Chinese imperialism: no better than the US?

Does Chinese investment in the Global South make it easier for workers to organise in those countries? Charlie Hore responds to a recent article and argues that Chinese imperialism is no better than any other kind.

Fraser Amos’ recent article set out to consider the changing shape of imperialism in the 21st century, and made some very important points about Trump’s strategies and the tensions between the US and Europe. However, I want to argue that it’s not possible to have a rounded analysis of imperialism as a world system today without understanding where China fits in. The single biggest change over the last 30 years has been China’s growth into a major imperial power, and on this I think the article falls short. 

Amos’ account of China seems to face both ways. On the one hand, they recognise: 

• Xi Jinping’s full-throated and sincere defence of the neo-liberal world order as ‘ready to resolutely defend the UN-centric international system, stand guard over the world order based on international law’
• that ‘Chinese state and capital acts at home and abroad with all the repression required to secure the conditions for continued national capitalist development’
• and that ‘overproduction in China’s construction sector, flush with money in response to the 2008 recession, is now being exported to global south nations through the Belt and Road Initiative’ 

All of which seem to be descriptions of China behaving as an imperialist power – the export of capital in particular was central to both Lenin and Bukharin’s understanding of imperialism. 

But on the other hand, the article offers a far too uncritical picture of both the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and China’s international trading relations more generally. In reality, BRI investment is mostly in metals and mining, energy and manufacturing production for export, rather than in an altruistic spirit of boosting ‘south-south trading’ on any sort of equitable basis. China’s threat to US hegemony is not that it’s an alternative model, but rather that it offers ruling classes in the Global South a choice of trading partners. The Chinese-American economist Ho-fung Hung captures this contradiction well:

Although China’s presence has not severed developing countries’ ties to the developed world, it does increase the plurality of their investors and trade partners, thus enhancing their bargaining power in the world market. It is in this sense that the capitalist boom in China is altering the power relations between the developing world and the developed… China is therefore both a facilitator of developing countries’ autonomy from the developed ones and a status quo power that joins hands with traditional core powers to help reproduce a global neoliberal order.

However, it’s also important to note that the increased autonomy is that of governments and ruling classes. China’s rise does not ‘create breathing space for progressive and revolutionary forces’, if by that we understand working-class or anti-imperialist movements. China’s support for the governments it trades with does nothing to strengthen workers against their own ruling classes – as the fourth-largest arms exporter, it often does the opposite. 

China’s ‘doctrine of non-interference’ in practice means that China is happy to trade with any regime, however repressive. Among the states that have ‘their bargaining power enhanced’ are Israel and Saudi Arabia: China is Israel’s second-largest trading partner, and the biggest buyer of oil from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is of course also one of the members of BRICS+ – a previous article here has addressed the myth of BRICS as an anti-imperialist bloc, so I won’t repeat those arguments here.  

Amos quotes several ‘unequal exchange’ economists to back up the view that China’s growth is dependent on the US, but this is in part based on an outdated view of China’s dependency on exports to the US. That hasn’t been true since 2008 – exports now account for just under 20 percent of China’s GDP, and exports to the US 15 per cent of that (2023 figures) so around three percent of total GDP. That’s one of the key reasons why the Chinese Communist Party can be reasonably relaxed about the tariffs – under Trump’s first administration they hurt the US economy more than China, and it’s entirely possible that the same will be true again.

It’s also not true that most foreign capital in China is US capital – quite the reverse, as these figures from 2023 shows:

Asian countries dominated foreign investment activity in China, accounting for 76.8 per cent of newly established FIEs [foreign-invested enterprises] and 81.3 per cent of the total actual investment amount. In contrast, African countries contributed only 5.8 per cent of new enterprises and a mere 0.2 per cent of the investment, while European nations represented 7.2 per cent of new establishments with 8.9 per cent of the investment. Latin American countries made up 1.4 per cent of the new enterprises and 6.4 per cent of the investment, whereas North American countries accounted for 5.5 per cent and 2.4 per cent, respectively.

This isn’t new – Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao were the major sources of foreign investment until the mid-1990s, and while US investment increased thereafter, so did investment from South Korea and Japan. So for example, Foxconn, which makes Apple products in China (and increasingly in India), is Taiwanese-owned (though of course Apple and similar companies share in the surplus-value extracted from Chinese workers through huge price mark-ups).

There is a more basic methodological question here, though. China is the world’s second largest economy; the largest manufacturing economy and goods exporter; the second largest importer; the top trading partner of over 120 countries; and in the top five of capital exporting countries. Three of the world’s ten biggest companies are Chinese – all state-owned. If China is such a major player in world capitalism, but not an imperialist power, then in what sense do we still have an imperialist world-system?  

China’s rise was in large part due to a combination of favourable internal conditions and a changing world economy. But it was also part of a larger shift towards ‘…an increasingly multi-polar world order where the US is no longer a hegemonic force’, as Kate Deer put in an important recent article. The rise of independent centres of capital accumulation outside the ‘imperial core’, especially in east Asia has been an important factor in the relative decline of US economic, military and political hegemony. There are important debates to be had about the extent of that decline and the US’ continuing economic dominance, but we also need to be clear that the rise of rival centres of capital accumulation does not in itself benefit workers and the oppressed. A multi-polar world may be a more favourable terrain of struggle, but not because any of the poles are on our side. China is now a much bigger part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Charlie Hore is the author of The Road to Tiananmen Square, which has just been republished with a new introduction, currently available in Britain from Blackwell’s.