In the following text, based on a speech given by at a Black Liberation Alliance day school in London, Carlos Martinez explains why China’s rapid rise and its policy of win-win cooperation with the Global South threaten Western hegemony and fuel today’s New Cold War.
Carlos begins by emphasising the extraordinary scale of China’s transformation: from one of the poorest countries in the world just 75 years ago to a global leader in renewable energy, infrastructure, telecommunications, AI, electric vehicles and other advanced technologies. This economic and technological leap has been accompanied by vast improvements in living standards – average life expectancy has risen from 35 in 1949 to 79 today – and China is steadily pursuing “modernisation of common prosperity,” ensuring the fruits of development are reaped by the whole population.
Carlos contrasts this progress with the West’s neoliberal trajectory of inequality and stagnation. Crucially, China’s rise has not been based on colonialism or war. Instead, China aligns itself with the Global South, strengthens multipolar institutions such as BRICS and the SCO, and forms partnerships grounded in sovereign equality and mutual benefit. China’s investments in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean come without the coercive conditionalities typical of Western trade and investment relationships.
China therefore challenges imperialism both materially and ideologically. Materially, it helps countries escape underdevelopment while defending their sovereignty. Ideologically, it presents the pre-eminent modern example of a socialist-oriented model delivering prosperity, stability and green development. As living standards for Chinese workers approach – and start to surpass – those in Western countries, the legitimacy of Western capitalism weakens by the day.
In response, the US and its allies are escalating their long-term containment campaign in addition to waging a propaganda war which portrays China as authoritarian, repressive, expansionist and predatory. Carlos concludes that progressive and anti-war forces in the West have a vital responsibility to challenge this war propaganda and stand in solidarity with China and the Global South.
I’ve been asked to speak about why China’s rise and its programme of win-win cooperation with the Global South pose such a threat to western hegemony – and how that manifests itself in a New Cold War and as red scare propaganda.
The first thing then is to understand the dimensions of China’s rise, which is really nothing short of remarkable.
China has gone from being one of the poorest and most technologically backward countries in the world, to being the world’s second largest economy in terms of nominal GDP, the world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, the world’s only renewable energy superpower, a world leader in telecommunications, advanced infrastructure, high speed rail, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, quantum computing, space exploration, and a whole range of other cutting edge technologies.
And these advances have taken place in combination with an unprecedented improvement in living standards for ordinary people. China’s average life expectancy in 1949, at the time of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, was approximately 35 years, substantially below the global average. Today it’s 79 years, substantially above the global average, and surpassing that of the United States (actually in terms of its healthy lifespan, China is many years ahead of the US). The draft of the 15th Five Year Plan, which will kick off next year, sets out a roadmap for life expectancy to reach at least 80 years by 2030, which will put China in a very exclusive club.
As the Chinese leadership often says, Chinese modernisation is the modernisation of common prosperity. That means everybody benefits, not just a small elite. What China has achieved with its poverty alleviation programme is unprecedented in human history.
And while China is still a developing country, with a per capita GDP that’s three or four times lower than that of Britain, its people live increasingly well. Every single person has a guarantee of decent housing, adequate food, adequate clothing, free healthcare, free universal education, and clean water and electricity piped into their homes. You can walk round a big Chinese city for hours and hours and not see a single homeless person. And while you’re there, you’ll also notice how clean and nice everything is, how much green space there is – how many trees, how many parks, and how good the infrastructure is.
China is pursuing a people-centred development model that puts the wellbeing of ordinary people at the heart of its development strategy. The fastest growing socioeconomic category in China is the middle income group, which currently constitutes around 500 million people and which continues to grow rapidly. China has a vision for this middle income group – meaning people who do more than just get by, who have some disposable, who can go on holiday, and so on – to make up the vast majority of Chinese society within the next decade or so.
Meanwhile in the West, neoliberal capitalism has for the last four decades been accelerating the process of what Karl Marx called proletarianisation, with growing inequality, precarious work, underemployment, stagnating wages, and the destruction of social safety nets. The middle income group is shrinking and people increasingly find themselves in financial dire straits, struggling to make ends meet, struggling to find stable work.
The other very important characteristic of China’s rise is that it’s not based on colonialism, imperialism or war – making it fundamentally different to the rise of the US, Western Europe and Japan. As President Xi Jinping has pointedly remarked: China will “neither tread the old path of colonisation and plunder, nor the crooked path taken by some countries to seek hegemony once they grow strong.”
China positions itself very much within the Global South, and is really the driving force behind the rising multipolar trajectory. China is a key player in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. It works closely with regional organisations such as the African Union, ASEAN and CELAC. It works closely with international organisations such as the G20, the G77 and the Non Aligned Movement. At the United Nations, it is a loud and consistent voice for peace, progress and environmental sustainability.
China has extensive trade and investment relationships with the countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. But unlike the West’s engagement with those parts of the world, China builds relationships based on the principles of sovereign equality, mutual benefit, non-interference and peaceful coexistence.
Unlike the US and its allies, China doesn’t impose loan conditionality – no African country has had to privatise its water system in order to get access to Chinese financing, no Latin American country has had to deregulate its education sector or de-unionise its energy sector in order to make a deal with China. And so on.
China isn’t engaged in proxy wars, destabilisation campaigns, economic suffocation and the like. Right now Venezuela is facing a potential full-on military attack by the US, on top of a brutal sanctions regime and destabilisation campaign. Contrast that with the China-Venezuela relationship, in which China has made massive investments in Venezuela, on very fair and mutually agreed terms, which the socialist-oriented governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro have used to transform the lives of the poor, for example by building millions of units of social housing.
So all of this puts China at the heart of the multipolar project. China is the largest trading partner of two-thirds of the world’s countries. Around three quarters of the world’s countries – the vast majority in the Global South – are signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative.
China poses a threat to the imperialist status quo at both the material and ideological levels.
Materially, it’s bad enough that China militantly defends its sovereignty and refuses to accept a permanent position at the bottom of a global economic order designed in New York City. Moreover it’s a socialist country, and that’s always unforgivable.
But the fact that China’s rise and its role in the world is helping other countries to break out of underdevelopment whilst simultaneously protecting their sovereignty makes things very difficult for the imperialists. The whole nature of capitalism is that if it doesn’t grow, it dies. And part of that is the expansion of capital into every corner of the globe. The ability to exploit the billions of workers of the Global South is the main thing that’s kept capitalism alive over the last few decades. Starvation wages in Africa and Asia have become the life blood of the system, and a rising South-South cooperation is threatening to take that away.
At the ideological level, China represents the threat of a good example, as socialist countries have always done.
In spite of all the propaganda directed at it, people (especially young people) increasingly see China in a positive light. Particularly because of its leadership on green energy, because of its peaceful foreign policy, because of its commitment to poverty alleviation, and because of its amazing infrastructure.
We’re moving towards a situation where Chinese workers live better than their Western counterparts, and that’s going to create serious problems for a capitalist ruling class that doesn’t have answers to this chronic economic crisis; that is increasingly repressive in its relationship with the working classes; that’s increasingly aggressive and warmongering in its bid to retain its global hegemony.
So as I said, China represents both a material and an ideological challenge to the whole imperialist system.
And that imperialist system, led by the US, is responding in both material and ideological ways.
The material ways include a tariff war; a semiconductor war; the construction of the AUKUS nuclear pact; the positioning of tens of thousands of troops and weapons in Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, Guam and Australia; the encouraging of Japanese re-armament; the encouraging of Taiwanese separatist forces. There’s a campaign of containment and encirclement of China that’s been going on for 75 years and which has been steadily escalating ever since the Obama-Clinton Pivot to Asia back in 2011.
The ideological response to China’s rise is to wage a propaganda war against it. To paint China as a threat to global security; as a human rights abuser; as a uniquely authoritarian regime; as an economic predator.
They throw slanders around about China being engaged in a genocide in Xinjiang – while they themselves are arming, funding and supporting an actual genocide in Gaza.
They accuse China of debt trap diplomacy – whilst ‘debt trap’ imperialism forms the very basis of the West’s relations with the Global South.
The most recent fairy story in Britain is that we can’t use Chinese-made electric buses because they might include ‘kill switches’ that allow the Chinese government to remotely disable them. Quite why the Chinese government would want to do that is beyond me.
As I’ve said before, this propaganda war is war propaganda. It’s designed to get people onside with the New Cold War – and potentially a hot war – on China.
The progressive, left, anti-imperialist and anti-war movements in the West have an important role to play in countering this propaganda and building solidarity with China and the Global South.
