Review | Coming to terms with China

rs21 member Charlie Hore weighs up two new books on contemporary China.

China’s rise this century as a major economic power, and consequently a challenger to the US’s global hegemony, continues to pose awkward questions for socialists. How do we oppose the growing political offensive and military build-up against China, while also supporting Chinese people fighting back against exploitation and oppression? And how do we explain the explosive growth of the Chinese economy? 

These two complementary but contrasting books provide a valuable starting point for exploring these and other questions. China in Global Capitalism is written for an American left activist audience, and focused primarily on the history of this century. China: Rise, Repression and Resistance takes a longer perspective, with an opening chapter on the 20^th century from the 1925-27 revolution to Tiananmen Square. While it’s equally written for activists, it also takes on academic explanations of China’s rise and development.

Both aim to provide a Marxist explanation of China today, grounded in a ‘socialism from below’ perspective. This begins with understanding China’s rise as a product of contemporary world capitalism, rather than something separate or distinct. As Friedman et al explain:

By the early 2000s, China’s state and private capital were fully merged into the world economy. Its state corporations sold shares on stock markets from Hong Kong to New York, and they formed joint partnerships with multinationals. And its private corporations, which today account for more than 60 percent of China’s GDP and 90 percent of its exports, expanded dramatically and forged partnerships with multinationals. (p.33) 

But as Budd highlights: 

…as China’s economy became increasingly inter-connected with the rest of the world, its capacity to insulate itself from capitalist crises declined [… and] in the last decade growth rates have slowed and the economy is beset by deepening problems. China may have experienced economic take-off, but it cannot escape the gravitational pull of the economic laws of capitalism that Marx identified. (p.41)   

Friedman et al underline that point in their chapter on the environment and climate change, where they spell out how ecological damage is a result of China’s integration into global capitalism. This is both because China has become the world’s biggest exporter, and more recently because Chinese investment overseas is increasingly funding coal-powered energy. They cite a 2020 report showing that 70% of coal-powered plants being built are Chinese-financed. (p128) They also demonstrate how competition between China and the US (the world’s two largest carbon emitters) hinders finding solutions to climate change. This is despite China becoming the world’s largest producer of wind and solar power; coal still produces more than half of China’s electricity.   

Most Western explanations of China’s success start with China’s embrace of the ‘free market’. Both books reject this simplistic explanation, pointing instead to the exploitation and dispossession of the huge migrant working class, and the central role that the state (at all levels) continues to play in the Chinese economy. 

They also celebrate the struggles of workers, peasants, national minorities and feminists against the huge social and economic inequalities that runaway growth has produced. Friedman et al have an incisive chapter on feminist resistance and the crisis of social reproduction, while both books have chapters on the workplace battles waged by migrant and state-employed workers, and the strengths and limits of strikes in the absence of any independent organisation. 

Both books stress the difference between the mix of concessions and repression deployed in ‘China proper’, and the much greater repression meted out in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. They also pinpoint Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012 as a key turning point in repression, marked by his reassertion of the power of the central state and use of anti-corruption campaigns to reshape the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Budd has an excellent chapter on the relationships between private capitalists and the CCP, and the factional divisions that persist among the CCP’s leaders. 

Large numbers of private capitalists have joined the CCP (or come from the ranks of the CCP and state bureaucracy), but this is in no sense a ‘takeover’. They join because they need membership to get ahead, but for the CCP this functions as an extra lever of control. Important differences persist between those sections of capital primarily focussed on the world economy, and those oriented on the state-run economy, and there are also generational and regional cleavages. Xi Jinping has built his power in part by removing significant rivals, but in doing so has undermined the CCP’s collective decision-making abilities. 

Inter-imperialist rivalries

China’s rise has coincided with and hastened the relative decline of US imperial power, and both books give detailed accounts of the changing nature of their competition. Up to the early 2000s, the US primarily saw China as a source of cheap imports, but economic and military tensions have since deepened, particularly following the 2008 crash. Both the US and China have ramped up military spending and presences in east Asia, though this is highly uneven. As Budd points out, pointing to China’s military expansion as the main threat to world peace distorts reality: ‘China’s first overseas base compares to the 800 the US military have […] Against China’s fleet of up to six aircraft carriers […] the US has 37.’ (p.181)

China’s expansion of economic and political influence through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been a major trigger for growing US hostility. The BRI, first launched in 2013, is a development framework covering state and state-directed investments in (to date) over 150 countries. It has become the largest international investment project ever seen, and the primary way in which China is reasserting itself as a world power. However, replacing one dominant imperial power with another offers little change to the Global South. Both books show how the BRI has been just as predatory as the West in exploiting natural resources across the globe.

But as Friedman et al point out, China’s ‘best-laid plans, just like Biden’s have gone astray.’ (p119) Governments have been increasingly cancelling BRI projects or debts, as opposition to economic dominance and environmental damage has flourished. Meanwhile, the US’s plans to build anti-China blocs have both run up against the extent to which China is now embedded in the world economy, and the backfiring of Trump’s moves towards ‘America first’  economic isolation.  

The more recent project of ‘decoupling’ – US private companies moving their production out of China – has also run up against the reality of complex manufacturing and trading chains which are hard to replicate outside of China. as well as the reluctance of many companies to abandon profitable ventures. Even Trump’s evocation of ‘national security interests’ largely failed to move substantial amounts of capital out of China. For the foreseeable future, China and the US are locked into what another socialist writer described as ‘antagonistic cooperation’–  which doesn’t make the military build-up in east Asia any less threatening. 

Although China was the first major economy to recover from the Covid pandemic, growth since then has been sluggish, and the CCP faces a number of interlocking structural problems. Slow growth rates, a declining population, the threats from climate changes and the ever-present possibility of unrest from below all constrain the CCP’s policy choices. At the same time, the authors reject the simplistic idea that China’s boom is over. 

Both books have a wealth of detail that flesh out and underpin their arguments, and are written to be accessible for readers without a detailed knowledge of China. The authors’ different approaches and intended audiences mean that while they have much in common, they are far from identical. For example, Friedman et al have an opening chapter outlining exactly why China is capitalist, still something of a controversial argument on the US left. Budd addresses that issue in passing, but takes on influential academic arguments about China not being imperialist. His account also stresses the many continuities with China before 1978, while recognizing the huge transformation that has taken place since.

Budd begins by citing a solidarity slogan from 1989 “We are part of China and China is part of us”, arguing that this is now truer than ever. Understanding China is essential to understanding 21^st century capitalism – and how to fight it. As Friedman et al argue, ‘the left must not allow the borders of the nation state to confine our political imagination; our organizing must be as international as global capitalism itself.’ These two books are crucial contributions towards building an internationalist and anti-imperialist left opposed to all forms of exploitation and oppression.