Video: The decline of America and the rise of China

Charlie Hore, author of The Road to Tiananmen Square and numerous articles about China, talks about the shifting powers in imperialism in the past decades.

In this talk, recorded on 31 August 2019 on a meeting organised by Greater Manchester rs21, he explains the ways in which the Chinese economy reorganised itself firstly to recover, and later to take advantage of the 2008 economic crash by moving away from a model of growth predicated on manufacturing and export to investment initiatives in infrastructure at home, and now globally, also known as the Belt and Road project.

He gives us an insight as to how this is enabling China to increase its global political influence and the effect of underdevelopment it creates in certain parts of the Global South to draw out the conclusions that China is an imperialist power that fits into our understanding of imperialism rather than a deviation, and therefore we must be cautious of our critique of it following right-wing arguments and logic. He touches on the history of anti-Chinese racism particularly in the US and Australia, to illustrate the necessity of grounding our analysis in principled anti-imperialism.