Is China a capitalist and imperialist country or is it "socialist [not even communist] with Chinese characteristics" as some leftists say? Is it to be considered an ally of those who oppose U.S. capitalism simply because it is a U.S. rival or because it truly represents an alternative system? We in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) say the answer to both questions is that China is an imperialist rival of the U.S. and is no friend of the working class.. Both its external political and economic policies and the conditions of its own working class attest that China is capitalist. The unfortunate truth is that there are no communist countries in the world today. Our energy must go into understanding the nature of contemporary Chinese society and why socialist revolutions in the USSR and China devolved back to capitalism, not into pretending that it didn't happen.
External relations
There is no doubt that China is the main economic and military rival of the U.S. today. In 2024, China's outward foreign direct investment was 12 percent of the global total, including about 52,000 foreign enterprises controlled or created by Chinese investors in 190 countries. Much of the over $3 trillion in foreign capital that China controls passes through tax havens like offshore holding companies that have indirect ownership or corporate opacity, just like other imperialist nations.1
Chinese domestic manufactured goods production in 2024 was 26 percent of world industrial output, nearly double that of the U.S., while their export of manufactured goods was almost triple that of the U.S.2
Moreover, China dominates the world’s supply chains of minerals needed to produce “clean” energy – electric car batteries, solar panels, cell phones, and other electronics – accounting for 60 percent of world-wide production and 85 percent of processing capacity.
In addition to mining its own resources, China is well entrenched in Africa and is dominant in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Guinea, Zambia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. In DRC, over 40,000 children dig cobalt, lithium and other rare earth elements out of the earth with their hands and shovels and many die every year from accidents and the effects of pollution and poverty. DRC supplies 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, and China either owns or has a stake in nearly all the mines. In the Central African Republic (CAR) many people die from mercury poisoning related to Chinese gold mining.3 China also owns 50 factories in Indonesia, and invests in mining and manufacturing in Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and (until recently) Venezuela.
China has established a new financial bloc, BRICS, originally involving Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa, but now also including the authoritarian nations Egypt, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE. Many other Asian, African and Latin American countries have lesser "partner" status. BRICS' major aim is to reduce dependency on the dollar as the world's reserve currency and engine of trade and replace it with the Chinese renminbi, although the dollar still finances 80 percent of international transactions.4
China has doubled its military budget since Xi came to power and is accelerating its development of hypersonic missiles, AI, biotechnology and increasing its supply of nuclear and maritime weapons. They expect to be able to win a war over Taiwan by 2027.5
Internal conditions
The domestic Chinese economy involves state-owned and private companies, with 60 percent of output coming from the private sector, although the state does play a major role in regulating private capital and in industrial planning. This system has encouraged huge levels of corruption, in which capitalists offer high-stakes rewards to powerful officials in exchange not just for speed but also for access to exclusive, lucrative privileges, including cheap credit, land grants, monopoly rights, procurement contracts, tax breaks, and the like.6 U.S. intelligence says Xi Jinping and his family have $1 billion in assets, and that 65 percent of all government officials receive income through bribery or graft.7 Production is based on what can be sold, commodity production, not what people need, as would be the case under communism.
Perhaps most telling is how China treats its own 725 million workers. Each worker must have an officially registered household location, and anyone living outside this area forsakes many social services. Nonetheless, about 300 million rural workers have migrated to the cities seeking work and face discrimination in housing, employment, health care and education. Even for urban workers who do have health insurance it has very limited coverage for out-patient care or medications. Schooling is free for only nine years and unavailable to migrants. For the past 30 years there have been many labor strikes, in which the police always intervene to suppress the workers. The legal right to strike was removed in 1982, and the only legal union today is one run by the (fake left) Communist Party.8 Wages are on average about one fourth of those in the U.S., and, although it is illegal, many workers are required to work 12 hour days, six days a week.9
Thus we see that China has become a wholly capitalist nation, albeit one that runs more efficiently than the U.S. because of state oversight and control and is outpacing the U.S. in production and international investment. For the Chinese working class, a new communist consciousness and organization is necessary to defeat capitalism, just as in all nations of the world. It may be that the inevitable future conflict between the U.S. and China will lead workers in both nations, indeed all nations, to refuse to fight their bosses' wars and organize themselves to build an enduring communist society. We fight for the Progressive Labor Party to be the international party that unites workers in this life and death struggle.
1.https://www.facebook.com/groups/457920714226660/posts/27202332456025456/
2. https://x.com/econovisuals/status/1947272850890797345
4. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/what-brics-group-and-why-it-expanding
6. https://www.chinadebate.com/chinamacroreporter/how-corruption-powers-chinas-economy
