There is no doubt that China is today the main rival to U.S. imperialism on the world scale. But what is the nature of that rivalry? For many years, from Obama’s “pivot to Asia” to Trump’s tariffs, the U.S. has been targeting China, from trade wars, to bases and warships surrounding it, to possible future military confrontation. Is the U.S. worried about China as a major socialist country, or is it an imperialist rival? Much confusion has surrounded this question, particularly in the “left” broadly speaking.

Clearly, as Lenin always pointed out, our main enemy is “our own” bourgeoisie. If we mainly focus our attack on China, we become social-chauvinists and might as well support Trump or Biden/Harris or the next representative of U.S. imperialism.

However, it is necessary to have ideological clarity on the role of China (and Russia) in the world today. There is even a “left” current in the pro-China/Russia camp that says that, even if (or even though) the China-Russia bloc is also imperialist, they are “good” imperialists, or at least better than the U.S. imperialists.

There is no doubt that China’s people’s democratic revolution was the second most important revolutionary event of the 20th century, after the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. The People’s Republic of China, together with the other countries that carried out people’s democratic revolutions in Europe and Asia after World War II, joined with the socialist Soviet Union in forming the democratic camp opposed to the imperialist camp led by the U.S. This camp had almost 1/3 of the world’s population, and led to the division of the world into two blocs, one revolutionary and the other reactionary.

In 1949, the Conform pointed out: “The Chinese people’s democratic revolution has won a great victory, a victory of world historic significance. The victory of the Chinese revolution will not only affect the destiny of the peoples of China but also the historical destinies of all the other Peoples of the East and West. The Chinese revolution has dealt a mortal blow to the combined forces of internal reaction and world imperialism in China; it has dealt a new, powerful blow to the whole system of world imperialism and is the most serious defeat inflicted on this system since the Great October Revolution and the victory of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., since the defeat of tile Hitler fascist coalition.”¹

Though the character of the bloc led by the Soviet Union fundamentally changed in the years after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the ascent of Khrushchevite modern revisionism, China maintained certain people’s democratic features until Mao’s death in 1976. The people’s communes were maintained, education and medical care were free. However, large-scale industry was weak, as can be seen in the promotion of developing steel production in backyard furnaces during the “Great Leap Forward” from 1958-1960.

There were some manifestations of internationalism, such as the critique of Khrushchev revisionism, and the building of the Tan-Zam railroad (completed in 1976) that allowed Zambia to export its copper through Tanzania without going through apartheid South Africa.

However, by the end of Mao’s life, this was already beginning to change. This was seen in the development of “Mao Tse-Tung Thought” as a supposed “new stage” of Marxism-Leninism. This period saw China uniting with U.S. imperialism against Soviet social-imperialism, as seen in the period of Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 (see Mao’s talks with Kissinger, Nixon and Ford (in the archive section of Revolutionary Democracy²), the “Theory of Three Worlds,” which included Pinochet’s Chile and the Shah’s Iran, the support for pro-U.S. groups (under the guise of unity) in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, especially support for the FLNA and UNITA in Angola against the MPLA, etc.

After Mao’s death, a new stage developed in China, which we could call “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” A period of opening up to Western capital began and an end was put to carrying on people’s democracy. The people’s communes were dissolved, and agriculture was developed on a purely capitalist basis. As a result, an estimated 174 million peasants migrated to the cities between 1978 and 1999, providing a cheap labor force for the newly developed industries, both state capitalist and private capitalist. No longer was education after 9th grade free³. While basic public health service is free or low cost for all Chinese residents, “China is the 11th most expensive country based on average premiums for international private medical insurance...” costing “US $5,274 in 2022.”⁴ This is typical of health care in a class-divided society. Housing, which had been free on the communes, now became a commodity, as in other capitalist countries.

A story has been told about China having pulled 800 million people out of poverty⁵. If one takes an income of US $1 per day as the measure of extreme poverty, and US $5 per day as a measure of poverty, this only has meaning based on the system one is living under. A person earning US $5, or even US $1 per day living on the people’s communes, with no expenses for housing, basic food (with the division of surplus based on work points), medical care and education, is better off than a migrant worker from the countryside in the city earning US $1 or even US $5 per day who must pay for all his own expenses.

Openly pro-capitalist Wikipedia also claims that China pulled 800 million people out of poverty, but it states that this was due to opening up to capitalism after 1975.⁶

There are also different periods of open capitalism after 1976. Initially, China’s development was largely due to import of Western capital, particularly from the U.S. In this period, much of U.S. clothing, toys and other products of light industry was imported from China, which was an area of cheap labor power. But as China developed, it put more of its accumulated capital into heavy industry. For example, many of the big cranes, used in the U.S. and other countries to load and unload container ships, are made in China.

As of 2006, migrant workers (who made up about 1/5 of China’s labor force) earned less than US $130 a month.⁷  Since that time, China has also developed a large number of skilled workers, due to its increased industrialisation, who earn considerably more than US $130 a month. At the same time, there has been a large increase in inequality in China. The “Gini coefficient” is a frequently used measure of income inequality within a country, and though there are differences in the actual figures depending on the source, there is no question that income inequality is rising in China, and is generally assumed to be higher than in the U.S.⁸  Furthermore, China now has the second highest number of billionaires, 205, compared to the U.S., which has 516.⁹

There is no question that China’s industry (both state and privately owned) has grown immensely over the last decades, just as U.S. industry has declined. China now has the second or first largest GDP, depending on how it is measured. China has the largest share of manufacturing in the world and has the largest share of auto manufacturing (see below). But this in no way determines the type of social system it has.

The U.S. developed very rapidly in the decades after the Civil War, especially with the building of the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869 (ironically with some 12,000 Chinese immigrant workers), but this clearly did not stop it from being capitalist, as well as developing features of imperialism (monopoly capitalism) in this period. China has now developed all the features of imperialism that Lenin pointed to (see bibliography: “Is China an Imperialist Country?”). This just proves Lenin’s point that imperialist countries develop at different rates, and the one main form of redivision of the world is through war.¹⁰

I will not go through details of the development of Chinese imperialism, as this has been done, particularly in three works that I am familiar with (see bibliography). I will only try to summarise here the main points of this development.

China is interested in trade and investment in all countries, regardless of their political character.

As to trade, this is basically a principle of equality and peaceful co-existence. However, there are exceptions. It is unconscionable that Israel is China’s third largest trading partner, especially when Israel is carrying out its genocidal attacks on Palestine, and Gaza in particular. (Note also that Putin met with Netanyahu on Victory Day, 2018. The third person shown in the photo below is Serb President Aleksandar Vucic).

There is no doubt that militarily the U.S. and its allies are far stronger than China and Russia. But this does not mean that we should support the weaker imperialist bloc against the stronger. And even in military technology, Workers World (WW) points out that “China’s military advancements are reshaping global power dynamics.” Rather than exposing how the recent short war between India and Pakistan was used by their respective imperialist backers to strengthen “their own” clients, WW shows how China’s military is gaining over Western technology.¹¹  What about the U.S. proxy war with Russia over Ukraine? We must give no support to the U.S. and its reactionary proxy Ukrainian government, but recent U.S.-Russia discussions show that Russia (like the U.S.) is more interested getting control of Ukrainian resources than saving Russian-speakers in Ukraine from anti-Russian chauvinist Ukrainian attacks.

Not only are China’s monopolies developing worldwide, but so is its finance capital. Of the 10 largest banks worldwide, the top 4 are from China, the next 2 are from the U.S., 2 from France and 1 each from UK and Japan.¹²

Meanwhile, China’s capital export is growing, though it is still far behind the U.S. The chart below shows the top 10 countries by outward Foreign Direct Investment(FDI) in 2022. The US has the largest outward FDI, followed by the Netherlands (although much of its investment may actually be from other Western imperialists that make their legal home there), China and UK.¹³

China made a deal with the “progressive” government of Correa in Ecuador for 80 per cent of its oil production in exchange for a large loan. It has continued to invest in oil production under reactionary governments there, particularly in the Amazon region, despite protests from indigenous peoples and others. China has also bought up mining companies elsewhere in Latin America that were previously owned by Western capitalists.

China is still way behind the U.S. in Foreign Direct Investment

Under China’s Belt and Road Initiative, China has bought the majority share of Greece’s port of Piraeus, and is heavily invested in Italy’s port of Trieste. It is also building a new deep-water port of Gwadar in Pakistan on the Arabian Sea, which will make it easier for China to export goods to South Asia and the east coast of Africa.

China is now the largest investor in coltan from the Democratic Republic of Congo, having taken over first place from the U.S. and European Union. Coltan is used to produce tantalum, essential for the manufacturing of electronic devices like mobile phones, laptops, and other consumer electronics. The mining of coltan is a dangerous occupation, mainly using child labour since it easier for them to navigate in the small mines that often collapse. Is it somehow better for Congolese children to be exploited by Chinese capitalists than by U.S. capitalists?

The 20th century saw two major imperialist wars (despite the difference in character between the first and second world war). If there is not a worldwide effort to stop the growing inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S.-U.E. bloc and the China-Russia bloc, this rivalry is likely to lead to World War III.

Lenin, pointed out in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: “The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to obtain profits. And they divide it ‘in proportion to capital, ‘in proportion to strength,’ because there cannot be any other method of division under commodity production and capitalism. But strength varies with the degree of economic and political development. In order to understand what is taking place, it is necessary to know what questions are settled by the changes in strength. The question as to whether these changes are "purely" economic or non-economic (e.g., military) is a secondary one, which cannot in the least affect the fundamental views on the latest epoch of capitalism. To substitute the question of the form of the struggle and agreements (today peaceful, tomorrow warlike, the next day warlike again) for the question of the substance of the struggle and agreements between capitalist combines is to sink to the role of a sophist.”

Bibliography

Critiques of Chinese Imperialism:

1). Is China an Imperialist Country?, by N. B. Turner (apparently a pseudonym) et al. This work was presented at he Left Forum in 2014 by a group of mostly young Chinese-American Maoists. It is the most detailed presentation of how China today meets all of Lenin’s 5 characteristics of imperialism. It is also the oldest of these three works.

2) In China, Capitalism Is Being Consolidated, Not Socialism, by the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador, 2017. This is probably the clearest ideologically of the three works. Tambien disponible enespañol.

3) The Class Nature of China Today, by Towards Marxist-Leninist Unity, 2021. This pamphlet has the advantage that it is the most recent of the three works, and the only one written after the One Belt, One Road initiative.

All three of these works are available for free download as pdfs or for sale from http://www.RedStarPublishers.org, of which I am the webmaster.

Works claiming that China is a socialist country today:

People’s China at 75, edited by Keith Bennet and Carlos Martinez, 2025. This is a compendium of 11 articles by various authors discussing various aspects of what the authors consider Chinese socialism.

How China brought 800 million people out of poverty. “China – socialist or an imperialist? the difference” at https://www.workers.org/2024/09/80773/

Note that none of those trumpeting “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” bother to contradict the evidence that China is an imperialist country.

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