We embed below an interview with our co-editor Keith Bennett produced by Spectre – a Scottish-based communist podcast.
In conversation with Nathan Hennebry, recorded on November 20, 2024, Keith outlines the origins of his own interest in China and how Friends of Socialist China has developed over the last three years. They go on to discuss a range of topics, including the history of the Chinese revolution, how socialist democracy is practiced in China and the relationship of ‘yellow peril’ Sinophobia to the new Cold War.
Keith’s interview, and Spectre’s other podcasts, can also be listened to across a variety of media.
It is time to stop beating around the global geopolitical bush. The pre-eminence of an American driven rules base world order with it’s neo-Liberal forms of governance has come to an end. These challenging times demand more sophisticated, resilient and adaptable forms of governance; those which are capable of meeting the social and cultural needs of the people. Clearly the best example of such governance today is the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with a system of governance it refers to as ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’, governed as it is by a single centralist party known as the Communist Party of China (CPC). The CPC has been successfully modernising socialism since the 1970s; to the point where China has risen from being among the poorest of countries in the world to now being the wealthiest when using the most pertinent metric of global Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).
One only needs to ponder on the compatibility of the word communist with the word commune and the word socialist with the word socialise, to begin to understand why and how they can and do identify a more sophisticated form of governance than do the words individual and liberal. These challenging times now demand democratic forms of governance that are based on national characteristics within an international socialism; government of the people, for the people, by the people; governance that is capable of prioritising the social and cultural needs of the people and that recognise the individual sovereignty of nation states.