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VOA reports that President Assad's fall in Syria has been a setback for China's Belt and Road Initiative. However, Chinese strategist Professor Wang Xiangsui argues that it could create new opportunities for the BRI in the Middle East and potentially accelerate the decline of U.S. unipolar dominance.  On November 8, Syrian opposition forces captured the capital, Damascus, marking the end of President Bashar al-Assad’s government. On the same day, Voice of America Chinese quickly declared that “China has lost an ally,” claiming that China’s Belt and Road investments in Syria would suffer losses amounting to tens of billions of dollars. However, Chinese strategist Professor Wang Xiangsui argues that VOA’s assessment is entirely wrong. He believes the Syrian crisis is instead offer new opportunities for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Middle East and could even accelerate the collapse of U.S. unipolar hegemony. Firstly, Syria’s strategic value to the BRI is overhyped by the Western Media. Syria is not located along the overland route of BRI. Additionally, Syria is not a major oil-producing country. According to British Petroleum’s statistics, Syria accounted for only 0.05% of global oil production as of 2016. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that bilateral trade between China and Syria amounted to just $358 million in 2023. In comparison, China’s total import-export trade volume in 2023 was $5.94 trillion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. This means Syria’s role in China’s foreign trade is negligible, with a direct impact of only 0.006%. Clearly, VOA has grossly exaggerated the implications of Syria’s situation for China’s overseas interests.  Secondly, the upheaval in Syria could strengthen Iran-China cooperation. In March 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-Year Comprehensive Cooperation Plan. However, progress in certain areas, particularly the oil and gas industries, has been slow due to disagreements over pricing and infrastructure development. Three years ago, Iran was reluctant to engage in full-scale confrontation with the U.S. or military conflict with Israel. But the civil war in Syria has fragmented Iran’s sphere of influence, cornering it in terms of core national interests. As direct conflict with the U.S. and Israel becomes increasingly inevitable, Iran’s need for collaboration with China will grow, creating greater urgency for substantive cooperation. This is advantageous for advancing the Belt and Road Initiative. Previously, one of the biggest challenges for the BRI was that China needed to explain to the Middle Eastern countries that the benefits of changing the status quo outweigh the risks, leaving it in a passive position during negotiations. Now, if the turmoil in Syria heightens the sense of urgency among international communities, they will be more inclined to cooperate with China, which would significantly benefit the BRI’s expansion. Thirdly, Israel’s opportunism in Syria will deepen U.S. entanglement in the Middle East, hastening the decline of U.S. hegemony. According to Al Jazeera, on December 8, Israeli forces occupied the Syrian-controlled area of the Golan Heights. This marks the first open entry of Israeli ground forces into Syrian territory since the Yom Kippur War. Such a military venture is bound to exacerbate tensions between Israel and the Arab world. In the next four years, this could trigger more conflicts, creating additional aid burdens for the U.S. as it supports Israel. Meanwhile, the White House will have no choice but to foot the bill, as the Trump administration has been dominated by pro-Israel officials. Future U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are staunch Israel supporters, and even Trump’s daughter is married into a Jewish family. From Rome to Britain, every empire’s decline begins with a mismatch between ambition and capability. Trump recognized that spreading resources thin in Ukraine and Israel would weaken the U.S. in its competition with China and sought to refocus through his “America First” policy. However, Israel’s opportunism in Syria will make it impossible for him to realise this vision, as Israel will always take precedence over the U.S. in the current administration. Prof. Wang points out that there will be no second “American Century.” What follows will not be a “Chinese Century” either but rather a truly multipolar world. What we are witnessing in Syria is an ulcer in the U.S.-led world order. With Syria now fragmented among various factions, we are witnessing the collapse of the old order, which has yet to give rise to a new one. During this transitional phase, nations have significant opportunities. However, it is evident that multipolarity will emerge as the dominant global trend. References https://www.voachinese.com/a/a-look-at-sino-syrian-relations-upon-the-collapse-of-the-assad-regime-20241208/7891788.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110615211258/http://www.bp.com/assets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2011/STAGING/local_assets/pdf/statistical_review_of_world_energy_full_report_2011.pdf https://www.mfa.gov.cn/web/gjhdq_676201/gj_676203/yz_676205/1206_677100/sbgx_677104/ https://www.mfa.gov.cn/web/gjhdq_676201/gj_676203/yz_676205/1206_677172/sbgx_677176/ http://big5.www.gov.cn/gate/big5/www.gov.cn/lianbo/fabu/202404/content_6945047.htm https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/8/israel-seizes-buffer-zone-in-syrias-golan-heights-after-al-assad-falls AuthorWang Xiangsui This article was produced by The China Academy. Archives December 2024
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 In 1989 Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed that we had arrived at the “end of history.” Capitalist liberal “democracy” was cherished as the culmination point of humanity’s development, proven in the defeat of “communism” it achieved in the so-called “Cold War.” More than three decades have passed and that world which was supposed to be final is itself coming to an end. It was an interesting “end of history,” where the U.S. waged uninterrupted wars in the global South (especially the Middle East) which took the lives of tens of millions, and which displaced many more.  However, it is clear to even the most dogmatic defenders of the old unipolar world that we are in a period of revolutionary transition. The logic which animates geopolitical relations is being radically altered. The days were the U.S. unilaterally imposed its will on the world are coming to an end. Today a new, multipolar geopolitical logic is being born, and it is governed by a mutual respect between nations and civilizations, and an intercourse of trade based on win-win, not win-lose, relations. It is fair to say, then, that we are living in the “end of the end of history.” This should not have been unexpected for anyone with the slightest awareness of history itself. History shows that development is an ever-going phenomenon; it demonstrates that everything that comes to be, irrespective of how final and secure it may at first appear, will eventually, as Goethe said, “perish wretchedly.” The “end of history” was never the “end of history.” It was simply a period were the U.S.’s imperialist power could go unchallenged by any formidable rival. The “end of history” was nothing but a short interlude in a global struggle against Western imperialism, wherein the U.S. held on to a ceaselessly weakening unipolar dominance. This short interlude provided the time for a resurgence of global powers that could challenge the U.S.’s plan for a “New American Century.” These new global powers, such as China, Russia, Iran, etc., are working upon the legacy of rich ancient civilizations, whose millennium-long cultural insights and experience they have managed to incorporate into their rapid modernization. It has been a modernization, importantly, which has been free of the perils which accomplished Western capitalist “modernization,” namely, the genocide of the Amerindian populations, the African slave trade, and centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. Internally, far from witnessing the extreme national inequalities which accompanied growth in the capitalist West, these civilizations have managed, as China says, to promote “common prosperity,” to greater or lesser extents, amongst their people. It has genuinely been a tide that has lifted all, or at least most, boats.  For the German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, “the History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom… Freedom is the sole truth of Spirit.” Fukuyama’s phrase on the “end of history” was first uttered by Hegel, who proclaimed that the “History of the World travels from East to West… Europe is absolutely the end of History.” If history is understood as the development of the self-consciousness of the concept of freedom, as Hegel understood it, then “the East knew only that One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; [and] the German-Christian World knows that All are free.” In terms of conceptual recognition, the West today continues to recognize that “all are free.” In fact, it precisely carries out its imperialist operations around the world under the auspices of promoting freedom, democracy, and equality. It uses the concepts of freedom, democracy, and equality to entrench the most profound real unfreedoms, tyrannies, and inequalities in the world. Far from allowing the self-consciousness of the concept of freedom be the means through which actual freedom is realized, a superficial, merely formal recognition of freedom is sustained precisely to reproduce unfreedom in actuality. Furthermore, through its mass media and indoctrinating educational system, it prevents its population from even accessing the appropriate lexicon through which to communicate such unfreedom. The unfreedoms experienced can never be an inherent feature of the system; ultimate responsibility is always externalized to some pariah “other.” The unfreedoms of the American people are thus blamed on China, Russia, Iran, etc., and not on the U.S. capitalist system that produced them. In doing so, a dual effect is produced: 1) blame for the real unfreedom is exported to a convenient “other” who challenges U.S. imperial power, and 2) in externalizing the responsibility for your conditions of unfreedom, the limitations to your power appear merely external, i.e., you continue to operate as if you are still free, but “blocked off” from realizing such freedoms by the boogeyman “other.” Paradoxically, this predicament was eloquently expressed by a Western philosopher who always manages to make support for the imperialist West seem “progressive,” Slavoj Žižek, who noted that “we ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.” Instead of thinking about freedom’s relationship with historical development as conceptual, we should think of it in terms of actuality. The same Hegel which suggests that we think of historical development as the universalizing of the concept of freedom, also equips us with a concrete conception of universality which readily provides us with the tools to affect this turn. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel writes that “Man knows what he is, and only when he does so is he actually what he is. Without this, knowing reason is nothing, nor is freedom.” We can be as self-conscious of our freedom as we want, but if there isn’t actual freedom in our lives, that self-consciousness of freedom is empty and hollow. It is merely freedom in form, without content. Therefore, Hegel writes that “Freedom can, however, be also abstract freedom without necessity, which false freedom is self-will, and for that reason it is self-opposed, unconsciously limited, an imaginary freedom which is free in form alone.” This is the empty, indeterminate freedom we have in the West. As the French philosopher Michel Clouscard articulated, it is a freedom where “everything is allowed but nothing is possible.” Freedom is always determinate; it is precisely the recognition of necessity, and the ability to positively act upon such a recognition. This recognition of necessity, in the contemporary social conjuncture, is fundamentally a recognition of the laws of social development shaping our social trajectory. If we are not aware of the real systemic forces that produce the changes we observe in our world, we neither have the recognition of necessity nor the ability to affect our trajectory. This is what the ideological apparatuses of the West, the media, the schools, and the entertainment industry, provide the current social order, namely, the ability to prevent people from recognizing necessity. Even in times of deep social crisis – such as the crisis of legitimacy prevalent in the U.S. – the institutions of knowledge production provide ready-made alternative explanations for the reality at hand. As mentioned earlier, there is always an “other” upon which blame could be placed. This, therefore, systematically produces a recognition of false necessity, and hence, an unfreedom experienced as freedom. If we understand history as the history of the actuality of freedom, it is evident that we are far from its “end.” However, the collapse of the Western capitalist order that once fooled Hegel into seeing in its abstract proclamation of freedom the “end of history” (a mistake much more unforgiveable when it occurs almost two centuries after with Fukuyama), is a positive step in humanity’s trajectory towards real freedom. The recognition of our recognition of a false necessity, therefore, stands as an important mediational moment for our recognition of real necessity. Multipolarity is opening the world to what Marx called the “realm of freedom” by recognizing the laws of capitalist social development, and actively intervening to undermine them. This is, fundamentally, what is at stake when countries like China, Russia, Iran, etc. place social and common good over and above the accumulation of capital. That supremacy of capital which warrants labeling the system capital-ISM is being actively undermined by the multipolar world. While this change, as Hegel said, “imports dissolution, [it] involves at the same time the rise of a new life.” The new world being born, as economist Oscar Rojas has described it, is premised on international relations between “associated free producers,” i.e., sovereign countries engaging in win-win geopolitical relations, and is leading humanity into a “communitarian mode of production,” where the aims of socially carried out production are not the accumulation of capital in private hands, but social utility and benefit. Hegel was right, then, about the sun of world-history setting in the West. But its setting has long passed. Today humanity is in an astronomical dawn. Once again, the sun is rising in the East. While it is not fully out, its light has become visible. A new day is here. AuthorCarlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2024) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. This article was published originally in The China Academy. Archives October 2024  In leading foreign policy magazines across the United States, the rise of China is treated as a threat which the U.S. must effectively challenge. Since at least President Barack Obama’s 2011 “pivot to Asia,” American foreign policy has been crafted towards “containing” China, and “de-linking” it from the global economy. As has been historically the case for all empires, its treatment of its up-and-coming competition has required various tactics of dehumanization. In the eyes of their population, they need the competitor to appear as a barbaric “other,” a being fully foreign to everything their people hold sacred. This is how hybrid wars against the “otherized” country are legitimated in the native population; fear of one’s way of life being threatened drives people who have no real, material interest in supporting these policies into supporting them. The “pivot to Asia” has been conjoined with a healthy dose of Sinophobia. Even the propaganda spewed about China itself presupposes orientalist tropes about the “backwards” Eastern peoples more predisposed to despotism than the “enlightened” Westerners. Without this ideological basis, the media’s job of convincing Americans that China is ran by an autocratic “dictator,” who somehow calls all the shots in a country of 1.4 billion people, would be significantly harder. It is a predisposed dehumanization of the Chinese that premises the acceptance of baseless claims about a “Uyghur genocide,” for which those who have plundered the predominantly Muslim countries of the Middle East for a century have never provided evidence for. But is there any basis in this otherization? Is the “Chinese dream” and way of life really that different from the ideals that regular American people hold as common sense? All evidence points to the contrary. In many ways, the reality Chinese people experience with their socialist democracy lives up to the American ideals far better than the reality Americans experience in the U.S. itself. The most influential American thinkers and leaders in American history, those whose insights have crystallized into the common sense of many Americans, have all been distrustful of those who consider it their main purpose to simply accumulate capital at the expense of society. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, held that there was a fundamental distinction between the aristocratic and democratic man: the former is rooted in big business elitism, the latter in the people’s will. Jefferson considered that if the aristocratic man came into power, the American experiment in democracy would be threatened. Hindsight has shown how right he was! Abraham Lincoln, for instance, held that “labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” For Lincoln, the substance of the American project was “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as he eloquently stated in his Gettysburg Address. He would be disappointed to see how today we have government of, by, and for big corporations, investment firms, and banks. In the 20th century, no American thinkers are as influential as the polymath, John Dewey, and the brilliant Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. While every year American politicians pay lip service to Dr. King, and while Dewey’s literal nickname was “America’s philosopher of democracy,” what is often left out of the conversation was how both were vehemently critical of how America was failing to live up to its democratic ideals, and how, if it wanted to make these ideals real, it required some form of socialism. Dr. King argued that “if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.” China’s efforts in lifting 800 million out of poverty and eliminating absolute poverty would align with Dr. King’s understanding of what is required for authentic American democracy far greater than the condition most American working people live in, more than 60% of which are a lost paycheck away from homelessness and most of which are drowning in debt-slavery. Likewise, for Dewey we must stop thinking about democracy as something “institutional and external;’” instead, we should treat democracy as a “way of life,” one governed by the “belief in the common man.” For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice. It has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders would be realized “only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.” It is in China, where capital is forced to serve the people and not the other way around, where this vision is most plentifully realized. Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Chinese president Xi Jinping, who asserted that “democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.” As Xi Jinping has noted, If the people are awakened only at the time of voting and go into dormancy afterward; if the people only listen to smashing slogans during election campaigns but have no say afterward; if the people are only favored during canvassing but are left out after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy. One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. The ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should look anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the Declaration of Independence, and to the leading theorists of our country, who have developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy is. Instead of accepting the lies U.S. politicians and media spew, all of which are aimed are “otherizing” and “demonizing” China, the American people must realize that it is China where the American ideals are best embodied. Professor Zhang Weiwei is, without a doubt, correct to point out that Lincoln’s dictum “of, by, and for the people,” is much more substantially realized in China. Instead of accepting the easily disprovable lies of U.S. officials, who in condemning China are themselves standing in an anti-American position, the American people should fight to realize Lincoln’s vision. When our government is actually of, by, and for the people, the conditions will be present for us seeing China’s rise not as a threat we must contain, but an effort we can applaud. Ultimately, if Americans are faithful to their democratic creed, they will realize that we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind. AuthorCarlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2024) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. This article was published originally in The China Academy. Archives September 2024 9/18/2024 Front Row at Putin's Speech: Here Are What Will Shatter Your Perceptions By: Zhang WeiweiRead NowThe St. Petersburg International Economic Forum began in 1997. Since 2006, the Russian president has attended and spoken at the forum every year. In 2024, more than 21,000 people from 139 countries and regions participated in the forum, signing over 980 agreements with a total value of 520 billion yuan. Professor Zhang Weiwei was deeply inspired by President Putin's keynote speech. At the start of this June, invited by The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, I attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia, a large-scale economic forum of utmost importance in Russia. The focus of the forum was on “The Formation of New Centers of Growth as The Cornerstone of a Multipolar World.” More than 12,000 members of various professions from more than 100 countries attended the forum. Russian President Putin made a keynote speech, of which some opinions are very impressive.  First of all his brief on the global trend, where he expressed that all countries in the world are enhancing sovereignty in three aspects: national sovereignty, cultural value sovereignty, and economic sovereignty. I find this inspiring. Secondly, he made a judgment on the world economic situation, stating that China has already emerged as the top economy globally. Although he did not explicitly mention the second-ranked economy, it is widely understood to be the United States. This is what I often express on Chinese television programs., China’s economy, measured by purchasing power parity, surpassed that of the US as early as 2014, a decade ago. Putin then discussed how, according to purchasing power parity, India is poised to become the third-largest economy. He also emphasized the high birth rate, relatively low level of urbanization, and rapid economic growth in the South Asia region where India is situated. Thirdly, regarding the Russian economy, he stated that Russia’s objective is to become the fourth-largest economy in the world. He then spontaneously mentioned that the World Bank had recently revised its statistics, indicating that Russia had surpassed Japan to claim the fourth spot in terms of economic scale, based on purchasing power parity. The audience erupted into enthusiastic applause at this announcement, prompting Putin to advise everyone to maintain a modest demeanor. He emphasized, “We have now overtaken Japan and Germany, albeit by a slight margin, which we aim to sustain and expand. It is imperative for us to ensure high-speed, high-quality growth in the long term, considering that other nations, such as Indonesia, are rapidly advancing with their growing population and swift economic progress.” Putin referenced data released by the World Bank at the end of May this year: as of the end of 2023, the global economic rankings by purchasing power parity are as follows: China in first place with 35 trillion dollars, the United States in second with 27.4 trillion dollars, India in third with 14.6 trillion dollars, Russia in fourth with 6.45 trillion dollars, and Japan in fifth with 6.3 trillion dollars. Based on these figures, China’s economy is approximately equivalent to 5.5 times that of Japan and 128% of the United States’. The shift towards utilizing purchasing power parity as a measurement is significant for Russia, as it is perceived as a more realistic indicator. Historically, Russia had been using nominal GDP calculated by official exchange rates, resulting in a significant underestimation of its economic size and portraying a position of weakness to the West. This miscalculation led to five expansions of NATO towards the east and continuous humiliation of Russia. Presently, Russian leaders predominantly rely on purchasing power parity standards to evaluate their economic standing. Then Putin continued on the status of Russia’s economic development and structural adjustment, with which he pointed out Russia’s GDP growth rate was 3.6% last year, above the world average. He especially mentioned how this growth comes mainly from non-resource areas. The Russian economy was, by the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse and under the influence of neo-liberalism ideology, driven afar from reality, and relied on selling resources for a long time. After Putin took presidency the situation changed. According to himself, in 2023, non-resource industries like manufacturing, architecture, logistics, information, agriculture, and electricity have grown by over 45.5%. Some claim that Russia is only getting a higher growth rate for its war-time economy, yet from our own eyes we have seen these years Russia rebuilt. A large batch of Chinese enterprises are actively investing in Russia as well. Although Russia is bearing over 15000 various Western sanctions, the Russian market is still prospering, essentials are well-supplied, and many goods from China, including cars, phones, and appliances are seen all around. Putin also talked about how Russia’s exporting commerce has grown immensely, and the share of “poisonous currencies” from unfriendly nations has decreased by half. Over 40% of exchanges use Russian rubles. The concept of “poisonous currency” was first raised among Russian scholars to describe Western currencies like US dollars, now it is also widely used among Russian leaders like Putin himself. This shows Russia’s unique understanding of Western currencies like dollars, and worth our thinking as well. During the speech, Putin also stressed that global development has shifted its center from Europe to Asia, “we should get closer to these centers of development”. Russia’s “Turning East” is not a temporary move, but a progress that is happening around the world. After his speech, the esteemed Russian political scholar Sergey Karaganov posed an intriguing question to Putin. He mentioned that Peter the Great had intentionally constructed St. Petersburg as a gateway to Europe, securing his place in history. Karaganov asked why Putin couldn’t make a similar decision to establish a grand city in the Far East. In response, Putin stated that Russia could explore the possibility of creating a third metropolis in Russia, emphasizing that such endeavors should not rely solely on administrative directives but rather on the cultivation of appealing conditions. Putin explained that the development of St. Petersburg was driven by the economic hub being located in Europe at that time. With the global economic center now shifted to Asia, he emphasized the importance of Russia turning its focus towards Asia and vigorously advancing economic growth in the Far East. During his visit to China, Putin made a special trip to Harbin. The Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, also visited the Far East region of Russia, including Irkutsk. I see these visits as significant signals indicating the acceleration of cooperation between Russia and China in developing the Far East. During his visit to Irkutsk, Wang Yi remarked that China is actively advancing its modernization process in Chinese model while Russia is expediting the development of the Far East, presenting both countries with a historic opportunity for collaboration. Local partnerships play a crucial role in the China-Russia relationship. I personally believe that joint cooperation in the development of the Far East region will bring substantial benefits to both nations. From China’s perspective, this collaboration will enhance the long-term energy and resource security needed for China’s economic growth. From Russia’s standpoint, it will contribute to reshaping the spatial layout of the Russian economy, creating a new hub for economic growth. AuthorZhang Weiwei This article was produced by The China Academy. Archives September 2024 On China's top current affairs show, A prestigious China scholar Zhang Weiwei explores how the four pillars of Western hegemony—economic, technological, military, and ideological—are deeply shaken today. At a technological level, the rise of the non-Western world, particularly China, is striking. During this year’s March Two Sessions, our Minister of Science and Technology, Yin Hejun, informed both domestic and foreign journalists that China has achieved a significant number of original breakthroughs in fields such as quantum technology, integrated circuits, artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and new energy. The export growth rates of EV cars, lithium batteries, and photovoltaic components – collectively known as the “New Three” – are remarkably promising. The Wall Street Journal reported on this development with the headline “The World Is in for Another China Shock.” My friend forwarded me a fascinating blog post where the author made some intriguing points. The author mentioned that these “New Three” are truly formidable because China has managed to produce them at such a low cost, akin to the “rock-bottom prices.” Over the past three years of the pandemic, amidst US lockdowns and sanctions, China has been expanding its production capacity in a counter-cyclical manner, while the Western countries are moving towards deindustrialization. With high-interest rates in the US, Europe and Russia drifting apart, leading to soaring resource costs, one might wonder how their manufacturing sectors will fare. China’s next move is poised for a comprehensive breakthrough in the chip industry chain. Once achieved, it’s uncertain what headline the Wall Street Journal might come up with next. Could it be “The Shock of China’s Shock”? In the realm of military affairs, shortly after Biden took office, in August 2021, the US military made a hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. A chaotic scene unfolded at Kabul Airport as fleeing crowds chased planes on the runway, and Afghan individuals clinging to aircrafts tragically fell to their deaths. German President Steinmeier remarked that this harrowing situation at Kabul Airport was a disgrace for the United States and the Western world. Former US President Trump criticized Biden, stating, “This is the most embarrassing moment in our country’s history.” He added, “If China sees this, they must be delighted, the Chinese are laughing at us.” When asked about Trump’s comments, our Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying responded, “Is there even a need for us to laugh at?” In recent months, the Yemeni Houthi militia has been targeting British and American merchant vessels in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait under the guise of supporting the Palestinian people. Despite the deployment of US and UK warships for protection, the situation remains tense, with reports of British ships being sunk. The Houthi group continues to launch missiles at British and American vessels, causing concern over the US’s ability to contain the situation and maintain its military dominance. The American conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, went as far as suggesting on its website that if merchant ships from around the world start seeking protection from China instead of the US, it could signify a shift from the “American century” to the “Chinese century.” While the author expressed relief that Beijing has not yet taken on this role, it is a viewpoint that warrants serious consideration. In the realm of ideology, the soft power of the US and the West is declining at an accelerated pace. For a long time, the US has cloaked itself in the banners of “Democracy, Liberty, Human Rights”, employing deceptive tactics to incite “Color Revolutions” worldwide, resulting in political turmoil and economic decline in numerous nations. The “Arab Spring” that erupted around 2011 ultimately led to the fragmentation of Libya and Yemen, with Syria enduring devastating levels of destruction. International evaluations indicate that the “Arab Spring” inflicted approximately $900 billion in damages to the infrastructure of countries such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, forcing over 15 million people into refugee status. Ukraine, deeply immersed in Western ideology, has faced a tumultuous fate. The “Orange Revolution” in 2004 and the “Euromaidan Revolution” in 2014 have left their mark. During the chaos at Independence Square in Kyiv in 2014, then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland personally visited to support the pro-Western faction in Ukraine. However, this key figure behind the Ukrainian “Color Revolution” and the conflict with Russia has recently “resigned.” This move is widely seen as a sign of the failure of Biden’s Ukraine strategy. Sadly, the Ukrainian people, through what they believed to be democratic means, elected a leader who unquestioningly follows the US’s lead. The outcome is a land in ruins, with widespread devastation and despair. Personally, Ukraine gave me some special memories, because it was the 100th country I researched, and it was from July 17th to 21st, 2006. That was also my last stop in East Europe’s former Socialist countries. I have drawn a careful conclusion to my practical study: a non-western country or non-western region, if transplanted with a Western political system, could only yield one of two: from hope to disappointment, or from hope to desperation. Now the Western world itself is experiencing constantly from hope to disappointment, maybe some would even face desperation in the future. I remember on January 6th, after the riots on Capitol Hill, Richard Haas, the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, exclaimed in a post, “From now on, no one in the world will see, respect, fear, or rely on us America in the same way. If there is a starting date for the ‘post-American era,’ it is almost certainly today.”  This year the entire world shall witness American inferior democracy stepping lower into deteriorate. British media The Guardian posted an article on its website shows that over 80% of US citizens are worried about the American democratic system and future Political violence. It is one of the not much agreement the two parties may gather, that the US will get itself into such disaster. Great Britain is not so much better, the same media The Guardian quoted a poll on March showing that 79% of the participants think of British politicians as “non-listeners to average people’s opinions”, while 43% think “the UK is downfalling”. In conclusion, the four pillars of Western hegemony – Economic, Technological, Military, and Ideological – are deeply shaken today, and various reliable alternatives have emerged. Allow me to share a commentary we made shortly after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a fitting conclusion, showcasing the practicality of our assessment. At that time, I expressed: the conflict once again proves that the world has entered a “post-American era.” The age of US dominance as the sole superpower has ended, and the US can no longer dictate the course of the world. Consequently, a series of US-led institutional arrangements, including alliances like NATO and the status of the US dollar hegemony, may gradually decline. A truly multipolar international order will emerge through the dynamic interplay of revolution, reform, and turbulence. AuthorZhang Weiwei This article was produced by The China Academy. Archives September 2024  Originally published: Morning Star Online on July 5, 2024 by Roger McKenzie (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted Jul 10, 2024) THE Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang is at the geographical centre of Eurasia. The region borders eight other countries which makes it a vital part of Chinese plans for the greater integration of Eurasia and the westward opening up of this nation of 1.4 billion people. The Comprehensive Bonded Zone in the city of Kashi is central to co-ordinating the booming trade links that China has established with its immediate neighbours. Xinjiang, one of the largest regions in China, is a gateway to Russia, India, Pakistan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. It occupies around 643,000 square miles of China–a space larger than six Britains. Its sparse population of approximately 25 million is mainly Muslim and made up of around 65 different ethnic groups including Chinese Han, Uighurs, Kazakhs and Hui, among others. I lost count of the number of mosques that I saw during my recent trip. I visited a thriving Islamic Centre in the city of Urumqi–which has received millions in funding from the Chinese government for its development to teach its around 1,000 students. I had the honour of sitting in the mosque’s main hall attached to the centre alongside the imam and hearing him talk about the support the centre had received from the government. I also visited the magnificent and extremely busy Id Kah Mosque in the city of Kashi. Both times the imams took the time from their busy schedules to speak about how grateful they and worshippers at the mosque are for the support provided by the government. They told me about how the right to worship any religion is considered a private matter in China and protected in law. That’s why it provides funds to a wide range of religious bodies representing Muslims, Buddhists and Christians among others. None of this is recognised in the West. Instead tall tales are told about supposed widespread religious persecution. In particular Western politicians and their stenographers in the corporate media continue to spin untruths about the treatment of religious minorities. To be crystal clear: at no time did I witness any attempt to block anyone from being able to worship according to the Islamic faith or, for that matter, any other religion. I heard no criticism of the government over religious persecution from senior religious figures or anyone else I met during my visit. I was never stopped from speaking with anyone in any of the large crowds of people that I found myself in across the region. Having made the effort to actually visit five cities in 10 days in the region rather than pontificate from thousands of miles away, I can honestly say that for a country that supposedly routinely oppresses ethnic minorities China seems to spend an inordinate amount of time celebrating them. By that, I don’t mean the half-arsed patronising so-called celebration of diversity that now appears customary across Britain. Leading figures in Britain trip over themselves to take a knee and say how much black lives matter to them but continue to do nothing about racism in their organisations. It doesn’t look to me like a Black History Month-type gig where a big show is made for a short tokenistic period and then ignored for the rest of the time. Talking up the richness of the region’s cultural diversity wasn’t just an isolated thing in Xinjiang–it was everywhere. Celebrations of the Islamic culture were everywhere for anyone to see. I can already hear some saying that either I wasn’t looking hard enough or I was having the wool pulled over my eyes. I did look hard and I don’t believe an elaborate hoax was being played on me. I spoke with lots of people in private with no restrictions placed on me whatsoever. In fact, my dreadlocks, and I dare say, the colour of my skin, meant I was a target of curiosity, especially among the young, many of who wanted to come and chat and have a photo taken with me. That was frankly the most uncomfortable thing about the trip! What I saw was lots of people going about their business in much the same way as I have seen people trying to do in many parts of the world. I met many Communist Party officials who were questioned over the allegations made against them and their country. All of them said the only way to counter the propaganda war being waged against them was for people to come and see for themselves. They told me how hard they were working to open up the region to more tourism so that people could experience this beautiful area but also so more people could bear witness to the truth about them. So why is this propaganda war being waged against China in general and in particular against Xinjiang? The geographical position of the region provides the answer. As the centre of the Silk Road renaissance, the region will be the focal point of Chinese trade and its economic heartbeat. It means the continuing economic growth of China is disproportionately linked to Xinjiang. Its trade routes through its eight neighbours to its wider partners will be critical to sell Chinese-made goods as well as to buy the resources needed to continue to power the country’s economy. The U.S. is the world’s leading economy and wants to keep it that way. Its doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance asserts that it will use any means necessary to maintain the pre-eminence of U.S. capital. I think we can take this to mean that the U.S. will not hesitate to spread misinformation about China. After all, it’s not as if the U.S. does not have form for this type of behaviour. They have been doing it for years, particularly across Africa and Central America where they buy organisations to ferment internal dissent against governments deemed not to be compliant. Sprinkled with an always unhealthy dose of sinophobia the move by the U.S. to undermine the reputation of China has largely economic foundations and false allegations of mistreatment against ethnic minorities–particularly the Uighurs–are completely without foundation. On the contrary, there seems to me to be far more evidence of the Chinese at a national and regional level actively celebrating cultural diversity as well as striving to put in place the economic prosperity that looks as though it is undermining attempts by terrorist groups–likely funded by the West–to sow discontent in Xinjiang. I will talk about this and the allegations of forced labour in some detail in the second part of this three series about my visit to China. In the meantime, to anyone reading this article in disbelief and who believes that either I am lying or have been the victim of what would be a truly elaborate hoax my suggestion is: go and see for yourself. It’s a long way away but I honestly believe you will be surprised by the wonderful vibrant people and cities that will greet you. This is the first of three eyewitness articles from Morning Star international editor Roger McKenzie on his recent visit to China. AuthorRoger McKenzie This article was produced by Morning Star. Archives July 2024 2/28/2024 China’s economy is still far out growing the U.S. – contrary to Western media “fake news. By: John RossRead Now GDP data for China, the U.S., and the other G7 countries for the year 2023 has now been published. This makes possible an accurate assessment of China’s, the U.S., and major economies performance—both in terms of China’s domestic goals and international comparisons. There are two key reasons this is important.
The factual situation is that China’s economy, as it heads into 2024, has far outgrown all other major comparable economies. This reality is in total contradiction to claims in the U.S. media. This in turn, therefore, demonstrates the extraordinary distortions and falsifications in the U.S. media about this situation. It confirms that, with a few honourable exceptions, Western economic journalism is primarily dominated by, in some cases quite extraordinary, “fake news” rather than any objective analysis. Both for understanding the economic situation, and the degree of distortion in the U.S. media, it is therefore necessary to establish the facts of current international developments. China’s growth targets Starting with China’s strategic domestic criteria, it has set clear goals for its economic development over the next period which will complete its transition from a “developing” to a “high-income” economy by World Bank international standards. In precise numbers, in 2020’s discussion around the 14th Five Year plan, it was concluded that for China by 2035: “It is entirely possible to double the total or per capita income”. Such a result would mean China decisively overcoming the alleged “middle income trap” and, as the 20th Party Congress stated, China reaching the level of a “medium-developed country by 2035”. In contrast, a recent series of Western reports, widely used in anti-China propaganda, claim that China’s economy will experience sharp slowdown and will fail to reach its targets. Self-evidently which of these outcomes is achieved is of fundamental importance for China’s entire national rejuvenation and construction of socialism—as Xi Jinping stated, China’s: “path takes economic development as the central task, and brings along economic, political, cultural, social, ecological and other forms of progress.” But the outcome also affects the entire global economy—for example, a recent article by the chair of Rockefeller International, published in the Financial Times, made the claim that what was occurring was China’s “economy… losing share to its peers”. The Wall Street journal asserted: “China’s economy limps into 2024” whereas in contrast the U.S. was marked by a “resilient domestic economy.” The British Daily Telegraph proclaimed China has a “stagnant economy”. The Washington Post headlined that: “Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery” with the article claiming: “in the United States… the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners.” This is allegedly because: “Through the end of September, it was more than 7 percent larger than before the pandemic. That was more than twice Japan’s gain and far better than Germany’s anaemic 0.3 percent increase.” Numerous similar claims could be quoted from the U.S. media. U.S. use of “fake news”Reading U.S. media claims on these issues, and comparing them to the facts. it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that what is involved is deliberate “fake news” for propaganda purposes—as will be seen, the only alternative explanation is that it is disgracefully sloppy journalism that should not appear in supposedly “quality” media. For example, it is simply absurdly untrue, genuinely “fake news”, that the U.S. is “outperforming all of its major trading partners”, or that China has a “stagnant economy”. Anyone who bothers to consult the facts, an elementary requirement for a journalist, can easily find out that such claims are entirely false—as will be shown in detail below. To first give an example regarding U.S. domestic reports, before dealing with international aspects, a distortion of U.S. economic growth in 2023 was so widely reported in the U.S. media that it is again hard to avoid the conclusion that this was a deliberate misrepresentation to present an exaggerated view of U.S. economic performance. Factually, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. official statistics agency for economic growth, reported that U.S. GDP in 2023 rose by 2.5%—for comparison China’s GDP increased by 5.2%. But a series of U.S. media outlets, starting with the Wall Street Journal, instead proclaimed that the “U.S. economy grew 3.1% over the last year”. This “fake news” on U.S. growth was created by statistical “cherry picking”. In this case comparing only the last quarter of 2023 with the last quarter of 2022, which was an increase of 3.1%, but not by taking GDP growth in the year as a whole “last year”. But U.S. growth in the earlier part of 2023 was far weaker than in the 4th quarter—year on year growth in the 1st quarter was only 1.7% and in the 2nd quarter only 2.4%. Taking into account this weak growth in the first part of the year, and stronger growth in the second, U.S. growth for the year as a whole was only 2.5%—not 3.1%. As it is perfectly easy to look up the actual annual figure, which was precisely published by the U.S. statistical authorities, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this was a deliberate distortion in the U.S. media to falsely present a higher U.S. growth rate in 2023 than the reality. It may be noted that even if U.S. GDP growth had been 3.1% then China’s was much higher at 5.2%. But the real data makes it transparently clear that China’s economy grew more than twice as fast as the U.S. in 2023—showing at a glance that claims that the U.S. is “outperforming all of its major trading partners”, or that China has a “stagnant economy” were entirely “fake news”. Many more examples of U.S. media false claims could be given, but the best way to see the overall situation is to systematically present the overall facts of growth in the major economies. What China has to do to achieve its 2035 goalsTurning first to assessing China’s economic performance, compared to its own strategic goals of doubling GDP and per capita GDP between 2020 and 2035, it should be noted that in 2022 China’s population declined by 0.1% and this fall is expected to continue—the UN projects China’s population will decline by an average 0.1% a year between 2020 and 2035. Therefore, in economic growth terms, the goal of doubling GDP growth to 2035 is slightly more challenging than the per capita target and will be concentrated on here—if China’stotal GDP goal is achieved then the per capita GDP one will necessarily be exceeded. To make an international comparison of China’s growth projections compared with the U.S., the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), responsible for the official growth projections for the U.S. economy on which its government’s policies rely, estimates there will be 1.8% annual average U.S. GDP growth between 2023 and 2023—with this falling to 1.6% from 2034 onwards. This figure is slightly below the current U.S. 12-year long term annual average GDP growth of 2.3%—12 being the number of years from 2023 to 2035. To avoid any suggestion of bias against the U.S., and in favour of China, in international comparisons here the higher U.S. number of 2.3% will be used. The results of such figures are that if China hits its growth target for 2035, and the U.S. continues to grow at 2.3%, then between 2020 and 2035 China’s economy will grow by 100% and the U.S. by 41%—see Figure 1. Therefore, from 2020 to 2035, China’s economy would grow slightly more than two and a half times as fast as the U.S.  The strategic consequences of China’s economic growth rate The international implications of any such growth outcomes were succinctly summarised by Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times. If China’s economy continues to grow substantially faster than Western ones, and it achieves the status of a “medium-developed country by 2035”, then, in addition to achieving high domestic living standards, China’s will become by far the world’s largest economy. As Wolf put it: “The implications can be seen in quite a simple way. According to the IMF, China’s gross domestic product per head (measured at purchasing power) was 28 per cent of U.S. levels in 2022. This is almost exactly half of Poland’s relative GDP per head… Now, suppose its [China’s] relative GDP per head doubled, to match Poland’s. Then its GDP would be more than double that of the U.S. and bigger than that of the U.S. and EU together.” By 2035 such a process would not be completed on the growth rates already given, and measuring by Wolf’s chosen measure of purchasing power parities (PPPs) China’s economy by 2035 would be 60% bigger than that of the U.S. But even that would make China by far the world’s largest economy. Wolf equally accurately notes that the only way that such an outcome would be prevented from occurring is if China’s economy slows down to the growth rate of a Western economy such as the U.S. Clearly, if China’s economic growth slows to that of a Western economy, then, naturally, China will never catch up with the West—it will necessarily simply stay the same distance behind. Therefore. as Wolf accurately puts it the outcomes are: What is the economic future of China? Will it become a high-income economy and so, inevitably, the largest in the world for an extended period, or will it be stuck in the ‘middle income’ trap, with growth comparable to that of the U.S.? The progress in achieving China’s strategic economic goalsTurning to the precise figure required to achieve China’s 2035 target, China’s goal of doubling GDP required average annual growth of at least 4.7% a year between 2020 and 2035. So far China, as Figure 1 shows, is ahead of this goal—annual average growth in 2020-2022 was 5.7%, meaning that from 2023-2035 annual average 4.6% growth is now required. China’ 5.2% GDP increase in 2023 therefore once again exceeded the required 4.6% growth rate to achieve its 2035 goal—as shown in Figure 1. From 2020 to 2023 the required total increase in China’s GDP to hit its 2035 target was 14.9%, whereas in fact its growth was 17.5%. This is in line with the 45-year record since 1978’s Reform and Opening Up, during which entire period the medium/long term targets set by China have always been exceeded. Therefore. to summarise, there is no sign whatever in 2023, or indeed in the period since 2020, that China will fail to meet its target of doubling GDP between 2020 and 2035—China is ahead of this target. Such a 4.6% growth rate would easily ensure China becomes a high-income economy by World Bank criteria well before 2035—the present criteria for this being per capita income of $13,846. It should be noted, as discussed in in detail below, that a clear international conclusion flows from this necessary 4.6% annual average growth rate for China to achieve its strategic goals. It means that China must continue to grow much faster than the Western economies throughout this period to 2035—that is in line with China’s current trend. However, if China were to slow down to the growth rate of a Western economy, then it will fail to achieve its strategic goals to 2035, may not succeed in becoming a high income economy, and will necessarily remain the same distance behind the West as now. The implications of this will be considered below. Systematic comparisons not “cherry picking”Having considered China’s performance in 2023 terms of achieving its own domestic strategic goals we will now turn to actual results and a comparison of China with other international economies. This immediately shows the factual absurdity, the pure “fake news” of claims such as that the U.S. has “the world’s best recovery“ and “the United States… is outperforming all of its major trading partners.” On the contrary China has continued to far outgrow the U.S. economy not only in 2023 but in the entire last period. China’s outperformance of the other major Western economies, the G7, is even greater that of the U.S. Entirely misleading claims regarding such international comparisons, used for propaganda as opposed to serious analysis, are sometimes made because data is taken from extremely short periods of time which are taken out of context—unrepresentative statistical “cherry picking” or, as Lenin put it, a statistical “dirty business”. Such a method is always erroneous, but it is particularly so during periods which were affected by the impact of the Covid pandemic as these caused extremely violent short-term economic fluctuations related to lock downs and similar measures. China’s assertion of superior growth is based on its overall performance, not an absurd claim that it outperforms every other economy, on every single measure, in every single period! Therefore, in making international comparisons, the most suitable period to take is that for since the beginning of the pandemic up to the latest available GDP data. As comparison of China with the U.S. is the most commonly made one, and particularly concentrated on by the U.S. media campaign, this will be considered first. China’s and the U.S.’s growth in 2023 It was already noted that in 2023 China’s GDP grew by 5.2% and the U.S. by 2.5%—China’s economy growing more than twice as fast as the U.S. But it should also be observed that 2023 was an above trend growth year for the U.S.—U.S. annual average growth over a 12-year period is only 2.3% and over a 20-year period it is only 2.1%. Therefore, although in 2023 China’s economy grew more than twice as fast as the U.S., that figure is actually somewhat flattering for the U.S. Figure 2shows that in the overall period since the beginning of the pandemic China’s economy has grown by 20.1% and the U.S. by 8.1%—that is China’s total GDP growth since the beginning of the pandemic was two and half times greater than the U.S. China’s annual average growth rate was 4.7% compared to the US’s 2.0%.  Economic performance of China and the three major global economic centres Turning to wider international comparisons than the U.S. such data immediately shows the extremely negative situation in most “Global North” economies and China’s great outperformance of them. To start by analysing this in the broadest terms, Figure 3 shows the developments in the world’s three largest economic centres—China, the U.S., and the Eurozone. These three together account for 57% of world GDP at current exchange rates and 46% in purchasing power parities (PPPs). No other economic centre comes close to matching their weight in the world economy. Regarding the relative performance of these three major economic centres, at the time of writing data has not been published for the Euro Area for the whole year of 2023 —which would be the ideal comparison. However, it has been published for the the Euro area for the four quarters of 2023 individually and trends can be calculated on that basis. These show that In the four years to the 4th quarter of 2023, covering the period since the beginning of the pandemic, China’s economy has grown by 20.1%, the U.S. by 8.2%, and the Eurozone by 3.0%. China’s economy therefore grew by two and a half times as fast as the U.S. while the situation of the Eurozone could accurately be described as extremely negative with annual average GDP growth in the last four years of only 0.7%. Such data again makes it immediately obvious that claims in the Western media that China faces economic crisis, and the Western economies are doing well is entirely absurd—pure fantasy propaganda disconnected from reality.  Relative performance of China and the G7 Turning to analysing individual countries, then comparing China to all G7 states, i.e. the major advanced economies, shows the situation equally clearly—see Figure 4. Data for China and all G7 economies has now been published for the whole of 2023. The huge outperformance by China of all the major advanced economies is again evident. Over the four years since the beginning of the pandemic China’s economy grew by 20.1%, the U.S. by 8.1%, Canada by 5.4%, Italy by 3.1%, the UK by 1.8%, France by 1.7%, Japan by 1.1% and Germany by 0.7%. In the same period China’s economy therefore grew two and a half times as fast as the U.S., almost four times as fast as Canada, almost seven times as fast as Italy, 11 times as fast as the UK, 12 times as fast as France, 18 times as fast as Japan and almost 29 times as fast as Germany. In terms of annual average GDP growth during this period China’s was 4.7%, the U.S. 2.0%, Canada 1.3%, Italy 0.8%, the UK 0.4%, France 0.4%, Japan 0.3% and Germany 0.2%. It may therefore be seen that China’s economy far outperformed the U.S., while the performance of all other major G7 economies may be quite reasonably described as extremely negative—all having annual average economic growth rates of around or even under 1%.  Comparison of China to developing economies A comparison using the IMF’s January 2024 projections can also be made to the major developing economies—the BRICS. Figure 5 shows this, using the factual result for China and the IMF projections for the other countries. Over the period since the start of the pandemic, from 2019-2023, China’s GDP grew by 20.1%, India by 17.5%, Brazil by 7.7%, Russia by 3.7% and South Africa by 0.9%. This data confirms that the major Global South economies are growing faster than most of the major Global North economies, which is part of the rise of the Global South and draws attention to the good performance of India. But China grew more than two and half times more than all the BRICS economies except India—China’s growth was 15% greater than India’s. It should be noted that India is at a far lower stage of development than the other BRICS economies—all the others fall in the World Bank classification of upper middle-income economies whereas India falls into the lower middle income group.  Comparison of China’s growth to Western economies Finally, this outperformance by China casts light on what is necessary to achieve its own 2035 strategic targets. China’s 4.6% growth rate necessary to meet these goals means that it must continue to maintain a growth rate far higher than Western economies—Figure 6 shows this in overall terms in addition to individual comparisons given to major economies above. Whereas China must achieve an annual average 4.6% growth rate the median growth rate of high income “Western” economies is only 1.9%, the U.S. is 2.3%, and the median for developing economies is 3.0%.That is, to achieve its 2035 goals China must grow twice as fast as the long term trend of the U.S., almost two and a half times as fast as the median for high income economies, and more than 50% faster than the median for developing economies. As already seen, China is more than achieving this. But such facts immediately show why it is an extremely misleading when proposals are made that China should move towards the macro-economic structure of a Western economy. If China adopts the structure of a Western economy then, of course, China will slow down to the same growth rate as Western economies—and therefore fail to achieve its 2035 economic goals. China will be precisely stuck in the negative outcome of the situation accurately diagnosed by Martin Wolf. What is the economic future of China? Will it become a high-income economy and so, inevitably, the largest in the world for an extended period, or will it be stuck in the ‘middle income’ trap, with growth comparable to that of the U.S.?  Conclusion In conclusion, it addition to objectively analysing 2023’s economic results, it is also necessary in the light of this factual situation to make a remark regarding Western, in particular U.S. “journalism”. None of the data given above is secret, all is available from public readily accessible sources. In many cases it does not even require any calculations and simply published data can be used. But the U.S. media and journalists report information that is systematically misleading and in many cases simply untrue. While it lagged China in creating economic growth the U.S. was certainly the world leader in creating “fake economic news”! What was the reason, what attitude should be taken to it? First, to avoid accusations of distortion, it should be stated that there were a small handful of Western journalists who refused to go along with this type of distortion and fake news. For example Chris Giles, the Financial Times economics commentator, in December, sharply attacked “an absurd way to compare economies… among people who should know better.” Giles did not do this because of support for China but because, quite rightly, he warned that spreading false or distorted information led to serious errors by countries doing so: “Coming from the UK, which lost its top economic dog status in the late 19th century but still has some delusions of grandeur, I can understand American denialism… But ultimately, bad comparisons foster bad decisions.” But the overwhelming majority of U.S. and Western journalists continued to spread fake news. Why? First, the fact that identical distortions and false information appeared absolutely simultaneously across a very wide range of media makes it clear that undoubtedly U.S. intelligence services were involved in creating it—i.e. part of the misrepresentation and distortions were entirely deliberate and conscious, aimed at disguising the real situation. Second, another part was merely sloppy journalism—that is journalists who could not be bothered to check facts. Third, supporting both of these factors was “white Western arrogance”—an arrogant assumption, rooted in centuries of European and European descended countries dominating the world, that the West must be right. Therefore, such arrogance made it impossible to acknowledge or report the clear facts that China’s economy is far outperforming the West. But whether it was conscious distortion, sloppy journalism, or conscious or unconscious arrogance, in all these cases no respect should be given to the Western “quality” media. It is not trying to find out the truth, which is the job of journalism, it is simply spreading false propaganda. It remains a truth that if a theory and the real world don’t coincide there are only two courses that can be taken. The first, that of a sane person, is to abandon the theory. The second, that of a dangerous one, is to abandon the real world—precisely the danger that Chris Giles pointed to. What has been appearing in the Western media about international economic comparisons regarding China is precisely abandonment of the real world in favour of systematic fake news. This is a shortened version of an article that originally appeared in Chinese at Guancha.cn. About John Ross is a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He was formerly director of economic policy for the mayor of London. Republished from Monthly Review Archives February 2024 10/12/2023 A decade of BRI development transforms China's Xinjiang region into a core area of the Silk Road Economic Belt By: Li Xuanmin in Urumqi and HorgosRead NowA decade of BRI development transforms the region into a core area of the Silk Road Economic Belt  On Sunday morning, workers were harvesting grapes on farmland in Yining county in Kazak Autonomous Prefecture of Ili, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The freshly-picked fruit was then uploaded onto a truck, headed to Kazakhstan via highway, and within six hours, it would be delivered to the Kazakhstani market and sold to the local consumers. "It used to take two to three days to ship goods from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan, but the time has been reduced to only half a day since the development of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), under which connectivity has been facilitated and the efficiency of customs clearance has been largely improved," Yu Chengzhong, chairman of Horgos Jinyi International Trade Co, told the Global Times. Yu's company is growing quickly thanks to fruit exports from Xinjiang, including apples, nectarines, grapes, peppers, tomatoes, prunes and cucumbers to markets in Central Asia, Russia, and Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Vietnam. It is expected that the company's export value to Central Asia could climb up to $1.2 billion this year, almost doubling from $683 million recorded last year. As business expands, the company is now constructing a 500,000-square-meter overseas warehouse in Alma-Ata in southern Kazakhstan, and it is scheduled to be put into use in October 2024. "It will be built into a distribution center covering other Central Asian countries and Russia. We will also set up an exhibition area for China-produced vehicles, as those autos have been gaining popularity in those markets," Yu added Yu's company is one among the thousands of firms in Xinjiang whose businesses have been taking off under the BRI. As the China-proposed BRI being materialized over the past decade, Xinjiang - which sits at China's westernmost frontier bordering eight countries including Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India - has been transformed from a relatively closed inland region to a frontier of opening-up.  A view of China- Kazakhstan International Cooperation Center in Horgos, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on September 16. Photo: Li Xuanmin/GT As an important node along the BRI, the region, leveraging its strategic location, has built up an overarching rail, road and flight transportation network that not only fosters closer trade and economic ties with Central Asia and Europe, but also shapes itself into a bridgehead for westward opening-up, company representatives and local officials noted. "What we felt most during the past 10 years is that Xinjiang is no longer a remote region, but it is now becoming a core area of the Silk Road Economic Belt. We're a pivotal international logistic hub placed at the Asia-Europe 'golden passage.' And the region is set to be designated with more important missions in the country's further opening-up," Zhao Yi, general manager assistant at International Land Port in Urumqi, told the Global Times. Flourishing foreign trade In the first eight months of 2023, Xinjiang's foreign trade surged by 51.2 percent year on year, reaching 219.19 billion yuan (around $30 billion). Xinjiang has engaged in foreign trade with 170 countries and regions this year. Its foreign trade with five Central Asian countries grew by 59.1 percent year-on-year to 176.64 billion yuan, accounting for 80.6 percent of the regional total, customs data showed. "The main cargo shipped from Xinjiang to the international market are typically ketchup, agricultural products, textiles, PVC, chemical raw materials, equipment and machineries," Zhao explained, as he guided the loading of containers into a China-Europe freight train set to depart for Kazakhstan on Sunday afternoon. As of early September, the inbound and outbound China-Europe freight trains passing through Xinjiang have totaled 10,017 this year, up 10.1 percent year-on-year, according to China Railway Urumqi Group Co Ltd. In the first seven months of 2023, the International Land Port in Urumqi opened 772 China-Europe freight trains, up 9.35 percent year-on-year. The rail routes connect with 26 cities in 19 countries. The port also serves as an important transit point for goods across China and from Southeast Asia to be transported to Europe. Ding Zhijun, an official from the Urumqi Economic and Technological Development Zone, told the Global Times that since the beginning of this year, goods from Laos, such as sugar and rubber, have been transferred at the port via China-Laos Railway and other inland railway routes, and then are assembled and delivered to European markets. "The BRI has driven up Xinjiang's foreign trade, which is a boon for local industries. It is also conducive to Xinjiang's economic development and boosting employment opportunities," Ding said. He added that looking to the future, the port authorities plan to set up a textile trading center within the port, to facilitate the exports and trade of clothes and other textile products. Opening to the West The hustle and bustle of international cooperation in Xinjiang is also seen throughout the China-Kazakhstan International Cooperation Center in Horgos, which is home to China's first cross-border free trade zone. When Global Times reporters visited the center at a weekend in mid-September, streams of tourists were standing at the border gate and taking photos, and stores were crowded with merchants and buyers. "In the initial stage when we set up the shopping mall in 2015, most merchants were from Kazakhstan and China. But now, with the steady progress of BRI, the center has become a hot destination for foreign investment, and there are more vendors from other Central Asia countries as well as Russia and South Korea," Ji Gang, general manager of Jindiao Central Square, a shopping mall at the cooperation center, told the Global Times. According to Ji, the center has just held a commercial fair for Central Asian business leaders in August, during which a number of deals were signed, including equipment purchase agreements. Some Chinese and Kazakhstani companies also reached initial agreement to open factories in Kazakhstan. "With unique geographic advantage, Xinjiang has become an important gateway for China to open up to the West. It is worth noting that the radiation effect of the region is not confined to China, but also to Central Asia and Europe, which would in turn provide Xinjiang with more development opportunities," Ji added. Zhao also said that the International Land Port is planning to open more China-Europe freight train routes that directly connect the region to Europe. "In particular, we aim to set up some premium routes to transport electronic components and local specialty goods via the China-Europe railway express. This year, we are also actively engaging with Kazakhstan to establish business partnerships and enhance customs clearance efficiency," Zhao noted. AuthorLi Xuanmin in Urumqi and Horgos This article was produced by Global Times. Archives October 2023  With over 20 million inhabitants each, Shanghai and Beijing are among the “hypercities” of the Global South, including Delhi, São Paulo, Dhaka, Cairo, and Mexico City, far surpassing the “megacities” of the Global North like London, Paris, or New York1. Walking the streets in China’s cities, you will however, quickly notice one marked difference – the absence of large slums or pervasive homelessness that is so common to most of the rest of the world. Why did mass urbanization not create large slums in China?When reform and opening up began in the late 1970s, 83 percent of China’s population lived in the countryside. By 2021, the proportion of the rural population had fallen to 36 percent. During this period of mass urbanization, over 600 million people migrated from rural areas to cities. Today, there are 296 million internal “migrant workers” (农民工, nóngmín gōng), comprising over 70 percent of the country’s total workforce2. Migrant workers became the economic engine of China’s rapid growth, which created the world’s largest middle class of 400 million people.  This historic migration came with many challenges, including the emergence of “urban villages” that had poor living conditions and inadequate infrastructure. Although basic amenities – such as running water, electricity, gas, and communications – were provided, sanitation, public services, fire safety, and other such amenities resembled that of rural villages. Due to lower rents and the lack of other affordable housing, urban villages are largely inhabited by migrant workers. With the acceleration of urbanization in the 2000s, the Chinese government began to promote large-scale transformation of the old areas of the cities, focusing on renovation of historically deteriorated neighborhoods and the removal of dangerous housing. Between 2008 and 2012, 12.6 million households in urban villages were rebuilt nationwide3. At the same time, efforts were made to construct public rental or low-rent housing. For instance, in Shanghai today, families of three or more people with a monthly income of less than 4,200 yuan per person can apply for low-rent housing, with the monthly rent being just a few hundred yuan (or five percent of monthly household income). In 2022, the central government announced the construction of 6.5 million units of low-cost rental housing in 40 cities, representing 26 percent of the total new housing supply in the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025)4.  Indeed the explosion of rural-to-urban migration in recent decades is not a phenomenon unique to China. While understanding that there are different definitions of “slums” used by countries and international organizations, they all point to the same tendency: since the 1970s, slum growth outpaced urbanization rates across the Global South. China’s efforts to upgrade existing precarious housing or build new affordable housing does not, however, explain why China did not develop slums like in so many other countries. Urbanization in China, therefore, must be understood within the context of socialist construction. What is the “hukou” system and what does it have to do with socialism? One unique characteristic of China’s urbanization process is that, although policies encouraged migration to cities for industrial and service jobs, rural residents never lost their access to land in the countryside. In the 1950s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led a nationwide land reform process, abolishing private land ownership and transforming it into collective ownership. During the economic reform period, beginning in 1978, a “Household Responsibility System” (家庭联产承包责任制 jiātíng lián chǎn chéngbāo zérèn zhì) was created, which reallocated rural agricultural land into the hands of individual households. Though agricultural production was deeply impacted, collective land ownership remained and land was never privatized.  Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside. Beyond land reform, a system was created to manage the mass migration of people from the countryside to the cities, to ensure that the movement of people aligned with the national planning needs of such a populous country. Though China has had some form of migration restriction for over 2,000 years, in the late 1950s, the country established a new “household registration system” (户口 or hùkǒu) to regulate rural-to-urban migration. Every Chinese person has an assigned urban or rural hukou status that grants them access to social welfare benefits (subsidized public housing, education, health care, pension, and unemployment insurance, etc.) in their hometown, but which are restricted in the cities they move to for work. While reformation of the hukou system is ongoing, the lack of urban hukou status forces many migrant parents to spend long periods away from their families and they must leave their children in their grandparents’ care in their hometowns, referred to as “left-behind children” (留守儿童 liúshǒu értóng). Though the number has been decreasing over the years, there are still an estimated seven million children in this situation. Today, 65.22 percent of China’s population lives in cities, but only 45.4 percent have urban hukou. Although this system deterred the creation of large urban slums, it also reinforced serious inequities of social welfare between urban and rural areas, and between residents within a city based on their hukou status.  How does the Chinese government deal with homelessness? In the early 2000s, the issues of residential status, rights of migrant workers, and treatment of urban homeless people became a national matter. In 2003, the State Council – the highest executive organ of state power – issued the “Measures for the Rescue and Management of Itinerant and Homeless in Urban Areas”5. The new regulation created urban relief stations providing food rations and temporary shelters, abolished the mandatory detention system of people without hukou status or housing, and placed the responsibility on the local authorities for finding housing for homeless people in their hometowns. Under these measures, cities like Shanghai have set up relief stations for homeless people. When public security – the local police – and urban management officials encounter homeless people, they must assist them in accessing nearby relief stations. All costs are covered by the city’s fiscal budget. For example, the relief management station in Putuo District (with the fourth lowest per capita GDP of Shanghai’s 16 districts and a resident population of 1.24 million), provided shelter and relief to an average of 24.3 homeless people a month from June 2022 to April 2023, which could include repeated cases6. Relief stations provide homeless people with food and basic accommodations, help those who are seriously ill access healthcare, assist them to return to the locations of their household registration by contacting their relatives or the local government, and arrange free transportation home when needed.  Upon returning home, the local county-level government is responsible to help the homeless people, including contacting relatives for care and finding local employment. For a very small number of people who are elderly, have disabilities, or do not have relatives nor the ability to work, the local township people’s government, or the Party-run street office, will provide national support for them in accordance with the “method of providing for extremely impoverished persons”, which is stipulated in the 2014 “Interim Measures for Social Assistance”. The content of the support includes providing basic living conditions, giving care to impoverished individuals who cannot take care of themselves, providing treatment for diseases, and handling funeral affairs, etc. This series of relief management measures ensure that administrative law enforcement personnel in the city do not simply expel homeless people from the city, but must guarantee that they receive proper assistance, in terms of housing, work, and support systems. What are the current challenges of urbanization, migration, and inequality? While creating relief centers is an important advancement, it is clear that shelters are not a structural solution and they alone cannot meet the needs of a metropolis like Shanghai of 25 million people, let alone the country’s 921 million urban residents. The government has been implementing many structural reforms to address inequality, and to make the cities and the countryside more liveable. In his report to the 20th National Congress of the CPC, President Xi Jinping said: “We have identified the principal contradiction facing Chinese society as that between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life, and we have made it clear that closing this gap should be the focus of all our initiatives.”7 The unbalanced and inadequate development points to the gap between the countryside and cities, between underdeveloped and industrialized regions, and between the rich and poor. On a broader scale, the anti-poverty campaigns – highlighted by the eradication of extreme poverty in 2020 – and the rural revitalization strategy have helped alleviate the pressure of migrant workers moving to the cities. The government has invested substantial funds and resources, using diversified ways to alleviate poverty beyond income-transfer schemes, including developing rural industry, education, health care, and infrastructure8. These measures fundamentally improved the living and employment environment in rural areas and created more opportunities so that people have the option to stay and work in the countryside. For example, every year, more migrants are returning from cities back to their hometowns, which increased from 2.4 million (2015) to 8.5 million people (2019). Over the last decade, China has implemented reforms to balance the easing of hukou residency requirements and to improve the social welfare of migrant workers, while ensuring that urbanization and population distribution responds to the country’s needs. Since 2010, major cities have gradually relaxed the household registration restrictions for school admission, allowing children of migrant workers to attend public schools like children with local hukou. Furthermore, according to the 2019 Urbanization Plan, cities with populations below three million people are required to remove all hukou restrictions, while bigger cities (under five million) can begin to relax restrictions. The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) and the country’s economic strategy until 2035 focus on redistributing income through tax reform, reducing the gap between the rich and poor, and removing the barriers that prevent millions of migrant workers from enjoying the full benefits of urban life. In 2021, the government invested US$5.3 billion to relax the hukou residency rules, and to also boost urban migrants’ spending power as part of the country’s “dual circulation” policy9.  These efforts to tackle the “three mountains” of the high cost of housing, education, and health care faced by all Chinese people, including migrants, is at the center of the government’s vision and policy reforms towards “common prosperity” for all its citizens and the building of a modern socialist society.
AuthorDongsheng This article was produced by DongSheng. Archives July 2023 7/12/2023 Can China and the United States Establish Mutual Respect to Lessen Tensions? By: Vijay PrashadRead Now On June 3, 2023, naval vessels from the United States and Canada conducted a joint military exercise in the South China Sea. A Chinese warship (LY 132) overtook the U.S. guided-missile destroyer (USS Chung-Hoon) and speeded across its path. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command released a statement saying that the Chinese ship “executed maneuvers in an unsafe manner.” The spokesperson from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wang Wenbin, responded that the United States “made provocations first and China responded,” and that the “actions taken by the Chinese military are completely justified, lawful, safe, and professional.” This incident is one of many in these waters, where the United States conducts what it calls Freedom of Navigation (FON) exercises. These FON actions are given legitimacy by Article 87(1)(a) of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Laws of the Sea. China is a signatory to the Convention, but the United States has refused to ratify it. U.S. warships use the FON argument without legal rights or any United Nations Security Council authorization. The U.S. Freedom of Navigation Program was set up in 1979, before the Convention and separate from it. Hours after this encounter in the South China Sea, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. The Shangri-La Dialogue, which has taken place annually at the Shangri-La Hotel since 2002, brings together military chiefs from around Asia with guests from countries such as the United States. At a press gaggle, Austin was asked about the recent incident. He called upon the Chinese government “to reign in that kind of conduct because I think accidents can happen that could cause things to spiral out of control.” That the incident took place because a U.S. and Canadian military exercise took place adjacent to Chinese territorial waters did not evoke any comment from Austin. He emphasized the role of the United States to ensure that any country can “sail the seas and fly the skies in international space.” Austin’s pretense of innocence was challenged by his Chinese counterpart, Defense Minister Li Shangfu. “Why did all these incidents happen in areas near China,” Li asked, “not in areas near other countries?” “The best way to prevent this from happening is that military vessels and aircraft not come close to our waters and airspace… Watch out for your own territorial waters and airspace, then there will not be any problems.” Li contested the idea that the U.S. navy and air force are merely conducting FON exercises. “They are not here for innocent passage,” he said. “They are here for provocation.” Tighten the NetWhen Austin was not talking to the press, he was busy in Singapore strengthening U.S. military alliances whose purpose is to tighten the net around China. He held two important meetings, the first a U.S.-Japan-Australia trilateral meeting and the second a meeting that included their counterpart from the Philippines. After the trilateral meeting, the ministers released a sharp statement that used words (“destabilizing” and “coercive”) that raised the temperature against China. Bringing in the Philippines to this dialogue, the U.S. egged on new military cooperation among Canberra, Manila, and Tokyo. This builds on the Japan- Philippines military agreement signed in Tokyo in February 2023, which has Japan pledging funds to the Philippines and the latter allowing the Japanese military to conduct drills in its islands and waters. It also draws on the Australia-Japan military alliance signed in October 2022, which—while it does not mention China—is focused on the “free and open Indo-Pacific,” a U.S. military phrase that is often used in the context of the FON exercises in and near Chinese waters. Over the course of the past two decades, the United States has built a series of military alliances against China. The earliest of these alliances is the Quad, set up in 2008 and then revived after a renewed interest from India, in November 2017. The four powers in the Quad are Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. In 2018, the United States military renamed its Pacific Command (set up in 1947) to Indo-Pacific Command and developed an Indo-Pacific Strategy, whose main focus was on China. One of the reasons to rename the process was to draw India into the structure being built by the United States, emphasizing the India-China tensions around the Line of Actual Control. The document shows how the U.S. has attempted to inflame all conflicts in the region—some small, others large—and put itself forward as the defender of all Asian powers against the “bullying of neighbors.” Finding solutions to these disagreements is not on the agenda. The emphasis of the Indo-Pacific Strategy is for the U.S. to force China to subordinate itself to a new global alliance against it. Mutual RespectDuring the press gaggle in Singapore, Austin suggested that the Chinese government “should be interested in freedom of navigation as well because without that, I mean, it would affect them.” China is a major commercial power, he said, and “if there are no laws, if there are no rules, things will break down for them very quickly as well.” China’s Defense Minister Li was very clear that his government was open to a dialogue with the United States, and he worried as well about the “breakdown” of communications between the major powers. However, Li put forward an important precondition for the dialogue. “Mutual respect,” he said, “should be the foundation of our communications.” Up to now, there is little evidence—even less in Singapore despite Austin’s jovial attitude—of respect from the United States for the sovereignty of China. The language from Washington gets more and more acrid, even when it pretends to be sweet. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives July 2023 7/9/2023 Addressing allegations of “Chinese spy base” in Cuba.By: Manolo De Los Santos & Kate GonzalesRead Now On June 8, the U.S. media added to its long storybook of tales to scare people away from normal relations with Cuba. The Wall Street Journal published an article on that day claiming that China has plans to set up a “spy base” in Cuba, to “eavesdrop” on the United States and “identify potential strike targets.” WSJ has already published two more pieces since rapidly ramping up its narrative against the Cuban state and fermenting more paranoia as the news spreads across mainstream news outlets in the United States. Meanwhile, Cuban officials held a press conference on June 8 to completely deny the allegations. Cuba’s Vice Foreign Minister Carlos de Cossío stated that “All these are fallacies promoted with the deceitful intention of justifying the unprecedented tightening of the blockade, destabilization, and aggression against Cuba and of deceiving public opinion in the United States and the world.” Even John Kirby, National Security Council spokesman who was the former press secretary for the Pentagon, has denied the WSJ report, calling it “inaccurate.” This is just one new addition to the long legacy of lies that the United States has been spinning in an attempt to further alienate the Cuban people. One just has to remember the “Havana syndrome” that mysteriously affected diplomats in Cuba; it was first blamed on foreign powers as an attack but was later revealed to have no basis. Or maybe the claims about 20,000 Cuban soldiers supposedly based in Venezuela to maintain the government there, when in reality, the vast majority of Cubans present in Venezuela were medical workers. Or perhaps the idea that Cuban doctors sent across the world are enslaved, when it is simply their understanding that their duty to humanity is to provide health care to those who need it. All of these lies have been told just in the past few years alone. These falsified stories all swirl into fomenting the atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion that prevents normal U.S.-Cuba relations. In the wake of the Havana syndrome myth, Trump was able to interrupt the path Obama set toward normalization, setting 243 additional and comprehensive sanctions, and further preventing the island from meeting its basic needs. The United States continues to live out its Cold War fantasies through these lies, at the cost of the Cuban people’s lives and well-being. And yet, it maintains its hypocrisy. Cossío was careful to point out that Cuba would never allow a foreign military base on their island, as it is a signatory of the Declaration of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace. Cuba is also currently sponsoring and hosting peace talks between Colombia and the National Liberation Army (ELN). As of today, they have agreed to a cease-fire, ending decades of violence in the country. Cuba already suffers from the illegal U.S. occupation of Guantanamo, to further rub salt in the wound. The United States has its infamous military base there, which is known for the inhumane treatment and torture it deals out to its prisoners. While it accuses China of military expansion, the United States has hundreds of military bases all over the globe. Cuba has demonstrated that it desires nothing but peace in the region, and normal relations with its neighbor, the United States. But the United States refuses to accept this proposal. Instead, it maintains the most comprehensive sanctions in history against the small island. Instead, it falsely places Cuba on the state sponsors of terrorism list, even though it is in fact a sponsor of peace. Instead, the U.S. government and its media apparatuses choose to fabricate myths and legends, painting Cuba as the evil monster under the bed. It chooses to scare the U.S. people away from the possibility that normal relations and ending the blockade against Cuba could be good for people from both countries. AuthorManolo De Los Santos is the co-executive director of the People’s Forum and is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He co-edited, most recently, Viviremos: Venezuela vs. Hybrid War (LeftWord Books/1804 Books, 2020) and Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro (LeftWord Books/1804 Books, 2021). He is a co-coordinator of the People’s Summit for Democracy. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives July 2023 Recognising how important it is for Today’s Left to understand China, BEN CHACKO recommends a highly readable and well-researched book of essays  CHINA looms large in today’s world. Its economy is predicted to exceed the US’s in size within the decade; by purchasing power parity, it is already larger. It is racing ahead too in diplomacy and trade: it has now replaced the US as the country with the most diplomatic missions overseas, and is the biggest trading partner of a majority of countries globally. This very success — China’s status as the United States’ only acknowledged “peer competitor”— could be the reason China is now routinely depicted as a menace. Britain’s BBC dutifully takes up scares over weather balloons and breathless reports on Chinese aircraft or ships’ “aggressive” conduct in encounters with US counterparts — which for some reason always take place just off the Chinese, not the American coast. Projects like the Belt & Road Initiative, which overtook the World Bank as the biggest development finance lender in 2019, are seen as evidence of a sinister new imperialism. Understanding China could hardly be more important for today’s left. The “China threat” is a key justification for a major plank of British state policy: huge increases in arms spending and the first “east of Suez” military deployments in many decades. This could mean World War III: a serving US general predicts that happening the year after next. Armageddon could result from current China policy in other ways: sanctions and economic “decoupling” are cutting us off from the world leader in renewable technology and undermining scientific co-operation on global warming or pandemics. Socialists need to know how we respond to these challenges. Carlos Martinez’s new book The East is Still Red is an excellent guide. Whether China is socialist, as its ruling Communist Party argues, is a divisive topic but with an eye on history Martinez draws out the consistencies in the country’s course since 1949. Chapter 1, No Great Wall, looks at how the “reform and opening up” period begun by Deng Xiaoping from 1978 built on achievements of the Mao years, without underrating the huge policy differences that did occur, or whitewashing either era. Later, in Will China Suffer the Same Fate as the Soviet Union, Martinez contrasts the two and points both to underlying strengths in China’s model and the lessons its party leadership has learned from the Soviet collapse. Many are familiar with impressive headline figures such as China lifting 800 million people out of poverty — but Western accounts tend to imply this is the undirected result of introducing “the market,” though capitalist market economies such as India or Brazil cannot point to similar achievements. Martinez delves into the details and looks at the targets, the plans, the actual measures taken to deliver the greatest improvement in human welfare in recorded history. For a Western left audience, key chapters are those on how China is making progress towards “ecological civilisation” — and why a “plague on both your houses” position dubbed Neither Washington Nor Beijing is untenable in a context where the US is unambiguously the aggressor in the new cold war while China’s rise is widely welcomed in the global South. Later, he adopts Noam Chomsky’s famous phrase “manufacturing consent” while looking at the media’s coverage of China and how issues are distorted to build support for our own ruling class’s hostility to it: essential reading here is a demolition of the wild claims made about alleged abuses in Xinjiang and their less than objective origins. Developed from articles written on different aspects of China and its revolution — many originally published in the Morning Star — this is a highly readable narrative that doesn’t presuppose detailed knowledge of Chinese history or politics. The thematic character means many chapters work well on their own, and will make it a handy reference point for anyone wanting to brush up on specifics like the anti-poverty campaigns or China and climate change. It’s extensively referenced, and welcome in quoting more Chinese than foreign sources on the country. Highly recommended. AuthorMorning Star This article was produced by Morning Star. Archives July 2023  The difficulty the U.S. faces in its current attempts to damage China’s economy was analysed in detail in the article “The U.S. is trying to persuade China to commit suicide”. Reduced to essentials, the U.S. problem is that it possesses no external economic levers powerful enough to derail China’s economy. The U.S. has attempted tariffs, technology sanctions, political provocations over Taiwan, the actual or threatened banning of companies such as Huawei and Tik Tok etc. But, as always, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Taking the latest period, during the three years following the beginning of the Covid pandemic, China’s economy has grown two and a half times as fast as the U.S. and six times as fast as the E.U.. Therefore, as the previous article put it, in the economy the U.S. cannot “murder” China—even although it can create short term problems. Furthermore, unlike with Gorbachev, whose illusions in the U.S. led to a centralised political collapse of the CPSU, the disintegration of the USSR, and an historical national catastrophe for Russia, the policies of Xi Jinping and the CPC are centrally protecting China and socialism. As the U.S. cannot pursue a course of “murder”, therefore it is forced to attempt an indirect route to get China to commit “suicide”—that is, to try to persuade China to adopt policies which will damage it. Given that economic development underlies China’s success, one of the most central of all U.S. goals is to attempt to persuade China to adopt self-damaging economic policies. Enormous resources are therefore poured into spreading factually false propaganda regarding China’s economy. This also has the secondary goal of internationally attempting to persuade others not to learn from China’s economic success—because an understanding of the reality that China’s socialist economy is more efficient and successful than capitalism would be a devastating ideological blow to the U.S.. A crucial part of this false propaganda is to try to get accepted as “truth” claims about China’s economy which are entirely false—as basing policies on “facts” which are untrue would naturally lead to wrong policies. One of the most important of these false claims is that China’s socialist economy is “inefficient” compared to capitalism—or, more specifically, that investment in socialist China is inefficient in creating economic growth compared to capitalist America or in general compared to capitalist countries. Naturally, socialism’s goal is not abstract economic efficiency, it is people’s well-being. But an inefficient economy, in the long term, would be incapable of maintaining the maximum well-being of the people. Therefore, how efficient an economy is constitutes an important issue in economic development. Claims that capitalism is more economically efficient than capitalism, usually put in the form of U.S. claims of the “inefficiency of socialism”, consequently has at least two purposes. First, most immediately, to attempt to persuade China that as its investment is allegedly “inefficient” it should be reduced. As discussed in the earlier article, “The U.S. is trying to persuade China to commit suicide”, a key U.S. goal to get China to reduce its level of investment in GDP. This is because that same policy was successfully used earlier by the U.S. to derail its competitor economies of Germany, Japan and the Asian Tigers. Second, more generally and ideologically, this claim that China’s investment is inefficient, and capitalism’s is efficient, is an attempt to undermine and discredit socialism and promote capitalism. In summary, such propaganda is an attempt to spread two interrelated falsifications.
As will be systematically factually shown below, the exact reverse of these claims are true. Socialist China’s investment is much more efficient in creating growth than in capitalist countries such as the U.S.. As will be shown, this efficiency of China is integrally linked to the socialist character of its economy. As usual the method will be used to use the wise Chinese dictum to “seek truth from facts”. The first section of the article will establish the facts showing the greater efficiency of China’s investment. The second section will demonstrate that the reasons for this lie in the socialist character of China’s economy. Section 1—the high international efficiency of China’s capital investment |
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