly after the inauguration of the Chancay Port, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken turned up in Peru to announce a deal for 6 billion dollars’ worth of decades-old trains – presumably an unfortunate attempt to show that the US still has something to offer. A report in South China Morning Post remarked: “as Chinese President Xi Jinping inaugurated the US$3.5 billion Chancay port in Peru this month that promises to jump-start exports in the region and create a gateway to China, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken oversaw a ceremony just a few miles away to give US$6 million in 1980s diesel locomotives to the Andean nation… One was about the future, the other about the past.”

Donald Trump meanwhile is packing his cabinet with both China hawks and Latin America hawks, and will likely be even more aggressive in pressuring countries to toe the US line on China.

Such tactics will not work. The Financial Times reported on 20 November that “Joe Biden is losing to Xi Jinping in battle for Latin America”, noting that China is meeting the region’s enormous need for infrastructure investment.

The days of the Monroe Doctrine – enshrining the entire American super-continent as the US’s “sphere of influence” – are over. The nations of Latin America are asserting their sovereignty and are joining hands with the peoples of the world to reject hegemony and to create a future of global peace and common prosperity.

Confronting the great genocide illusion: Gaza and Xinjiang

The following essay by Russel Harland (trade unionist and Friends of Socialist China Britain Committee member) explores the bizarre phenomenon of “those apostles of ‘freedom’ [the Western ruling classes] wanting you to believe China is committing a genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang whilst turning a blind eye to the most documented genocide in history, in Gaza”.

Describing the ongoing horrors being inflicted on the people of Gaza, of which there is an abundance of evidence, Russel notes that there is “not an atom of credible evidence” of genocide in Xinjiang, and yet the propaganda campaign against China is so pervasive that even many on the left have been taken in by it. He notes: “My own trade union, which has done some phenomenal work in advocating for the Palestinian cause, appears to be investing quite a lot of time and resources into targeting China, from a standpoint of political malice.”

The essay provides an overview history of Xinjiang, and highlights its strategic importance to China and to the growing cooperation between China and the countries of Central Asia. This strategic importance gives a valuable clue as to why the US would seek to foment instability in the region.

Russel concludes:

With the use of genocide both in reality and fiction now truly exposed as a political mechanism to maintain hegemony for US imperialism, the necessity to confront the great genocide illusion is about embracing our own humanity, preventing any more of the world’s children succumbing to the merciless fate of those in Gaza, and once and for all stopping US imperialism’s drive towards total domination through war.

‘Prometheus, in stealing the fire from the gods, lays the foundation for the evolution of man. There would be no human history were it not for Prometheus’ “crime.” He, like Adam and Eve, is punished for his disobedience. But he does not repent and ask for forgiveness. On the contrary, he proudly says: “I would rather be chained to this rock than be the obedient servant of the gods.”’ (Erich Fromm)

The epigraph above comes from a series of papers written in the 1960s by German-American social philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, which became the book On Disobedience, published after his death in 1981. These dense texts illuminate the debilitating potency of US imperialism’s grasp on our everyday lives. Fromm, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, wrote these papers at the height of the Cold War, when atomic confrontation was a distinct possibility, in a decade that witnessed trepidatious events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the intensification of the Vietnam war, and the Sino-Soviet split.

In the midst of these papers, Fromm is describing how capitalism permanently tramples on the principles of solidarity and love to encourage the impersonal mechanisms of the market through individualism and egotistical action to regulate society while forgoing the expressed needs of the people. According to Fromm, the alienation into which humankind has been coerced is guided by bureaucracies of big enterprises through its consumers and workers under the illusion of freedom and independence. Granted that in writing these essays Fromm is stunned by the state of humanity under capitalism. He is also dismissive of the humanistic socialism being promoted in the Soviet Union or China, that finds inseparable the full development of the individual and society. Yet unbeknownst to Fromm, while the Soviet leaders, particularly from the time of Khrushchev, denigrated their predecessors to legitimate their own power, China navigated such incidences building on the legacy of each generation of leaders to set China on the path to national rejuvenation through Chinese-style modernisation. Thus far, the rejuvenation has included lifting around 900 million people out of extreme poverty to eradicate this scourge from China, whilst also helping the country become the second largest economy in the world. Unparalleled achievements gained in barely a few decades, to the contemporary despair of US Imperialism and its subordinates.

BRICS and the reconfiguration of the world order

The 37^th annual dinner of Third World Solidarity, an organisation that enjoys a close working relationship with Friends of Socialist China, was held on June 4, at the Royal Nawab Restaurant in the west London suburb of Perivale.

Among the guests were Councillor Tariq Dar MBE, Mayor of the London Borough of Brent, Councillor Shakeel Akram, Deputy Mayor of the London Borough of Hounslow, Nisar Malik, prospective parliamentary candidate for Brentford and Isleworth for the Workers’ Party of Britain (WPB), veteran journalist Shafi Naqi Jamie, and many others, from the embassy of Kazakhstan, local government, community activism, the arts, business and other walks of life, including members and friends of Friends of Socialist China from Britain, Luxembourg and Malaysia.

The 135 guests were greeted by Evie Hill of the Znaniye Foundation and its Russian School, who introduced the host, Honorary Alderman Mushtaq Lasharie CBE, the founder and Chairman of Third World Solidarity.

With the ongoing genocidal war of aggression against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and with June 14 marking the seventh anniversary of the Grenfell fire, which claimed the lives of 72 people, the first speakers were Palestinian activist for women’s rights, Ahlam Akram, the founder of Basira (British Arabs Supporting Universal Women’s Rights), and Emma O’Connor, a disabled resident on Grenfell’s 20^th floor.

The main speaker was Keith Bennett, Co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, who spoke on the BRICS cooperation mechanism and its role in the evolution of a new global order.

A video message of greetings was received from Dave Anderson, former miner, care worker, Labour MP and shadow minister under Jeremy Corbyn, who is now the Chair of Marras – the Friends of the Durham Miners Gala, who was unable to be present.

Following the speeches, Hugh Goodacre sang a song marking the 40th anniversary of the miners’ great strike and this was followed by a virtuoso performance from singer and musician Mubarak Ali to round off the evening.

Keith began his speech by thanking all those who had made the evening possible, especially Mushtaq Lasharie, highlighting his decades of tireless activism and public service.

Referring to the two previous speakers, he expressed solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian people and the Grenfell community. In the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people in India and Pakistan had taken to the streets raising the slogan, “My name, your name, Vietnam”. Today, for people around the world, their rallying cry has become, “In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.”

Grenfell was one of those events where people will remember where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about it. It was an entirely avoidable tragedy, an act of social murder in the memorable words of Friedrich Engels. The council, the government and the companies concerned, knew that the building’s cladding, like that of other residential buildings still standing, was flammable and lethal. The building was known to be a death trap. The fire was one more manifestation, like the Hillsborough football stadium disaster, the Post Office Horizon scandal, the contaminated blood scandal, and the treatment of the Windrush generation, among others, of the ruling class’s contempt for working people. But the multinational working class community of Grenfell, like the others mentioned, is a community that has refused to be silenced and which has courageously persisted in the struggle for justice.

The following is the text of the main body of Keith’s speech.

I’ve been asked to speak this evening about the BRICS and their growing role in the reconfiguration of the world order.

But like a good novel, it takes a while, and there are a few plot twists before things start to fall into place. So please bear with me for a bit.

Let’s start with the origins of our host organization, Third World Solidarity. What world were we living in? What was happening?

The key event that led to the formation of Third World Solidarity was the US bombing, with the support of the Thatcher government here, of Libya on April 15, 1986 – an act of state terrorism in which the adopted baby daughter of head of state Colonel Gaddafi was among those killed.

This was the period when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were turning the cold war hot throughout the Global South. (Or Third World as it was then generally called and from which we derive our name.) This was the case from Afghanistan to Nicaragua to Angola. And from Ethiopia to Cambodia.

It was also, although we did not realise it at the time, the period when the Soviet Union, and its allied socialist countries in central and Eastern Europe, were entering their final days.

Their demise also triggered the collapse, or the retreat, of many socialist experiments throughout the Third World.

Although five socialist countries survived, most notably China, elsewhere, attempts to build socialism, or just to pursue independent development, were often replaced by IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), the downgrading of the role of the state, and the decimation of social programs and basic services, including in the vital areas of health and education. Neoliberalism acquired a practically religious aura. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, we were repeatedly told: “There is no alternative.” And for good measure, she added that there was, “no such thing as society, only individuals and their families.”

This neoliberal ideological hegemony was such that US political theorist Francis Fukuyama even proclaimed the end of history. And was catapulted from relative obscurity to intellectual rock star and guru status for his banal observation.

This apparently and now obviously ridiculous claim that history had come to an end meant that the evolution of human society was considered to have reached the destination of its journey with the hegemony of liberal democracy and the free market.

Although if democracy is to have any relationship to people having some measure of actual control over their own lives, and collectively over the evolution and running of their state and society, for hundreds of millions there was plenty of neoliberalism, plenty of economic impoverishment, but precious little democracy.

With the end of history there was also supposed to be a peace dividend. No more wars. And the Soviet Union was effectively persuaded to surrender with US promises that its NATO military alliance would not move one inch further east from a reunified Germany.

Of course, NATO marched inexorably eastwards. Slowly but surely laying the groundwork for today’s Ukraine tragedy.

As for no more wars, even to utter the phrase now can only draw a bitter laugh as we recall Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine and so many other conflicts, together claiming the lives of millions of innocent children, women and men.

On China’s overcapacity

The article below, written for Friends of Socialist China by Shiran Illanperuma, addresses the latest ideological weapon in the Biden-Trump trade war against China: that of ‘overcapacity’. According to Western politicians and neoliberal economists, China’s industrial subsidies and production capacity are to blame for the US’s trade deficit and its apparent inability to reindustrialise its economy.

Shiran, citing fellow Marxist economist Michael Roberts, observes that the US and EU have sustained trade deficits since decades ago, before China’s emergence as an industrial superpower: “In a previous era, it was Japan and Germany that were the source of the US’s protracted trade deficits.” This rather suggests that “the main problem is the decline in the competitiveness and productive capabilities of the US itself rather than China’s (or, for that matter, anyone else’s) industrial policies.”

The article shows that China’s capacity utilisation and inventory levels almost exactly match those of the US. Hence, according to standard metrics, China is no more guilty of ‘overcapacity’ than the US itself. What is true is that China is actively working to contain excess capacity in mature industries such as coal and steel. However, in emerging technologies – particularly those required for solving the climate crisis – China is leveraging its socialist market economy to rapidly innovate and develop its productive forces. It should be noted that this strategy is responsible for a decrease in solar PV and wind energy costs of around 90 percent over the last decade. From the standpoint of maintaining a habitable Earth, the accusations of Chinese ‘overcapacity’ are beyond absurd.

Ultimately, what’s driving these accusations is that “Western imperialism is in crisis and can no longer sustain the position of its old labour aristocracy.”

The thesis of Chinese overcapacity therefore serves a dual purpose. First, it provides the Western ruling class with a means to deflect criticism of its own neoliberal policies in order to scapegoat China for the destruction of its industrial base. Second, it allows that same ruling class to resort to protectionism and subsidies on behalf of monopoly capitalists.

Shiran concludes:

For its part, China is developing technologies that are crucial for the future of mankind. It has done so while the ruling elite in the West gamble away wealth produced by workers through stock buybacks and real estate speculation. It is up to the Western Left to organise workers against imperialism and anti-China chauvinism, and to fight to liberate the productive forces necessary to address the socioeconomic and ecological challenges of this century.

Shiran Illanperuma is an independent journalist and researcher. He is currently reading for a master’s degree in economic policy at SOAS University of London.

In the last few months, there has been an intensified campaign by Western politicians, academics, and mainstream media to popularise the narrative of “Chinese overcapacity.” Like the disproven narrative of the “Chinese debt trap” before it, this appears to be a coordinated attempt by the West to scapegoat China for structural problems and imbalances in the world capitalist economy.

The thesis of China’s manufacturing overcapacity has been in circulation since at least the global financial crisis. In short, the argument goes that China’s investment-driven growth model creates both local and global imbalances. It is argued that higher investment suppresses consumption (as a share of GDP) and drives income inequality and excess production capacity within China. It is further argued that such imbalances are to blame for China’s excessive exports and massive trade surplus, which is said to be at the cost of the United States’ trade deficit.

In academia, this argument has been popularised by Keynesian economist Michael Pettis, who is a Professor of Finance at Peking University. Brad Setser, a former senior advisor to the United States Trade Representative, has also been a champion of this argument. Notably, the overcapacity thesis has also been a consistent theme of the IMF on China.

In May, the IMF Mission to China published a report stating that in order to ensure growth, China’s key priorities should include “rebalancing the economy towards consumption by strengthening the social safety net, liberalising the services sector, and scaling back distortive supply side policies that support the manufacturing sector [emphasis added].”

The IMF is, of course, a Western-dominated institution, where China controls just 6% of voting shares despite contributing to 18% of global GDP.

The overcapacity thesis has been an increasing source of diplomatic tension. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has attempted to rally the G7 on the issue and coax Global South countries such as India and Mexico into the debate. Meanwhile, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has argued that Chinese industrial policy is distorting the EU market for electric vehicles (EVs).

The Chinese side has reacted strongly to these allegations. Chinese President Xi Jinping said that there was no such thing as a Chinese overcapacity problem. Meanwhile, Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesperson He Yadong has said that the accusation of Chinese overcapacity was a typical Western double standard. More recently, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, “Overcapacity is just a pretext the US uses to try to coerce G7 members into creating fences and restrictions for Chinese new energy products.”

Following in Trump’s footsteps, the Biden administration recently threw up a slew of new tariffs against Chinese products, including 25% on steel and aluminium, 50% on semiconductors, 50% on solar panels, and a whopping 100% on electric vehicles (EVs). As the US-led trade war against China intensifies, it is worth reflecting on the facts behind the overcapacity thesis.

Measuring China’s overcapacity

French entrepreneur and analyst Arnaud Bertrand has argued that the concept of overcapacity can be measured with a few standard metrics: 1. capacity utilisation rates; and 2. inventory levels.

In economics, capacity utilisation refers to the share of production capacity that is in use at any given time. Generally speaking, a prolonged period of high capacity utilisation can indicate a need to expand productive capacity. In contrast, a prolonged period of low capacity may indicate a need to reduce productive capacity. Bertrand points out that the capacity utilisation rate in China is 76%, which is around the same as in the United States, which is 78%.

Inventory levels are generally used as a measure of how well sales are doing. A growing inventory of goods might mean a combination of sluggish demand or overproduction, while a shrinking inventory might mean growing demand and underproduction. Bertrand points out that the finished good inventory index PMI for China stood at 49, while a similar index for manufacturing inventory for the United States stood at 50.

Neither of the above numbers suggests that China has any more overcapacity than the US. On the contrary, the fact that Chinese industrial profits continue to grow suggests that there is ready demand for Chinese manufactures. Several analysts have also argued that China’s drive to increase production capacity for new energy products makes it indispensable in the global fight for ecological sustainability.