At the invitation of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez attended the 14th World Socialism Forum, held in Beijing from 9-10 September 2024.
The theme of this year’s forum was Current changes in the world and our times, and addressed the possibilities for furthering the cause of socialism around the world. There were over 200 delegates from China, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Britain, Cameroon, Cuba, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Laos, Lebanon, Nepal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Syria, Uruguay, Vietnam and Zambia. Keynote speakers included Zhen Zhanmin (Vice President of CASS), Cheng Enfu (Former President of the Academy of Marxism) and Zhang Weiwei (Dean of the China Institute at Fudan University).
Carlos spoke in one of the parallel sessions, introducing the book The East is Still Red – Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century and explaining the rationale for writing it. We reproduce his contribution below.
A write-up of the forum can be found on China Daily.
The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century was published in English by Praxis Press last year and will soon be available in Chinese through Jiuzhou Press, having been translated by comrade Zhuo Mingliang from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Many books have been written by Westerners about China. Did the world really need another one?
Looking at the US and UK best-selling book lists, you can find titles such as:
- How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise
- China’s New Tyranny
- How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept
- How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World
And so on.
There are dozens, even hundreds, of books describing China as authoritarian, dystopian, aggressive, repressive and reactionary.
These are not serious works of politics, economics and history; they are part of an increasingly wide-ranging propaganda campaign aimed at building public support for an anti-China New Cold War.
One of the key reasons for the book to help build a movement against that New Cold War.
In the West, the most disgraceful slanders are being hurled at China: that it’s committing human rights abuses against Uyghur people in Xinjiang Province; that it’s suppressing religious freedoms; that it’s preventing the use of minority languages; that it’s engaged in predatory policies in its trade and investment relations with the countries of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and the Pacific; that it’s an aggressive, expansionist power seeking to violate the sovereignty of other countries in the region; that it’s cracking down on basic democratic rights; and so on.
This is ultimately propaganda in favour of the West’s anti-China foreign policy, and in support of the US’s mission to maintain its hegemony, to hold on to its global economic and strategic advantages, and to pursue a Project for a New American Century.
This New Cold War has several parallels with the original Cold War, and indeed in many ways is a continuation of it.
What was the original Cold War all about? It was about consolidating and expanding the US-led imperialist system in the post-World War 2 era. It was about containing and weakening socialism, and ensuring that the colonial world system was replaced by a neocolonial system rather than by a truly multipolar world. The West engaged in wars, proxy wars, destabilisation, coups, assassinations and economic coercion throughout the world in order to prevent the countries of the Global South asserting their sovereignty and choosing their own development path.
And of course the Cold War was not always very cold. At least three million people lost their lives in Korea because the US insisted on having a military foothold in the Pacific which it could use to impose its will on the region. The US wanted to deny the Korean people their choice to build socialism; it wanted to host nuclear warheads in South Korea; it wanted to threaten People’s China and the Soviet Union with nuclear annihilation; it wanted to maintain a client dictatorship in Taiwan Province; it wanted to prevent China’s full reunification; and it wanted to keep the People’s Republic of China out of the United Nations. For these reasons, the US and its allies waged a genocidal war.
Several more million people lost their lives in Vietnam because the US couldn’t accept the choice of the people of Vietnam – and of Laos and Cambodia – to pursue their own development path; to be allied with the socialist countries; to exist outside the US sphere of influence, outside the imperialist world system.
In Indonesia, in Brazil, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ethiopia, hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed at the altar of the so-called rules-based world order.
Currently the New Cold War is not characterised by large-scale violence, but the threat of World War 3 is increasing by the day. For a start, it’s abundantly clear that the US and its allies are willing to fight to the last Ukrainian in their proxy war against Russia.
Meanwhile, in addition to the economic attacks on China – the trade war, the tariffs, the sanctions, the attacks on Huawei and TikTok, the bid to stop China developing advanced semiconductors – there’s a deepening campaign of military encirclement.
The emergence of the AUKUS nuclear pact between Britain, the US and Australia. The provision of direct military aid to Taiwan Province. The vast and expanding array of US military bases in the region, including a new base in North Australia and several new bases in the Philippines. The placement of nuclear-enabled warplanes in Japan, South Korea and Okinawa. The placement of the THAAD missile defence system in Guam and South Korea. The encouragement of Japanese re-armament. The attempts to create a global NATO.
None of this has peaceful purposes. There’s clearly a vocal and influential faction in Washington that see an outright war against China as the only viable means of stopping China from overtaking the US economically and technologically; as the only viable means of putting an end to an emerging multipolar world order with China at its core.
But it runs entirely counter to the interests of humanity. The countries of the West should be working with China, cooperating on the major global issues of our time: preventing climate breakdown; preventing future pandemics; preventing nuclear war; addressing the challenges of artificial intelligence; and tackling global poverty.
Ordinary people in the West must not allow their consent to be manufactured. So one of the major reasons for the book is to present the reality of China and thereby to contribute to the movement against war and for peaceful cooperation.
The other major objective of the book is to help improve people’s understanding of Chinese socialism, which is a subject that is widely misunderstood, including among many Marxists.
There is a tendency to assume that, with the introduction of Reform and Opening Up from 1978, China simply gave up on socialism and adopted capitalism.
But China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. This has been recognised by the UN as the most extensive and successful poverty alleviation programme in history. While the US and its allies have waged wars around the world, China has waged war on poverty.
Would this be possible if China were just another capitalist country? If the capitalist class – a relatively small group of people that own and deploy capital – dominated political power, would they really allow resources to be directed so consistently to solving the problems of the working people? If so, why doesn’t this happen all over the world? Why haven’t other capitalist countries achieved similar successes in improving people’s lives?
China has emerged as by far the global leader in developing renewable energy, protecting biodiversity, tackling pollution, building green transport systems, and planting trees.
Why is it China that’s making this progress? The dangers of climate change have been globally recognised for more than three decades, but the advanced capitalist economies of the West have made very little progress in addressing the issue and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The fundamental reason is that Western governments have left it to the market to solve the problem. Neoliberal orthodoxy says that the profit motive, and the dynamics of supply and demand, will fix everything, but they haven’t. Fossil fuel capitalism has continued unimpeded.
China now has more installed renewable energy capacity than the G7 countries combined. In the last two decades, coal has gone from 80 percent of the power mix to 50 percent. China’s forest coverage has increased from 12 percent in the early 1980s to 24 percent today. China leads the world in the production and use of electric cars, trains and buses. Around 98 percent of the world’s electric buses are in China, and around 70 percent of the world’s high-speed rail. Thanks to China’s investment and innovation, the cost of solar energy production has fallen dramatically over the last decade, to the point where it is cheaper than fossil fuel energy production in most parts of the world.
The Chinese government has set incredibly ambitious targets of reaching peak emissions by 2030 and zero carbon by 2060. And the latest research indicates that the peak emissions target has already been reached, several years ahead of schedule.
Would all this be possible if China were a capitalist country, if the capitalist class was in control?
A key idea I try to communicate in the book is that the reason China is the world leader in poverty alleviation; the reason China is leading the green energy transition; the reason China pursues a foreign policy based on peace, non-interference, mutual benefit, cooperation and respect for sovereignty; the reason it’s been able to deal with the Covid pandemic with a relatively minimal loss of life compared to the major capitalist countries; the reason it’s been able to go from being one of the poorest and most backward countries in the world to being a moderately prosperous country and one of the leading innovators in science and technology, is precisely that it’s a socialist country. That is, a country where political power is located in the masses of ordinary people rather than just a wealthy elite; a country where the economy serves the people; a country with a democratic planning process rather than the chaos of neoliberalism.
People get very confused about Chinese socialism, because of China’s level of engagement with global capitalism; its market reforms; the fact that private capital exists; the fact that there is significant inequality. Of course China looks very different today to how it looked in 1978.
But the country is governed primarily in the interests of ordinary people. The major party of government is a communist party, that takes Marxism extremely seriously. China has introduced market mechanisms not in order to revert to capitalism but in order to advance productivity, to catch up in science and technology, to attract investment, to improve living standards, and ultimately to create conditions for a more advanced socialism.
And one has to admit that this strategy has been highly successful. China is an economic powerhouse, and its people live far better than they used to. China’s average life expectancy has now surpassed that of the United States. Extreme poverty has been eliminated. Literacy is universal. Everybody has access to food, shelter, clean water, modern energy, education, healthcare and social security.
So the book poses a question to those on the left who deny China’s socialist character: if we are socialists, if we uphold socialism as a better path for humanity, why on earth would we want to ascribe China’s successes to capitalism?
My view is that the Western left can learn a great deal from China and can take a great deal of inspiration from it. In addition to building socialism, it is also putting forward a global vision based on peace and common prosperity. Such a vision is worthy of our support. For those that stand for socialism and peace, we should build solidarity with China and reject imperialist aggression against it.
