The president of China, Xi Jinping, called for accelerating the development of science and technology to ensure greater self-sufficiency and strengthen the country’s army in the face of the unprecedented siege that the United States has been applying, circumstances that require adapting to new challenges.

In the context of the 14th National People’s Congress, from where the destiny of the country is decided and in which Xi was re-elected for his third presidential term, he said that Beijing must apply the new philosophy of strengthening all fronts, and intensify efforts to create a new pattern of growth.

​“China must ultimately rely on scientific and technological innovation,” Xi said.

He also spoke about the need to shield China from a military and technological point of view. He spoke of turning the armed forces into a “great iron wall” that effectively safeguards national sovereignty, security, and development interests.

Regarding this last item, we must mention the strategic importance of Taiwan and the support of the United States for its false autonomy. Regarding gringo interference, he warned that China remains determined to prevent outside agents from getting involved in separatist activities on the island.

​In relation to the economic dimension, he asked officials to promote the construction of a new growth framework that prioritizes domestic demand, innovation, and self-sufficiency in science and technology, in addition to improving the industrial sector and promoting innovation to reduce carbon emissions.

After being re-elected for his third term as president of the National Popular Assembly, this body elected him as president of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and made him the commander of the two million-member People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

​It is well known that China will continue economic stimulus measures in 2023—the only serious discussion is of what type. To be successful these measures must simultaneously achieve two goals. First, they must adequately respond to China’s short-term situation—that is they must substantially reverse 2022’s economic slowdown. Second, they must aid in achieving the strategic goals China has set for 2035.

It is equally well known that the international economic situation which will confront China in 2023 is unfavorable. In this regard, it is important to understand that this negative international context is itself due to the failure of the stimulus programs the U.S. launched to deal with the consequences of the COVID pandemic. The fact that China and the U.S. have both now released their economic data for 2022 as a whole allows this situation to be judged clearly. In 2022 the U.S. suffered its worst stagflationary crisis for almost half a century—the EU’s similar situation merely followed a few months behind the U.S. In detail, the U.S. experienced the highest inflationary wave for forty years while simultaneously its economic growth rate has dropped by half compared to that earlier period. These two factors, in turn, combine to produce a U.S./EU economic policy paralysis in adequately responding to their short-term slowdown in 2023—high inflation means their policymakers must adopt economically contractionary policies, in particular raising interest rates, which fail to offset, indeed intensify, economic slowing.

In summary the result, as will be shown in detail, is not only short-term U.S./EU economic deceleration in 2023 but a medium-/long- term slowdown which prevents these economies achieving their strategic objectives. That is, the U.S. stimulus programs was a strategic failure—in addition to the short-term inflation, prospects for long-term economic growth were worse after these packages than before them.

In summary, the present world economic situation, and therefore the one facing China, is largely determined by the interrelation of two stimulus programs. The first is the damaging consequences of the U.S. stimulus packages, creating the worst global stagflationary situation for forty years, the second is the stimulus programs being launched by China which have the potential both to launch its own economic growth and to play a key role in global economic recovery. Given these facts it is, therefore, clarificatory for achieving China’s goals to examine in detail the present international economic situation and understand the reasons for the failure of the U.S. packages, and the lessons of these for China’s own stimulus programs.

Two interrelated but distinct issues are involved with this—both of which directly relate to China’s own economic situation and policies as it enters 2023.

1. The failure of the U.S./EU stimulus programs was completely predictable—as they followed from fundamental errors in economic analysis and theory. These errors unfortunately sometimes also appear in discussion in China. It is therefore important that these analytical/theoretical issues are clarified.
2. These analytical issues directly interrelate with the precise international and domestic economic situation confronting China at the beginning of 2023. To simultaneously meet both the immediate goals for 2023 and the strategic goals for 2035 it is necessary to accurately analyze the key elements of the short-, medium-, and longer-term economic situation.
   Both these aspects will be dealt with below. In analyzing these lessons, and their interrelation to the Western economies, as always, the correct method is to seek truth from facts. Therefore, first the facts that must be explained in the failure of the Western stimulus packages will be set out and then the reasons for these negative effects and the conclusions for China will be analyzed.

​Turning to the specific interrelation of these international economic issues with China’s strategic goals the latter, in terms of economic growth, were set out in November 2020 by Xi Jinping in 关于《中共中央关于制定国民经济和社会发展第十四个五年规划和二〇三五年远景目标的建议》的说明. This stated that discussion around the 14th Five Year Plan discussion had noted that: “the goal of doubling the economic aggregate or per capita income by 2035 should be clearly stated.” It concluded that: “It is entirely possible to double the total or per capita income.”

China doubling per capita GDP from 2020 to 2035 would mean, leaving inflation out of account, achieving a per capita GDP level of $21,050. At the 20th Party Congress the fundamental goal was set as reaching the level of a “medium-developed country by 2035.” Per capita GDP of slightly above $21,000 would be significantly above the level of Hungary or Poland today, that is of major East European states, and slightly above the level of Greece—precisely a medium-developed advanced economy.

China’s annual population growth in the recent period has been zero, and in 2022 was slightly below zero, consequently achieving the target of doubling total GDP is extremely close to that for doubling per capita GDP—and ensures that that the latter target will also be met. Therefore, the growth assumptions in what follows are for China doubling GDP by 2035—any realistic estimate of population changes by 2035 will not affect the fundamental economic situation.

To achieve doubling of GDP/per capita GDP during 2020-2035, after growth of 3.0 percent in 2022, requires annual average growth of at least 4.6 percent in 2023-2035. Any adequate stimulus program must therefore achieve the tactical goal of accelerating economic growth in 2023 but doing so in a way that simultaneously ensures achievement of the strategic goal for 2035. These requirements will be assumed in what follows.

Starting with the current international situation, it is already known that 2023 will be an extremely difficult year for the global economy and therefore for the international situation surrounding China. The U.S./EU governments are fully aware their economies are decelerating, the only discussion is of by how much—that is the only debate is as to whether there will be an actual recession, that is negative growth, or merely very slow growth. This clear understanding dominates projections by international economic organizations and discussion in the media. But, as already noted, Western government are paralyzed from taking any adequate stimulus measures to avoid this slowdown because during the last two years the U.S. economy has been passing through its worst stagflationary situation for almost half a century. This inflationary wave, accompanying the very slow growth, is therefore the first specific feature of the present international situation, differentiating it from other recent periods of low growth. Consequently, to understand the global economic processes, it is necessary first to accurately analyze the reasons for the inflationary wave and the reasons China escaped it.

First it is extremely important and very easy to show that the claim by the U.S. government that its inflationary wave is due to the Ukraine war is entirely false—as is clearly demonstrated by the chronology of the inflationary tsunami. Figure 1 shows that more than 80 percent of U.S. inflation took place before the Ukraine war started. The Ukraine conflict broke out on 24 February 2022. But by January 2022, that is before the war commenced, U.S. inflation had already risen from 0.1 percent in May 2020 to 7.5 percent—that is it had increased by 7.4 percent to the highest inflation level for over 40 years. U.S. recent peak inflation was in 9.1 percent in June 2022, therefore 82 percent of peak U.S. inflation occurred before the Ukraine war. By December 2022, U.S. inflation was 6.5 percent—which was actually lower than before the war. Regarding Eurozone inflation, Figure 1 shows that this was merely lagging two to three months behind the U.S.
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In summary the U.S./EU inflationary wave was created long before the Ukraine war broke out and therefore this war cannot be responsible for the inflation. The claim that the U.S./EU inflationary wave was due to the Ukraine war therefore will not stand factual examination and is U.S. propaganda, aimed to divert attention from the real causes of the inflationary wave. The real causes of the inflationary wave lay in the errors of the U.S. stimulus packages to respond to COVID, which are examined below.

Any short-term benefits during the pandemic were cancelled out, or more than cancelled out, by the contractionary policies and resulting low short-term growth required to get inflation back under control—an inflation which, as will be seen, was itself created by U.S. economic policy. This helps produce the stagnationary aspects of the situation.

​For this reason, not only will the U.S./EU’s 2023 growth decelerate, but Western economies medium/ long-term growth—in particular, that of the U.S. —will slow, as even the IMF, whose predictions are normally somewhat biased in favor of the U.S., admits. Figure 4 shows that the IMF projects that annual average U.S. GDP growth, taking a long-term average to remove the effect of business cycle fluctuations, will fall from an already low 1.9 percent in 2021 to 1.6 percent in 2027. Over the same period the IMF projects EU annual growth will fall from 1.4 percent to 1.2 percent.

This complete strategic failure of the U.S./E.U. stimulus packages launched against the COVID economic downturn makes clear why it is important that China studies and draws the lessons from this extremely negative experience—as these lessons are linked to fundamental issues of economic policy and therefore also affect China.

Turning to examine the uses this huge increase in U.S. government expenditure was put to, Figure 7 shows the structure and purposes of this. Making a comparison of the 2nd quarter of 2020, the peak of U.S. government spending, to the 4th quarter of 2019, the last before the pandemic struck, shows:

To summarize, the combination of the changes in U.S. government spending with macroeconomic changes the changes in the U.S. economy during the pandemic were clear and the following:

The reason for this complete strategic failure of the U.S. stimulus packages was twofold. Ultimately, of course, this failure was determined by the power of different social forces within the U.S., but in more immediate terms it was due to:

1. Confusions in U.S. economic thinking.
2. The point in the business cycle at which this consumer-based stimulus was launched.

Both have direct lessons for China as it considers its own stimulus packages for 2023.

Considering first the confusions in U.S. economic thinking these were dealt with in detail in 引发世界经济危机的罪魁祸首是美国，而非乌克兰战争. Therefore, here only an update to the new U.S. data and a summary is given.

The most important confusion in popular, more precisely “vulgar,” writing in Western economics is a fundamental and damaging confusion between the economy’s demand side and its supply side. This was used to create a false rationale for the U.S. stimulus packages, with their damaging consequences, and it unfortunately also sometimes appears in sections of China’s media. It is therefore important to clarify this.

This confusion between the economy’s demand and supply sides necessarily fails to understand the different roles played by consumption and investment in the economy, and therefore to an erroneous view that consumption can substitute for investment in terms of economic growth. To be precise:

• Considering first investment, this constitutes part of both the economy’s demand and supply sides. Investment goods and services appear in the economy’s demand side by being purchased (buying of machines, factories etc.) but they are also an input into production together with other factors such as labor—i.e., investment is part not only of the economy’s demand side but also part of its supply side. An increase in expenditure on investment is therefore not only an increase in demand but also an increase in supply—for example, if there is a purchase of a billion yuan of investment goods (machines etc.) there is also automatically a billion yuan increase in overall supply in the economy.
• In contrast to investment, consumption is only a category on the economy’s demand side, it does not appear in the economy’s supply side. This is necessarily the case because, by definition, consumption is not an input into production—if anything is an input into production it is not consumption. Therefore, for example, if there is a billion yuan increase in consumption there is a billion yuan increase in the demand side of the economy, but not any automatic increase in the economy’s supply side. An increase in consumption increases the demand side of the economy but, unlike with investment, it does not automatically increase supply.

Confusion over this fundamental theoretical issue, as will be seen, significantly explains the strategic failure of the U.S. stimulus packages.

To put this issue technically then, for example, in the most common form of “Western economics,” the growth accounting deriving from Solow, inputs into production are capital, labor, and total factor productivity (TFP). Other forms of Western growth accounting make a more detailed breakdown of these factors—an example is the KLEMS (capital, labor, energy, materials, services) framework developed by Jorgenson and applied by the European Commission. In Marxist economics supply side categories are living labor, capital, and socially necessary (or non-socially necessary) labor time.

It is unnecessary here to discuss the differences between these concepts in “Western” and Marxist economic as both agree that investment (capital) is an input into production and therefore part of the economy’s supply side, but neither includes consumption as an input into production—and therefore in both consumption is only part of the economy’s demand side but not of its supply side. Put in technical language, consumption is not an input into the production function—but for non-economists it is sufficient to understand that consumption is not part of the economy’s supply side.

As a result of investment being part of both the economy’s demand side and its supply side, but consumption being only part of the economy’s demand side, if there is an increase in investment demand, that is there is an increase in real expenditure on investment, there is also a direct increase in the economy’s supply side. However, if consumption is increased there is an increase in demand but not any direct increase in supply.
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Under certain circumstances, analyzed below, an increase in demand caused by increasing consumption expenditure, may indirectly lead to an increase in production—but this is not at all automatic and also under other circumstances, because consumption is not an input into production, an increase in consumption demand may not lead even indirectly lead to an increase in production. In some circumstances an increase in consumption expenditure may simply create inflation, suck in imports, or both without an increase in production. But in all cases, any increase in output can only occur if there is an increase in the economy’s supply side (that is in labor, capital etc.). Consumption itself provides no input into production and no increase in productive capacity.

Both Marxist and serious Western economics understand this difference between the economy’s supply side and its demand side. But unfortunately, in popular, or “vulgar” Western economics, the two are confused by statements such as: “With consumption accounting for 67 percent of GDP growth.” This implies, because the economy is divided into consumption and investment, that consumption contributed 67 percent of GDP growth and, by implication, investment contributed 33 percent. But this statement is false. The correct statement is that “67 percent of economic growth was consumed and 33 percent was invested.” But because consumption is not an input into supply, consumption always contributes precisely zero percent to any increase into production. Consumption, consequently, always produces precisely zero percent of GDP—it may be the case that 67 percent of GDP is consumed, but consumption creates zero percent of that GDP production. As John Papola rightly put it: “The systematic failure…to distinguish between consuming and producing value is the single most damaging fallacy in [Western] popular economic thinking.”

This confusion over demand and supply sides of the economy, and therefore over the role of consumption and investment, then follows directly from statements such as “With consumption accounting for 67 percent of GDP growth.” If both consumption and investment are an input into production this suggests then one can replace the other. For example, if consumption and investment are both inputs into production, and therefore both are parts of the economy’s supply side, perhaps consumption could be increased to 80 percent of GDP, and investment reduced to 20 percent, and production growth would continue as before? But this is entirely false.

If consumption were increased from 67 percent of GDP to 80 percent, and total GDP remained the same, then certainly total demand would remain the same—because both consumption and investment are sources of demand. Total demand would remain the same, and simply its division between consumption and investment would change. But if investment were reduced from 33 percent of GDP to 20 percent, because consumption had been raised from 67 percent of the economy to 80 percent, then the inputs into production would have been radically reduced. And because inputs into production had been radically reduced then, other things remaining equal, the increase in GDP would be radically slowed. That is, consumption cannot substitute for investment in production, because consumption is not an input into production.

This is why, for clarity of thinking and policy making, it is necessary to entirely eliminate such statements as “consumption contributed 67 percent of GDP growth”—consumption always contributes zero percent of GDP increase. This confusion between the economy’s demand side and its supply side provided the economic rationale for the damaging consumer, that is demand side only, U.S. stimulus programs.

This same confusion of the supply and demand sides of the economy appears in other forms. For example, I read one recent article in the Chinese media which started by arguing, correctly, that the eventual benefit to humanity of all production is only in consumption. This is correct because, to take an example, the aim in constructing a railway is not at all to have steel lines or locomotives (means of production/investment), it is to transport food or other goods to consumers, to allow people to travel to work, to let them go on vacation etc.—that is, to enable consumption. But the article then went on to argue that because the ultimate goal was consumption therefore the intermediate stage of investment (e.g., building a railway) should be cut out and money should simply be put directly into consumption—for example coupons to purchase food, carrying out tourism etc.

But that argument is false. If a billion yuan is used to give consumer tokens for purchasing food, or a billion yuan is used to subsidize free or cheap travel for tourism, that is all used at once in consumption, but it does not increase the capacity of the economy to produce in the future. The food which is purchased, or the trips which are made for tourism, are not an input into production, and therefore do not produce anything—that is why they are consumption, not investment. But if a billion yuan is used to build a railway, or purchase machinery for manufacturing cars, then the productive capacity of the economy is increased—it will produce new goods and services in the future. This fact, that the contribution of consumption to an increase in production, will always be precisely zero, because consumption is not an input into production, is crucial for economic clarity.
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Confusions over these elementary but crucial issues of economic theory as will be seen, determined the strategic failure of the U.S. stimulus packages. They rationalized the huge boost in consumption but no increase in supply and therefore are also crucial lessons for future stimulus packages for China in 2023.

Turning from these issues of economic theory to their practical effects in the U.S. stimulus packages this interrelates with the point in the business cycle at which these programs were launched. It was noted above that consumption, as it is not an input in production, cannot directly contribute to the supply side. But consumption can under certain conditions, by increasing demand, indirectly create increases in supply. But this is not automatic or necessary as it is subject to both physical and profitability constraints. Understanding both these distinctions, and the possible role of consumer stimulus, is therefore important.

First, if in any economic system there is spare capacity it is possible that increased demand resulting from increased consumption can result in extra supply to attempt fulfil this demand. But if there is no spare capacity then, until extra capacity is created by investment, there can be no increase in supply no matter what the increase in demand is. That is, there may be a physical constraint on increasing production. If there is an increase in consumer demand, but no ability in the short term to increase supply, what will be produced by the increase in demand is inflation, not an increase in production and GDP.

Second, for capitalist producers, if there is an increase in demand, it is not sufficient that there is unused capacity and therefore no physical constraint on increasing production. In a capitalist enterprise there will only be a meaningful increase in production if there is also an increase in profit—that is, there may be a profitability constraint on production if there is an increase in demand led by consumption even if spare capacity exists.

Taking into account these fundamental conditions immediately makes clear why the U.S. stimulus programs to deal with the COVID pandemic were a complete failure in both the short term and strategically. At the end of 2019, immediately before the pandemic, the U.S. economy was growing above its trend rate of growth. Year on year growth in the 4th quarter of 2019, the last before the pandemic, was 2.6 percent, significantly above the U.S. long term average at that time of 2.1 percent. As the U.S. economy was already growing above its trend rate of growth when the pandemic hit it was unlikely that at this position in the business cycle there was meaningful spare capacity in the U.S. economy.

In the purely short term, obviously when the pandemic struck there was immediately a sharp fall in U.S. production—in the 2nd quarter of 2020 U.S. GDP was 9.6 percent below its level in the 4th quarter of 2019 prior to the pandemic. But U.S. recovery was rapid, in part because of the stimulus packages—by the 1st quarter of 2021 U.S. GDP had already regained its pre-pandemic level. But, as already analyzed, the U.S. stimulus packages were designed to be, and were, almost exclusively consumer focused. As a result, U.S. consumption, but not investment, continued to rise strongly even after the pre-pandemic level of GDP had been regained. By the 1st quarter of 2021 U.S. consumption was already $741 billion above its 4th quarter of 2019 level, and then it rose by a further $3,028 billion by the 4th quarter of 2022. In contrast U.S. net fixed investment rose by only $73 billion between the 4th quarter of 2019 and the 1st quarter of 2021. Then it actually fell by $166 billion by the 4th quarter of 2022—to finish $93 billion below its pre-pandemic levels.
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This experience during the U.S. stimulus packages clearly illustrates the theoretical issue that increasing consumer demand does not automatically lead to an increase in productive capacity, in investment—substantially rising U.S. consumer demand did not lead to an increase in investment but was accompanied by investment failing even to increase by sufficient to replace capital depreciation.

Turning from the short term to the strategic consequences for the U.S. economy these theoretical issues have clear medium- and long-term implications.

The short-term destabilization of the global economy caused by the U.S. stimulus packages, is extremely striking. But it is only an extreme illustration of the damage done by confusion over the role of consumption in the economy—this confusion also affects long term growth. Clarifying this theoretical conclusion leads to immediate factual, and therefore testable, conclusions which further clarify the reasons for the damaging strategic effects of the almost entirely consumer-based U.S. stimulus packages.

The prediction from economic theory is that because consumption is not an input into production, and investment is, then other things being equal the greater the share of consumption in the economy, and therefore the lower the share of investment, then over anything other than the short term the slower will be economic growth. Equally because, by definition, investment is an input into production, then, other things being equal, the higher the percentage of investment in the economy the more rapid will be economic development. As will be seen analysis of the U.S. economy fully factually confirms these theoretical predictions. This allows the long term strategic, as well as short term, failure of the U.S. stimulus packages to be clearly understood.

Turning to medium/long term consequences, the changes in the structure of the U.S. economy which have been produced by the COVID stimulus packages have already been analyzed—that is they produced a further shift into consumption. But in addition to their negative short-term consequences how did these changes correspond, or fail to correspond, to the changes required to speed up U.S. economic growth over the medium and longer term—that is how do they strategically affect the U.S. economy? This was analyzed in detail in 引发世界经济危机的罪魁祸首是美国，而非乌克兰战争 so here only the main points are summarised—for other factual data please see that article.

Over the short term no single structural factor of U.S. GDP has a decisive influence on U.S. economic growth—as analyzed below this means, for example, that a consumer stimulus can have a short-term effect. However, if longer time periods are considered then the situation is entirely different. Taking a 10-year period, as would be predicted by economic theory, there is a positive correlation, to be precise 0.66, between the share of net fixed investment in the U.S. economy and GDP growth—a very high correlation. That is, the higher the percentage share of net fixed investment in U.S. GDP the faster the rate of U.S. GDP growth.

For present purposes it is unnecessary to determine why there is this close positive long-term correlation between net fixed investment and U.S. GDP growth—although the obvious explanation, in line with economic theory, would be the positive cumulative effect of high levels of fixed investment, an input into the economy’s supply side, in increasing U.S. capital stock. Nor is it even necessary, for present purposes, to determine the direction of causation between high levels of net fixed investment and high levels of GDP growth, or even to ascertain whether some third process determines both. It is simply sufficient to note that, due to this high correlation, the U.S. economy cannot achieve high levels of GDP growth without there also being high levels of net fixed investment in GDP. In other words, if over the longer term the U.S. economy is to grow more rapidly the percentage of net fixed investment in the U.S. economy must increase.
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This, therefore, provides the fundamental criteria for evaluating the strategic effect of the U.S. stimulus packages to deal with the consequences of COVID on longer term U.S. economic growth. As already noted, these failed to raise U.S. net fixed investment—on the contrary U.S. net fixed investment fell as a share of U.S. GDP during these stimulus programs. Figure 12 shows the declining levels of U.S. net fixed investment during successive post-World War II business cycles, which explains the long-term slowdown in the U.S. economy. As the latest stage in this decline, U.S. net fixed investment was 4.8 percent of GDP in the 4th quarter of 2019, on the eve of the pandemic. This had fallen to 3.6 percent of GDP by the 4th quarter of 2022. Given that the closest correlation for U.S. GDP growth is with net fixed investment the U.S. stimulus packages will therefore fail to raise the rate of U.S. long term economic growth—in line with IMF projections of a continuing slowdown of the U.S. economy. That is, the stimulus packages were accompanied by a further fall in U.S. net fixed investment—which in turn will undermine U.S. long term growth due to the close correlation of U.S. GDP growth and U.S. net fixed investment. That is these consumer-based packages not only produced extremely damaging short term inflation but were a strategic failure for the U.S. economy.

As already seen the U.S. stimulus packages raised the percentage of total consumption in U.S. GDP. As the closest negative correlation in U.S. GDP growth is between the percentage of total consumption in the U.S. economy and its economic growth these packages will therefore have a negative effect on long term U.S. economic growth. This explains the projections of slowing U.S. medium-long term growth already noted.
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It is therefore clear that the U.S. stimulus packages, because they were concentrated on consumption, produced no fundamental increase in the share of net fixed investment in U.S. GDP. Given that net fixed investment has the strongest correlation with U.S. GDP growth these U.S. stimulus packages therefore produced no increase in long term U.S. GDP growth. That is, they were a strategic failure.

Clarifying the relation of consumption and economic growth, and eliminating the confused idea that consumption is an input into production and therefore contributes to GDP growth, has a further immediate consequence. It makes clear why it is necessary to avoid confusion between the two different issues of the rate of growth of consumption and the percentage of consumption in GDP—a confusion which sometimes appears in sections of China’s media. This distinction is obscured by an unclear phraseology of “increasing consumption,” without specifying if what is meant is increasing the percentage of consumption in GDP or increasing the rate of growth of consumption. This distinction is crucial because, as will be seen, the two move in opposite directions over the medium/long term—other things being equal, the higher the percentage of consumption in GDP then, except in the very short term, the lower with be the growth rate of consumption.

As already noted, the long-term growth rate of consumption in the U.S. economy is highly positively correlated with overall economic growth in the U.S. economy. But as already show, the higher the percentage of consumption in U.S. GDP the slower is the rate of U.S. economic growth. Other things being equal, therefore, a higher share percentage share of consumption in GDP, by slowing economic growth, will lead to a slower growth rate of consumption. This prediction from basic economic theory, is confirmed by the fact that the negative correlation of the share of total consumption in U.S. GDP and the rate of growth of consumption is an extremely high -0.79. That is, the higher the share of consumption in U.S. GDP the more slowly consumption, and therefore U.S. living standards, grows. The same processes will be seen to operate in China’s economy.

But it is the level and rate of growth of consumption, not the percentage share of consumption in GDP, which affects people’s real lives. This is indeed obvious. For example, a country such as the Central African Republic has an extremely high percentage of consumption in GDP, 99 percent, but is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita GDP of $492 and its per capita consumption has fallen by 15 percent in the last 10 years. It would be absurd to tell the inhabitants of the Central African Republic that they had a high level of consumption because it is 99 percent of GDP! What matters to them is their extremely low level of consumption, due to the very low level of per capita GDP, and the extraordinarily low rate of growth of consumption.

The correlation of GDP growth and consumption growth.

In contrast, there is almost a perfect long-term correlation between U.S. GDP growth and growth of household consumption as shown in Figure 13. Taking a 20-year moving average, to remove short-term effects of business cycles, the correlation between U.S. GDP growth and U.S. household consumption is 0.97—an extraordinarily high figure, leaving no doubt as to the extremely high interrelation between U.S. GDP growth and the growth rate of U.S. consumption.
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In summary, an increase in the share of consumption in U.S. GDP will lead to a slower rate of increase of consumption, and a higher rate of growth of GDP will be associated with a higher rate of consumption growth. This basic prediction of economic theory is fully factually confirmed for the U.S. and, as will be seen below, equally applies to China.

These theoretical issues, confirmed factually by the U.S. stimulus packages, can be applied to China and help clarify the discussion on its own stimulus programs.
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First, regarding the position in the business cycle, the situation of China’s economy at the beginning of 2023 is significantly different to that of the U.S. when it launched its stimulus packages. In the 4th quarter of 2019, immediately before the pandemic struck, China’s annual growth rate was 6.0 percent. However, in the previous three years China’s annual average growth rate was 6.4 percent, and in the preceding five years it had been 6.6 percent. In short, when the pandemic struck China’s economy was growing significantly below trend—whereas when the pandemic struck the U.S. was growing significantly above trend. Furthermore, during the three years since the beginning of the pandemic China’s economy significantly slowed further—its annual average growth rate in 2020-2022 was only 4.3 percent. In summary China’s growth during the last period, before it launches any stimulus measures in 2023, has been significantly below trend.

Furthermore, during the pandemic the pattern of change in China’s economy was also completely different to the U.S. Over the whole period 2020-2022, calculated from the annual summary data published by the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s fixed asset investment rose by 13.4 percent while retail sales rose by 7.9 percent. Although China’s retail sales are a narrower category than the U.S. data for overall consumption, they are a sufficiently large part of consumption to make clear that during the pandemic China’s fixed investment grew more rapidly than consumption—the exact opposite of the U.S. pattern in the same period.

In addition, the fact that whereas the U.S. experienced very high inflation China’s producer price index has actually been falling since October 2022, combined with China’s low rate of consumer price inflation, is entirely in line with China’s lower than trend rate of growth—indicating both an absence of substantial inflationary pressures and the existence of spare capacity.

Therefore, China’s economy as it enters 2023 is in almost the exact opposite situation in terms of position in the business cycle to the U.S. when it launched its COVID stimulus packages.

• The U.S. economy was growing above trend when it entered the pandemic and then launched a stimulus package overwhelmingly focused on the demand side—on consumption. As already noted, the result was predictable. With a large increase in demand, and no increase in net fixed investment, that is no increase in the supply of capital, the U.S. suffered extremely high inflation and low growth.
• China entered the pandemic growing below trend and its fixed investment, that is the supply of fixed capital, grew more rapidly than retail sales during the pandemic itself. China experienced more rapid growth than the U.S. and entirely escaped the inflationary wave in the U.S. China’s consumer price inflation in December was 1.8 percent and its peak inflation in that year was 2.8 percent, whereas U.S. consumer price inflation in December was 6.5 percent and its peak inflation during 2022 was 9.1 percent.

These changes in the U.S. and China were therefore both in line with economic theory. They also determine the different situations regarding economic stimulus programs. It is clear that in the short-term China has the economic space to launch a program containing a significant consumer, that is demand side only, stimulus without the likelihood of this creating major inflation. Indeed, a stimulus for consumption is necessary for both economic and political reasons. Politically, the relatively low rate of increase in consumption during the pandemic period, compared to its previous growth rates, means that a rapid short-term increase in consumption will aid the population in recovery from the sacrifices of the three —which saved millions of lives but involved sacrifices in living standards. Economically, consumer industries have been growing more slowly than their historic rate creating negative pressure on them. A stimulus to consumption would therefore greatly aid output in the consumer industries.
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A boost to consumption is also particularly appropriate for a stimulus program aimed to have relatively rapid results—as, in general, short-term increases in production in consumer facing industries can be more rapid than in capital goods industries as consumer facing industries, in general, are less capital intensive than investment ones. Therefore, output can be increased in a shorter period without the very high capital expenditures frequently required in investment industries.

Regarding the form of consumer stimulus economic theory and analysis indicates, as already widely discussed in China, that this should aim to minimize the chances of an increase in resources for households being saved rather than spent and should aim to bring forward in time consumption that would occur in any case but at a later date. This includes measures such as price reductions, financed by subsidies that are limited in time, consumer tokens that must be used by a certain date etc. A number of such programs have been launched by Chinese regions. It is not possible by these means to 100 percent prevent “leakage” of such financial flows into saving but nevertheless theoretical issues are in line with the author’s personal experience that the bulk of such measures stimulate consumption and do not leak into saving.

Certainly, the present author does not have personal experiences of economic stimulus in an economy the size of China, but nevertheless his experiences in a very large city economy, London, are relevant. The author was in charge of London’s economic policy from 2000-2008 and London’s economy is larger than that of the majority of European countries—due to its extremely high level of productivity, with it being the only city in Europe that equals U.S. levels of per capita GDP. The author’s experience was entirely in line with the experience of Chinese regions that have launched steps to stimulate short term consumption via marketing, price reductions, coupons, and other steps. The most powerful specific experience of such consumer stimulus programs in London was in 2003 when the city suffered an extremely severe external economic shock due to the consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This invasion, as with COVID, was an extraneous blow, that is not due to normal economic processes in the business cycle.

London is one of the world’s largest internationally oriented city economies—in particular, one of the world’s most important financial centers and largest travel destinations for both business and tourism, and these form a large part of its economy. Fear of terrorism or military attacks during the Iraq war led to an extremely severe collapse of international, and to a lesser extent domestic, visitors. An indicator of the scale of this was that under this impact of the war the daily price of hotel rooms in London fell by 70-80 percent and those locations which, for branding reasons, refused to reduce their prices suffered 70-80 percent falls in visitors. Visits by domestic visitors also declined due to fear of terrorist attacks. This created serious downward pressure on London’s economy.

To meet this crisis no stimulus package was launched during the war itself, as no price or marketing incentive would lead to people travelling or going to visitor attractions if they believed they might be killed. But a stimulus package was prepared in advance for when the war ended. As soon as that occurred a consumer facing stimulus package was launched by London’s city government essentially similar to that launched by some Chinese regions and cities at the beginning of this year. This consisted of two elements. First, a major marketing campaign, financed by the city government, was launched promoting visitor attractions, restaurants, exhibitions etc. in the city. Second, in an interrelated move, subsidies were launched to allow temporary price reductions to visitor attractions, restaurants, exhibitions etc. In the case of London, the private sector companies involved in this were encouraged to offer temporary price reductions and the city government also gave a subsidy to such companies to make the price reductions still greater.

The results of this consumer facing program were extremely successful. Both international and domestic visitor numbers recovered extremely rapidly boosting economic recovery in the city. It is entirely possible some of this stimulus may have leaked into saving, but overall it is clear that the majority was used for consumption and the overall short term program was successful. Therefore, for both theoretical reasons and those of practical experience the present author is a strong supporter of launching consumer-oriented stimulus packages in the appropriate economic circumstances.
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But as already analyzed any such consumer stimulus, that is one purely on the demand side, does not automatically increase supply. Therefore, except in conditions of deep economic depression, with enormous amounts of unused capacity, which does not exist in China at present, a purely consumer, that is demand side, stimulus will, outside of the short term, lead to putting back to use large amounts of spare capacity but only an increase in the supply side, which involves increased fixed investment, can sustain over the medium/long term an increase in production/GDP. Therefore, to judge the strategic effect of any stimulus program it is necessary to constantly measure not only the short-term effects on demand and consumption but also to see if it is producing an increase in investment.

Although such short-term consumer stimulus programs can be successful at appropriate points in the business cycle, such as exist in China at present, nevertheless, to integrate these with economic strategy, it is simultaneously necessary to bear in mind the fundamental medium/long term economic issues.

First, other things being equal, what is being achieved by such consumer-oriented programs is to change in time when expenditure occurs—for example, this is achieved by a price and/or advertising incentive given for consumers to spend now and not to delay in time expenditure. But while experience shows this can have a significant short-term impact nevertheless over the medium/long term, if nothing else changes, expenditure will remain limited by income. The consumer stimulus may change in time the point at which expenditure takes place, which in some circumstances is extremely economically useful, but by its direct effect it cannot by itself alter the overall expenditure that takes place over time. Long term expenditure is determined by income. If everything else stays the same higher expenditure than normal in the short term will be accompanied by lower expenditure than normal later. Only an increase in income can create, other things being equal, an overall long-term increase in consumption. And such long-term increases in income are determined by economic growth and production.

Second, in anything other than the short term, that is while unused capacity is being put back to work, only an increase in investment, that is in supply, can increase output. If this does not occur then, as with the U.S. stimulus packages, the increase in demand from increased consumption will primarily, or even exclusively, over the medium/longer term produce inflation, not an increase in output.
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It is on this point that there is a clear medium/long term issue in China’s economy, and therefore for its strategy, which differs significantly from the short term. While China’s fixed investment has grown more rapidly than consumption during the pandemic this is exclusively due to the extremely sharp fall in consumption’s growth rate—it is not at all due to an increase in the growth rate of fixed asset investment. Figure 14 shows that the annual rate of increase of China’s fixed asset investment in December 2022, at 5.1 percent, was actually slightly slower than the 5.4 percent in December 2019 on the eve of the pandemic.

It as this point that any theoretical confusion between the economy’s demand and supply sides becomes crucial. If consumption were an input into production, that is into the economy’s supply side, then consumption could compensate for this fall in investment in terms of producing economic growth. But, as already seen, consumption is not an input into production and therefore contributes zero percent of production of GDP. The fall in net fixed investment therefore necessarily leads to fall in the rate of growth of GDP—as shown in Figure 16.

As already seen in the U.S. these move in exactly the opposite direction—the higher the percentage of consumption in GDP the lower is the growth rate of consumption. This factual finding in the U.S. is in line with economic theory. Figure 17 shows that exactly the same applies in China—as would be expected. Figure 17 shows that, taking a two-year moving average to even out purely short-term fluctuations caused by the pandemic between 2020 and 2021, the latest available data, the percentage of consumption in China’s GDP grew sharply by 5.3 percent of GDP, from 49.5 percent of GDP to 54.8 percent. But accompanying this the growth rate of consumption fell sharply by 5.4 percent of GDP—from 10.1 percent a year to 4.8 percent a year. There was a strong, -0.76, negative correlation between the percentage of consumption in GDP and the rate of growth of consumption. That is, raising the percentage of consumption in China’s GDP led to a slower growth rate of consumption and therefore to a slower rate of growth of Chinese living standards—precisely as with the U.S.
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Because the percentage of consumption in GDP and the rate of growth of consumption move in opposite directions it is necessary to clearly strictly distinguish the two. This real relation is confused by unclear formulas of “raising consumption” as this obscures that an increase in the percentage of consumption in GDP will lead to a lower rate of growth of living standards. Therefore, to take the phrase in one recent article, talk of China having historically been “tightening its belt” because of its low percentage of consumption in GDP is highly misleading. It is the high level of investment in China’s economy which has led to a rapid rate of economic growth and therefore a rapid rate of growth of consumption and therefore of China’s living standards. “Loosening the belt,” if by that is meant a higher percentage of consumption in China’s GDP, other things being equal, will lead to a lower rate of growth of consumption and therefore a lower rate of growth in living standards—and therefore, over time, to lower living standards than are possible with a lower percentage of consumption, and higher level of investment, in GDP.

​That is if GDP grows slowly so also will consumption. As investment is an input into production, increasing the percentage of consumption in GDP, and therefore lowering the percentage of investment, will lead to slower GDP growth—and therefore lower the rate of increase of consumption and living standards. This fundamental prediction of economic theory is confirmed factually just as much by China as by the U.S.

A short-term consumer, therefore purely demand side, stimulus is highly desirable in order to put existing unused capacity back to work. But because consumption is not an input into production, and not part of the economy’s supply side, such a stimulus program will not by itself add to the economy’s productive capacity. Therefore, only if this increase in consumer demand leads to an increase in supply, which necessarily includes investment, will it lead to long term growth and therefore achievement of the strategic goals to 2035. The only way to know if this is occurring is to carefully factually monitor the factual situation regarding investment.

In regard to this, certainly various predictions, theoretical or factual, may be made but, as always, in the end “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” If there is not an increase in investment created by the demand created by the consumer stimulus program, which is precisely what occurred in the U.S., then all that a prolonged consumer stimulus will create, once unused capacity is put back to work, is inflation—again this is what factually occurred in the U.S. and was entirely in line with economic theory. To achieve the strategic goals for 2035, doubling GDP/per capita GDP compared to 2020, which requires a doubling of the economy’s productive capacity, then a very large increase in investment is required. An increase in consumption, because it is not an input into production, will itself create no increase in the economy’s productive capacity—despite the fact consumption is the ultimate goal of economic activity.

Incorrect statements, such as that consumption accounted for 67, or any other, per cent of GDP growth, as sometimes appear in sections of the Chinese media, obscure this reality and helped provide a rationale for damaging programs and results such as were seen in the U.S. in the last period. Investment will account for a large part of the increase in productive capacity which is required to achieve the 2035 strategic goals, consumption necessarily will be zero percent of the increase in productive capacity necessary to achieve the 2035 goals.

Finally. for clarity, these issues, naturally do not mean that even in the short term any initial demand side stimulus should consist wholly of consumption—demand for investment increases overall demand just as much as does consumption demand. But this difference of the demand and supply sides of the economy becomes particularly clear over the medium/long term. Therefore, increase in consumption demand, if unaccompanied by increased investment, can only produce relatively short-term increases in output. An increased in investment, in contrast, because it increases not only demand, but supply can lead to a medium/long increase in output and, therefore achievement of strategic goals.

The strategic goals in the economy, in particular, therefore require an examination of the conditions which will create a sustained increase in investment. That large issue, however, has to be the subject of another article simply for reasons of word length.

To summarize, the present world economic situation, is largely determined by the interrelation between two sets of stimulus measures. The first is the simultaneous inflationary wave and slowdown of production in the main Western economies which is inseparably bound up with the predictable failure of the U.S. stimulus programs launched to deal with the consequences of the COVID pandemic. Clarification of the reasons for this failure, in turn, has crucial lessons both for the short-term stimulus measures China’s economy requires in 2023 and their interrelation with the achievement of the strategic goals for 2035. In particular:

1. As shown, confusion between the economy’s demand side and its supply side is extremely damaging. The facts regarding the results of the U.S. stimulus programs, and the issues involved for China, are entirely in line with both Marxist and serious Western economics. But they also show the dangerous errors of “vulgar” Western economics—errors which unfortunately sometimes appear in parts of China’s media.
2. The negative aspects of the Western economies’ situation, the most severe stagflationary problems for forty years, was not caused by the Ukraine war—as this inflationary wave was already taking place long before that war started. It was directly caused by the major errors in the stimulus programs launched by the U.S. Frequently rationalized by the wrong idea that consumption can produce something, that is that it is an input into production, the U.S. launched a massive essentially exclusively consumer based, i.e., demand side only, stimulus. If such a stimulus had been launched when the U.S. had been growing below trend, and had spare capacity, then despite its theoretical confusions this stimulus package might have been effective—the impact of economic measures is determined by their practical content not by their theoretical economic rationale. But instead, this massive demand side only stimulus was launched when the U.S. economy was already growing above trend. The result was entirely predictable—with a huge increase in demand, and no increase in supply, the inevitable consequence was a huge inflationary wave, that is a short-term crisis. This inflation in turn led to sharply contractionary policies, notably steep interest rate rises, to attempt to bring it under control. These contractionary polices in turn slowed the economy—meaning that the stimulus packages were not only a short term but a complete strategic failure.
3. China faces a sharply different practical situation. Its economy has been growing significantly below trend. A demand side stimulus will therefore find a situation where there is significant unused capacity. Under those circumstances a consumer stimulus, that is one solely on the demand side, is likely to be effective and necessary. Therefore, based both on considerations of economic theory and of personal practical experience, the present author strongly supports the idea of consumer stimulus as part of any overall stimulus program in China at present.
4. A potential danger in China’s situation is of a different type. It is the confusion that appears in some sections of China’s media of repetition of the same confusions as in vulgar Western economic theory—the false idea that consumption is an input in production and therefore that consumption can produce something.
5. The damaging practical consequences of this error are clear. A consumer-based stimulus launched in the current conditions of China’s economy, as already analyzed, should lead to a rapid and significant increase in production. But what will happen over the medium/long term will be determined by whether this demand side stimulus is accompanied by an increase in the economy’s supply side—which requires investment. The initial increase in output created by the consumer stimulus should not lead to damagingly high inflation in the short term for the reasons given, but after a certain period of time, exactly how long depends on how much spare capacity there is, unless there is an increase in investment, that is an increase in the supply side, there will either be slow growth, or inflation, or both—as in the U.S.
6. The long-term implications for consumption of raising the percentage of consumption in GDP must be clearly understood. Other things being equal, over the medium/long term, the higher the percentage of consumption in GDP, because this lowers the percentage of investment, the lower will be the growth rate of the economy and of consumption. Over a longer period, such as the twelve years to 2035, increasing the percentage of consumption in GDP will lead to a lower level of consumption, and a lower standard of living, than with a higher percentage of investment, and therefore a lower percentage of consumption, in GDP. Those arguing for a higher percentage of consumption in GDP are in fact arguing in favor of a lower living standard by 2035 than would otherwise be the case. This is an inevitable consequence of the fact, demonstrated by economic theory, and confirmed factually by both the U.S. and China, that over anything other than the short term the percentage of consumption in GDP and the growth rate of consumption move in opposite directions—that is, the higher the percentage of consumption in GDP the lower will be the rate of growth of consumption.
7. A consumption, that is purely demand side, stimulus is valuable in creating a rapid revival in 2023 by putting unused capacity back to work. But consumption, because it is not an input into production, can constitute nothing, that is precisely zero percent, of the doubling of productive capacity which is required to achieve the strategic goals to 2035. That doubling of productive capacity, however, requires a huge increase in investment. A necessary condition of the achievement of these strategic goals of 2035 is therefore creation of such investment—the conditions for achieving this, solely for reasons of space, requires another substantial article.

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​As the present global economic situation is largely defined by the by the extremely negative consequences of the U.S. stimulus programs, which was fully in line with economic theory, clarity on these issues is crucial both for achievement of China’s immediate economic targets in 2023 and the achievement of its strategic goals to 2035.

I arrived in Shanghai, 36 hours after leaving São Paulo, a near deportation in South Africa, and a canceled connecting flight. It was March 21, 2020. In the following days, China implemented its mandatory centralized quarantine for all international travelers. Exactly a week later, on March 28, China started its travel ban1 to prevent the spread of a still little-known virus called Covid-19, which was making its way to all corners of the earth.

Nearly three years later, on the coming January 8, 20232, China will officially open its borders, remove the mandatory quarantine and nucleic acid tests for people entering the country, and downgrade the management of Covid-19 from Class A to Class B3. It is not an end of an era; rather, it is a continuation of a rigorous process of confronting a historic and global pandemic, while putting science and the people at its center. It has been an incredible experience to see how the Chinese government and people have taken on this pandemic, while the world has suffered4 6.68 million recorded deaths, with over 650 million people infected. The impact of this virus is one for the history books, the lasting effects to be studied for years to come, and the fight has not yet ended.

The Western mainstream media, however, has been quick to criticize China every step of the way, from the “draconian5” Zero-Covid strategy to the “dystopian6” measures to ensure a safe Winter Olympics games in Beijing, and now to the “nightmare7” of relaxing the country’s Covid-19 requirements. Rhetoric aside, what has the fight against the virus been like in China—characterized by the Zero-Covid strategy—and why are the relaxation measures happening now? It is important to look back at the last three years to understand how we arrived at this point today. Having lived in China throughout the ebbs and flows of the Covid-19 virus, I would categorize the country’s dynamic strategy into four key phases.

Two-and-a-half weeks after I arrived in China, on April 8, the country celebrated the end to the 76-day historic lockdown in Wuhan, where the pandemic first broke out and claimed the lives of 4,512 Chinese people8. It was an emotional and bittersweet victory for the entire country, which had mobilized its people and resources to fight a very deadly and never-before-seen virus.

On December 26, 2019, Dr. Zhang Jixian9, director of the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine of Hubei Province hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, saw an elderly couple that had a high fever and a cough—symptoms that characterize the flu. But further examination ruled out influenza A and B, mycoplasma, chlamydia, adenovirus, and SARS. She and her team then quickly determined there was a new virus at play. Three days later, the provincial authorities were alerted, then the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC) and by December 31 the WHO was informed10. On New Year’s Day, the CDC officials called11 Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, while he was on vacation, to inform him of the severity of their findings.

On January 3, the virus was identified with its genetic sequence which was then shared12 with the world a week later. At this point, there were many unknowns—what the virus was, how it was transmitted, and how it could be stopped. There were no vaccines, while the country—and the world—was unprepared. A strict lockdown of the city of 11 million people began on January 23, and 41,000 medical workers13 were dispatched from across the country to Wuhan. Saving lives and studying this new virus were the main priorities in this phase.

After Covid-19 had been successfully contained in Wuhan, and throughout the rest of 2020 and 2021, China implemented a Zero-Covid strategy, characterized by extensive measures to track, test, isolate, and treat infected people. The Chinese mainland recorded extremely few deaths14 in this period since the Wuhan outbreak, while successfully containing 11 outbreaks15 of the Delta variant, which is more transmissible and the cause of more serious infections. Meanwhile, the global reported death toll had climbed to over 5.4 million people16 by the end of 2021 with countless millions more infected.

Far from “failing17” as the Western media is claiming now, Zero-Covid worked extremely effectively. Since the pandemic broke, the average life expectancy of Chinese people actually increased from 77.318 to 78.219 years (2019-2021), surpassing the United States for the first time in history (Chart 1). In the U.S., however, the average life span dropped from 78.820 to 76.421 years during that same period, owing in large part to the high number of Covid-related deaths. This is particularly striking when you consider that China was the eleventh22 poorest country in the world in 1949 (measured by per capita PPP GDP) with a life expectancy of only 3623 versus 6824 for the U.S. This means that an average Chinese person’s lifespan more than doubled, whereas in the U.S., the average lifespan only grew by eight years in nearly eight decades.

Life expectancy in China increased beyond that of the U.S. during the pandemic.

The U.S. has recorded 1.1 million deaths due to Covid-19. The cumulative U.S. death rate per one million people is currently 83425 times that of China (3,339 versus 4). In the case of the U.S. and China, the use of “excess-death” numbers—the difference between observed and expected mortality rates—is of little value for analysis purposes as both countries had relatively low numbers of these deaths in the last three years. If China had followed the reckless U.S. path, these figures indicate China would have suffered 4.8 million dead. Even a quick calculation reveals that China’s strategy indeed saved millions of lives.
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While it was containing the virus, China was also intensely studying the virus and developing responses, inaugurating26 its first vaccine, Sinopharm, in December 2020, which was subsequently approved27 by the WHO for emergency use on May 7, 2021. By October of that year, according to a Nature study28, Chinese vaccines accounted for nearly half of the 7.3 billion doses delivered globally. Since then, China has approved29 eight vaccines, with 35 others undergoing clinical trials, donated30 328 million doses, pledged31 over US$100 million to the Covax global vaccine distribution program for Global South countries, and proposed32 that vaccines become a global public good.

In August 2021, in response to the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant, China adopted33 a new strategy called “Dynamic Zero-Covid.” It was designed to balance health, economic, and social needs and to minimize the impact of the epidemic on the economy, society, production, and the people’s everyday life.
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There is no one-size-fits-all measure for a country of 1.4 billion people. During this third phase, guided by science, the country experimented with its prevention and implementation practices. Mass testing was developed to high levels of efficiency, in which Guangzhou34’s 18 million inhabitants could be tested a mere three days, while the cost of pooling PCR tests (ten samples per test tube and taking advantage of low infection rates) were reduced to merely 3.5 yuan35 (US$0.50) per person. The country developed a nation-wide digital travel code and city-level “green code” cellphone applications36 to track Covid cases and those who have visited high-risk areas. All the while, the government moved towards more targeted measures to limit the use of large-scale lockdowns. During the Shanghai outbreak, for example, residential communities were classified37 into “lockdown,” “controlled,” or “precautionary” zones based on their risk level to try to minimize the interruption of daily and economic life.

Between January 2020 and mid-April 2022, China had spent38 an estimated US$45.1 billion to provide 11.5 billion free PCR testing for its residents. The costs of this mass testing strategy, however, were also mounting, with estimates reaching 1.8 percent39 of the country’s GDP and putting pressure especially on local government budgets. Despite the economic pressures, rather than “crippling40” China’s economy, the country’s GDP grew nearly four times faster than the U.S. and five times compared to the EU, from the start of the pandemic to Q3 of 2022.41

Despite being the second largest economy, China is still a developing country. The pandemic strained the country’s medical system, which was lacking in several key areas. Accordingly, China used the last three years to begin to fill in those gaps, primarily through increasing its intensive care unit (ICU) capacity. In 2019, China had only 3.6 ICU per 100,000 residents42, which was nine times less than the U.S. with 34.7 units. Since 2019, China increased43 its supply of ICU beds 2.4-fold (57,160 in December 2019 to 138,800 in December 2022). In the same period, ICU doctors and nurses44 increased by one-third and doubled, respectively.

On January 15, 2022, China had its first case of locally transmitted Omicron infection. On April 18, 2022, Shanghai announced45 its first three Covid-related deaths, all unvaccinated elderly people aged over 89 years. At the time of the Shanghai outbreak, while 87 percent46 of the country were already fully vaccinated, that number dropped to only 62 percent47 for the city’s 3.6 million elderly aged over 60, with 38 percent having received booster shots. The country knew that this vulnerable sector of the population had to be protected.
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Significant efforts have since been made to increase vaccination of the elderly. The official National Health Commission reported48 that on November 30, 2022, the breakdown of vaccination rates for people aged over 80 years are as follows: 76.6 percent at least one shot, 65.8 percent two shots or more, and 40 percent three or more doses. Despite the lower mortality rates of the Omicron variant, its highly contagious nature posed serious challenges to the country’s existing prevention and control measures, while putting great strains on the economy. Even two doses49 of so-called advanced Western mRNA vaccines like Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine or Moderna’s similar mRNA vaccine provide only about 30 percent protection against symptomatic infection from Omicron for about four months.

As Omicron began to spread, comparisons50 showed that the risk of death when infected with Omicron BA.2 was less than half that of Delta. One Chinese scientific study51 on mice showed that the new Covid-19 strains had 100 times lower virus load than the original, but was highly transmissible. China knew it needed to adjust its policies with the shifting nature of the virus, but with some important considerations.

On November 11, the central government released its “20 measures”52 to begin to relax its Zero-Covid policies. This included reducing mandatory quarantine time for inbound flights, decreasing isolation times, promoting vaccination of elderly, and eliminating the use of mass testing. For a country of its size, any central government policy takes time and huge organizational capacity to be implemented at the local scale.

The easing created initial confusion, and some people were upset with local community officials for not upholding the central government’s easing measures, frequently aired on Chinese social media platforms. Though there was frustration and exhaustion, it would be a mistake to believe that the downgrading phase was a response to the series of small, coordinated “white paper protests” that occurred after an Urumqi apartment fire that claimed the ten lives on November 24. Not only did the protests occur two weeks after the government began relaxing its Covid measures, but they were also not representative of the Chinese public opinion at large. The government easing also sparked another concern, with many people worried about getting infected. Several Weibo social media users53 expressed anger and criticism of the protesters, seeing them as irresponsible, middle-class youth who wanted their personal liberties at a collective expense. Unlike the blanketing Western media portrayals, Chinese people do not have a singular voice.

On Monday December 26, China announced54 it will downgrade the management of Covid-19 from Class A to Class B of infectious diseases on January 8, 2023. The three main reasons for this change include the fact that Omicron is not as virulent as Delta, a large percentage of the population had been vaccinated, and the country’s health system was better prepared. China uses a three-level system for the classification of infectious diseases, each delimiting specific response measures. Class A, the most dangerous, includes only cholera and the plague. Class B includes SARS, AIDS, and tuberculosis. Class C includes the flu and the mumps. Corresponding to this change, Covid-19 measures will be further relaxed.

Twelve55 main countermeasures were identified for the new Covid-19 policy corresponding to Class B control: 1) Increase vaccination rates; 2) prepare drugs and testing reagents for patients;  3) increase investment in construction of medical resources including ICU beds; 4) shift from mass PCR testing; 5) treat patients according to severity; 6) improve health survey and data, including vaccination status of those aged over 65 years; 7) control vulnerable population institutions, including elder care, hospitals, and schools; 8) strengthen prevention and control for rural areas and for high-risk patients; 9) increase epidemic monitoring, response, and control; 10) promote personal protection and the principle of everyone’s responsibility for their own health; 11) enable information access and education; and 12) optimize international personnel exchanges.

In a press conference56 of the State Council Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism, Dr. Yin Wenwu, Chief Physician of CDC’s Division of Infection Prevention, addressed the consequence of classifying Covid-19 as a Class B, which would reduce the frequency of the publication of data. The new data, which will be released monthly, will include the number of existing hospitalized cases and serious illnesses, including critical illnesses, and the cumulative number of deaths.

As expected, downgrading the severity of the virus’s management would also mean increasing the number of infections and related deaths. However, no single prediction model can be easily applied to China. Existing models for Covid-19 infection and mortality predictions have a wide range of outcomes. Forecast accuracy tends to decrease as prediction times increase, with models showing up to fivefold increase57 in error comparing one-week to 20-week horizons. Even the same Omicron variant has resulted in varied mortality rates in different countries. As of December 21, the U.S. seven-day rolling death rate58 was as high as 437 people, or a rate of 1.29 per million. Meanwhile, Japan had a comparable rate of 2.0 per million and New Zealand 0.85 per million.

Although China has now surpassed the life expectancy of the U.S., it has relatively fewer people 75 years and older than the U.S. (46 percent59 fewer as a percentage of the total population for each country). Omicron has had the impact that a massive 69 percent60 of all Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. in September 2022 were from this age group. The demographic difference in this age group, taken as a stand-alone factor, would imply an over 30 percent reduction in likely death rates for China.

Western media have been quick to use selective stories and photographs to create a broader image of the “chaotic61” situation in China, including alleging very high death rates. China, with a population of over 1.4 billion people, had over 27,00062 deaths per day prior to the pandemic. Using existing Omicron death rates from other countries would infer a possible 6 percent increase in death rates. These would be significant deaths, into the many tens of thousands, but there is no evidence yet provided that supports the millions that the West is speculating.
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This downgrading phase is indeed complex and challenging, as doctors are working overtime with increase in cases, some hospitals are in full capacity, fever medicines have faced shortages, and winter-related ailments are adding complications. However, relaxing measures now means that China has used the last three years to try to prepare itself the best that it can by vaccinating the people, studying the virus, building medical infrastructure, training workers, and waiting until a much less deadly strain had emerged. It has also gained hard-earned experience that is essential to managing any future pandemic.

Not for lack of vaccines, there are several reasons for the relatively slow vaccination rates for China’s elders. Many of them63 had preconceived notions about vaccines or were worried about complications related to underlying health conditions, while the successful control of the virus disincentivized elders to get vaccinated. Comparatively, in the United States, only 36 percent of people 65 and older have received the updated shot, known as the bivalent booster64, according to data65 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. China, on the other hand, has consistently made efforts to convince, and not coerce, this vulnerable group to get vaccinated.

On November 29, the State Council’s Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism, adjusted the booster vaccination protocol, and required localities66 to extensively survey senior populations and ramp up services and awareness campaigns. Between December 1 and 13, 823,00067 of those over 80 years old received a third vaccine. China has created the world’s first commercially released inhaled vaccine68 for Covid-19: CanSino Biologics’ Convidecia Air, a non-replicated viral vector vaccine. This booster is already gaining popularity69 with the elderly.

Regarding the supply of medicines, some cities had shortages of fever medicines in the first weeks of December as cases increased. Hoarding, price-gouging, and the spike in demand were among the factors that contributed the supply shortage. In response, local governments started to distribute70 Ibuprofen for free, and Beijing residents, for example, can now get Ibuprofen and Paracetamol within an hour. China also passed a regulation71 on online pharmaceutical suppliers, that included penalties up to five million RMB (US$720,000) for pharmacies that increase prices according to speculative behavior. China has72 also made Pfizer’s Paxlovid oral antiviral treatment available.

Due to mass testing during phase three of the anti-pandemic fight, the government was able to obtain accurate data about the virus to inform its responses. As mass testing has been phased out in this current phase, some data precision will inevitably be foregone. However, China’s resilience is demonstrated in its ability to respond to new situations, applying technologies and science to evolve its public health system. For example, in the past two weeks, over ten provincial CDC’s, including in Sichuan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, have launched surveys73 with hundreds of thousands of participating citizens. This survey data, though limited by sampling methodology, provides an important reference for local and central authorities to monitor the path of the disease, and collect information including on important hospitals, availability of fever drugs, and response capacity of local governments.
​
On December 31, Hainan released74 the results of their second online survey (conducted December 19-25) filled in by about 3.4 percent of the province’s population. Below is one of the charts released (Chart 2).

China’s CDC continues to actively conduct real-time dynamic monitoring on Covid-19. From December 1 to 29, it had completed the whole genetic sequencing of 1,14275 cases through sampling survey. There are seven Omicron subvariants circulating, two of which, BA.5.2 and BF.7, account for more than 80 percent of all cases. BF.7 has greater immune escape ability, a shorter incubation period, and faster transmission. Guangzhou reported76 that 96 percent of people infected and tested had the BA5.2 variant, the symptoms of which are generally considered milder. There has been no reemergence of the Delta variant or other previous strains. However, the U.S. has conveniently used this moment to target visitors from China, requiring them to show negative Covid-19 tests to enter the country. Ironically, it was the U.S. that failed77 to prioritize Covid-19 variant surveillance in 2020.

Several prediction models have been published in the last week, including one by former CDC chief scientist of epidemiology Zeng Guang,78 states that the infection rate in Beijing may have exceeded 80 percent. These models also predict that the second wave is likely to be much milder and point to three factors behind the higher hospitalizations in the city: Beijing’s winter exacerbates respiratory symptoms among the elderly, Beijing is now listed as a moderately aging society (with 20 percent79 of the residents are above 60 years old, and the dominant80 BF.7 subvariant appears more virulent.

The government is paying close attention81 to the availability of medical resources, especially in the rural areas, in anticipation of the week-long spring festival starting January 21. China has increased daily production82 of antigen tests to 110 million units, along with 250,000 oximeters per day, and is prioritizing supply to rural areas. Rapid antigen tests cost as low as US$0.51 each on the e-commerce platform, Pinduoduo. In the rural areas where the medical infrastructure is less developed, the severity of the virus is not as bad as originally feared, according to online accounts83. Barefoot doctors84, a legacy of the Mao-era and sometimes pilloried by those seeking to privatize rural health, have been essential in providing care in rural eras despite having less resources than major city hospitals.

A look back at the last three years shows how difficult the pandemic has been for China and the world, testing the Chinese government’s capacity to confront such an unforeseen public health crisis as well as the people’s patience. In Beijing where I live, however, people are back and bundled in the streets, at work, and on the subways, with traffic and travel recovering. People are anxiously awaiting the spring festival, the most important holiday of the year. As we enter into a new year and a new era of fighting Covid-19—while anticipating the new viruses that will inevitably emerge—the hope is that the world can learn from these hard-earned lessons, act and cooperate using science, not rumors, and embody a spirit of international solidarity, not stigma.85

​Notes

1. ↩ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PRC, MFA News
2. ↩ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PRC, MFA News
3. ↩ Global Times, China to downgrade management of COVID-19 from Class A to Class B from January 8
4. ↩ World Health Organization, WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard
5. ↩ Bloomberg, China Hits Zero Covid Cases With a Month of Draconian Curbs
6. ↩ Daily Mail and Reuters, Winter Olympics Dystopian Scenes Inside Beijing’s Closed-Loop Covid Quarantine
7. ↩ The Washington Post, China’s new covid nightmare could become a global catastrophe
8. ↩ CGTN, COVID-19 testing to be increased in China’s Wuhan after new case confirmed
9. ↩ Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, China and CoronaShock
10. ↩ World Health Organization, Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) SITUATION REPORT-1 JANUARY 21 2020
11. ↩ The New York Times, The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19
12. ↩ World Health Organization, Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) SITUATION REPORT-1 JANUARY 21 2020
13. ↩ China Daily, Entire nation mobilizes to help Wuhan
14. ↩ Worldometer, COVID-19 Data in China
15. ↩ China CDC Weekly, Eleven COVID-19 Outbreaks with Local Transmissions Caused by the Imported SARS-CoV-2 Delta VOC—China
16. ↩ Worldometer, Coronavirus Death Toll
17. ↩ Consumer News and Business Channel, Here’s what lies ahead for China after zero-Covid failed
18. ↩ National Health Commission, PRC, Statistical Bulletin of China’s Health Development in 2019
19. ↩ National Health Commission, PRC, Statistical Bulletin of China’s Health Development in 2021
20. ↩ National Center for Health Statistics of CDC, U.S. Life Expectancy Increased in 2019, Prior to the Pandemic
21. ↩ National Center for Health Statistics of CDC, Mortality in the United States, 2021
22. ↩ Asia Times, A history of China’s fight against poverty
23. ↩ National Library of Medicine, Nutrition and health in China, 1949 to 1989
24. ↩ National Center for Health Statistics of CDC, Mortality Trends in the United States, 1900–2018
25. ↩ Worldometer, Reported Cases and Deaths by Country or Territory
26. ↩ Contagion Live, China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 Vaccine Approved by WHO
27. ↩ World Health Organization, WHO lists additional COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use and issues interim policy recommendations
28. ↩ Nature, China’s COVID vaccines have been crucial—now immunity is waning
29. ↩ COVID19 Vaccine Tracker, 8 Vaccines Approved for Use in China
30. ↩ Bridge of Global Health Strategy, China COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker
31. ↩ South China Morning Post, Xi Jinping says China promises 2 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses to other countries in 2021
32. ↩ China Daily, China’s vaccines are global public good
33. ↩ China CDC Weekly, Perspectives: The Dynamic COVID-Zero Strategy in China
34. ↩ South China Morning Post, Coronavirus: 18 million tests in three days as Guangzhou tries to stem spread in latest outbreak
35. ↩ Caixin Global, China Further Slashes Price of a Covid-19 Test to $2.40
36. ↩ The Paper, When will the health codes be interconnected?
37. ↩ Global Times, Shanghai reports three COVID-19 related deaths due to underlying diseases for the first time amid the latest flare-up
38. ↩ Caixin Global, In Depth: As Mass Covid Testing Becomes China’s New Normal, Debate Grows Over Who Pays
39. ↩ Caixin Global, Will Regular Covid Testing Help or Hurt China’s Economy?
40. ↩ Financial Times, How China’s lockdown policies are crippling the country’s economy
41. ↩ This data was provided by British economist John Ross and is included in his upcoming article on Covid-19 and the Chinese economy.
42. ↩ Global Times, China further focuses on severe COVID cases treatment with tiered medical services plan
43. ↩ Yujian Finance and Economics, ICU beds increased 2.4 times in three years: our critical care supporting facilities have been racing against time
44. ↩ Yujian Finance and Economics, ICU beds increased 2.4 times in three years: our critical care supporting facilities have been racing against time
45. ↩ Global Times, Shanghai reports three COVID-19 related deaths due to underlying diseases for the first time amid the latest flare-up
46. ↩ YCharts, China Coronavirus Full Vaccination Rate
47. ↩ Global Times, Shanghai reports three deaths, all elderly, unvaccinated
48. ↩ Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council, Work Plan for Strengthening COVID-19 Vaccination for the Elderly
49. ↩ The Scientist,  Omicron Appears to Evade Vaccines Better Than Other Variants
50. ↩ JAMA Network, Estimates of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.2 Subvariant Severity in New England
51. ↩ Global Times, Exclusive: Chinese scientists prove Omicron’s pathogenicity has geometrically decreased compared with previous strains
52. ↩ Global Times, China optimizes anti-epidemic measures, shortens quarantine period for intl arrivals
53. ↩ The Wall Street Journal, China’s Censors End Crackdown on Covid-Policy Criticism—of a Certain Kind
54. ↩ China Daily, China to manage COVID-19 with measures against Class B infectious diseases
55. ↩ National Health Commission, PRC, Explanation on Overall Plan for Implementing Class B Infectious Disease Management for COVID-19 Infections
56. ↩ National Health Commission, PRC, Transcript of the Press Conference of the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism on December 27, 2022
57. ↩ PNAS, Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States
58. ↩ Our World in Data, Coronavirus (COVID-19) Deaths
59. ↩ Statistics Times, United States vs China by population
60. ↩ Kaiser Family Foundation, Deaths Among Older Adults Due to COVID-19 Jumped During the Summer of 2022 Before Falling Somewhat in September
61. ↩ The Economist, Ending China’s zero-covid policy could unleash chaos
62. ↩ National Bureau of Statistics, PRC, Statistical Bulletin of China’s National Economic and Social Development in 2019
63. ↩ Caixin Global, Weekend Long Read: Why China’s Seniors Hesitate to Get Vaccinated
64. ↩ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, COVID-19 Bivalent Vaccine Boosters
65. ↩ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States
66. ↩ China Daily, Vaccination action plan to target elderly
67. ↩ Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council, Work Plan for Strengthening COVID-19 Vaccination for the Elderly
68. ↩ Business Wire, World-First Inhaled COVID-19 Vaccine, Developed in Partnership Between Aerogen® and CanSinoBIO, First Public Booster Immunization in China.
69. ↩ CGTN, Inhalable COVID-19 vaccines gain popularity among seniors in China
70. ↩ Communist Youth League Central Committee, Free medicines deliver in many places! Mobile diagnosis and treatment vehicles drive to the door and the PCR test booths turn into a diagnosis and treatment station.
71. ↩ South China Morning Post, China targets online pharmacies for price gouging on Covid-19 medication
72. ↩ Global Times, Beijing to distribute COVID-19 drug Paxlovid to community health centers to help key population amid approaching peak caseload
73. ↩ The Paper, Why did Sichuan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and other provinces launch the COVID-19 infection survey?
74. ↩ Sanya Released, Online survey of COVID-19 infection in hainan province
75. ↩ Global Times, Virologists and CDC departments deny reemergence of COVID-19 original strain and Delta variant in China
76. ↩ Guangming, What strains are dominant in Guangzhou now?
77. ↩ JAMA Network, How the U.S. Failed to Prioritize SARS-CoV-2 Variant Surveillance
78. ↩ IFeng, Zeng Guang:Beijing covid infection rate may exceed 80%. The first storm is relatively large, then the second wave is very low.
79. ↩ Global Times, Beijing now a moderately aging society, to become severely aging by 2035
80. ↩ Guangming, Beijing’s main strain is BF.7, the most contagious one so far.
81. ↩ Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council, Notice of the current work program for the prevention and control of covid infection in rural areas
82. ↩ Guancha, All-out efforts to ensure the supply of medical supplies and drugs
83. ↩ Yuyan Guancha, My hometown has survived the “pandemic”.
84. ↩ Gongdushijian, The barefoot doctors won a headwind game, while the online experts were confused
85. ↩ World Health Organization, WHO Director-General’s remarks at the media briefing on COVID-2019 outbreak on 14 February 2020

​[Source: jpost.com]

“A ghostly scene at China’s top of power: Xi Jinping’s predecessor is taken away. The ‘new emperor’ is reaching for absolute power. What are the consequences for the world?” This is the title and the introduction of the newspaper Die Weltwoche to a German-language article by the British historian Francis Pike, in which he writes: “Hu’s media-fueled removal takes on the appearance of a political drama reminiscent of Chairman Mao’s brutal purges of party members in the 1950s.” He is referring to a video from the Chinese Party Congress showing former party leader Hu Jintao allegedly being “forcefully taken away.”
​
“The removal of Hu from the hall occurred mere minutes after foreign media were allowed into the Great Hall,” Pike adds. This immediately raises the question of why Xi Jinping should wait to “remove” Hu Jintao until Western media are on the scene, having only waited for such an opportunity to pillory the “cruel and inhumane dictator Ji Jinping”?

​Ex-Chinese President Hu Jintao being removed from Communist Party Congress on October 22, 2022. [Source: nypost.com]

​[Source: biz-at-it.blogspot.com]

The same media did not mention that the frail 80-year-old man, who left a somewhat bewildered impression, had been escorted to and from the convention for several days during the Party Congress and before the “forced removal” hyped by the Western media on the last day of the Congress.

Here, for example, you can see Xi Jinping taking care of him as a friendly usher.
​
Cutting away an important part of the message and changing perceptions with misleading text is manipulation and is—rightly!—castigated by the same media when it is done by China.

That Hu Jintao has a health problem was first noticed by China observers at the 2019 National Day parade, when he was seen on the Tiananmen Balcony in Beijing with his hands shaking badly.
​
Immediately prior to the incident at the Party Congress, Hu Jintao participated in the election as the second eligible voter, just after Xi Jinping, who cast his vote at the ballot box. In a society that is much more Confucianist than Communist, this symbolic placement in the vote signifies great respect for the elder statesman. The Western media also blanked this out of the overall picture. This made it easier for them to construct a coup, a purge and a humiliation of the former president.

​On the Chinese evening news (in the video starting at 5:21), Hu Jintao was shown casting his vote after Xi Jinping had cast his vote at the ballot box and just before Hu was “removed.” [Source: cctv.com]

If Hu had really been purged during the day, as Western media claimed, it is highly unlikely that Chinese television would have shown him in its report in the evening.
​
According to George Soros, Xi is the “most dangerous man in the world.”

Little was heard from the official Chinese side about the incident, apart from a tweet from Xinhua News Agency saying Hu “did not feel well” during the meeting.

A report by Singaporean TV station CNA added an important detail that Western media representatives who were in the room seemed to have deliberately ignored: Hu had been looking at some documents on the table in front of him and apparently had a disagreement with the current chairman of China’s legislature, Li Zhanshu, who was sitting to his left, who took the documents out of his hand.
​
And when Li Zhanshu tried to get up to help Hu stand, Li was briefly dragged back to his seat by Wang Huning, a party ideologue and former professor of international politics to his left, making matters even more confusing. Xi stopped this disruption to the choreographed party meeting and summoned a staffer, who then tried to get Hu to leave, and who then escorted him out of the room. The video also shows that Hu, after standing up, first hovered in place, then took a few slow steps, then stopped and turned to Xi, who nodded briefly but continued to look at the assembled delegates.

If it had been a dispute, the incident would have been extraordinary, because in communist parties, which are not known for their transparency, disagreements are settled behind closed doors, and in any case not in front of running cameras from the whole world. So one would need to know what is in the documents. A former Chinese insider told the BBC, “Why would the party put a document on Hu’s desk if he wasn’t allowed to see it?”
​
Bill Bishop of the China newsletter Sinocism stated that the “purge claimed by the media doesn’t make sense that way.” Hu Haifeng, Hu Jintao’s son and party secretary of Lishui, Zhejiang, also sat in the room. “A purge of one without the other would be unlikely,” Bishop explained.

​Hu Heifeng [Source: taiwannews.com]

A real China insider was interviewed by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. When asked about Xi Jinping’s possible motives for the alleged “forced removal” of Hu Jintao, he replied:

“Xi is certainly not shy about taking drastic action, but his obsession is to restore party discipline through rules and procedures. He has never gone the way of Stalin or North Korea of just making his enemies disappear. Even with his bitterest foes—such as Bo Xilai, Zhou Yongkang, and Guo Boxiong, people who, in fact, plotted a coup against him—Xi took them down, but did everything according to the procedures.

He is a stern but not an arbitrary ruler. His books and speeches have more citations from China’s Legalism school than anything else. Legalism (a bad translation) stresses the importance of rules and regulations over arbitrary power.

If anyone wants to challenge Xi, it would be incredible for them to do so on the last day of the party congress, which is mainly for formal endorsement and communication. The debate and negotiations happened behind the scene MONTHS beforehand. There were plenty of opportunities for the two to argue if they didn’t agree with each other. This was simply not the case.”

Why have some Western media platforms gone wild with speculation, including suggesting it was a purge, the interviewer asked:

“This is the problem I have with the Western media and those ‘experts.’ You can be critical of the Chinese system, and you may dislike it intensely, but you at least need to understand what you are criticizing. Their imagination of China is just a plus-size North Korea, a modern-day Stalinist state, or the new Nazis. In fact, many Western media just borrow the same analytical tools they used to analyze the Soviet Union or North Korea or even Nazi Germany and apply it to China.

This is what I call the intellectual Procrustean bed they have forced on everyone studying China. Sometimes it can get really ridiculous. It’s either laziness or dogmatic rigidity or having an agenda—or a combination of all these.

There are many problems in Xi’s system, and so far he and the party have not come up with convincing answers to them. But to imagine it simply as another Soviet Union or North Korea is missing the point. If people start to make decisions based on such skewed views and perceptions, that will lead to real-life consequences. Hong Kong is a living example of it.”

So it is okay to criticize the Chinese system harshly, and pundits and the media may deeply loathe it, but they do so while being quite clueless.
​
Also, contrary to the predictions and speculations of experts and media in the West in the run-up to the Party Congress, the “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” was not shortened to Xi Jinping Thought in the Constitution, nor was Xi given new descriptive titles such as “Leader/领袖.”

​[Source: english.yunnan.cn]

There are two other key current things that pundits like John Pike and the mainstream media will not tell you:

1. China has remained essentially Confucian for more than two thousand years. Confucius advocated a government that cares for the people and makes their welfare its primary concern. It should be a meritocracy, in that “those who govern should do so on the basis of merit and not on the basis of inherited status,” he proclaimed, and that it should be enlightened and benevolent (in which the demonstrably most capable people who best serve the people should rise to positions of leadership).
   
   This is in contrast to Western democracies, where even the most incompetent can come to power thanks to empty promises and/or because they were well sponsored, and then have their own interests and those of their patrons in mind rather than the interests of their constituents. In China, civil servants still have to pass exams and prove themselves if they want to keep their jobs. This corresponds to the centuries-old Confucian tradition, according to which anyone, regardless of their social background, could obtain a position in the civil service at the imperial court after passing an entrance examination in various subjects. The fact that 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty in China over the past 40 years, accounting for more than 75% of global poverty, is no accident, but part of the application of this philosophy.
2. Mainstream media such as Foreign Affairs magazine highlighted the “Collateral Damage in China’s War on Covid,” or Nikkei, the world’s largest financial newspaper, headlined “Self-isolated: China’s lonely zero-COVID battle in spotlight” without ever telling their readers and viewers why the Chinese government took draconian measures against the Covid pandemic: China’s biggest weakness is its health care system. South Korea has 10 intensive care beds per 100,000 people, America has 34, and China has only 4. As a result, the government feared that the health care system would not be able to handle a large influx of seriously ill patients. Most retirees are not vaccinated.

​
The reason that modern medicine, including hospitals with intensive care units, lags behind the rest of the world in China is that the Chinese believe in their traditional medicine (acupuncture, herbal medicine, diet, exercise, and manual therapy to correct imbalances in the body and promote mental and physical health) because it has been used for thousands of years and is steeped in tradition, belief, popularity and anecdote. Western remedies are far less popular because the vast majority of Chinese also believe that traditional Chinese medicine has fewer side effects and has a stronger restorative effect on the body.

In contrast to the seemingly completely out-of-touch Western media, East Asian media, which have a far better understanding of China, used less charged language related to Hu Jintao’s escort out of the Party Congress hall. It is also important to note in this context that, unlike Europe, Asian countries do not want to be drawn into the U.S. fight against China at their own expense, as I have detailed here.
​
For example, the conservative Korea Herald in Seoul soberly headlined that Hu Jintao was helped off the stage at the Party Congress.

​[Source: Screenshot courtesy of Felix Abt]

It can therefore be assumed that the escorting of Hu Jintao at the Party Congress will not go down in the Korean history books.

On the one hand, everything that comes out of China is hyped up, twisted and used in the West for China-bashing. On the other hand, more important things that would contribute to a better understanding of the country are simply suppressed. Another recent example:

Do you know Dilana Dilixiati? No, of course you don’t. But you certainly know Peng Shuai, the famous Chinese tennis player who, according to Western media reports, accused a retired top politician of rape (the word rape does not appear in her original Chinese text), after the years-long secret love affair with many ups and downs between the two had gone to pieces.

Western politicians and media therefore immediately called for a boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

​Tennishead magazine wrote (December 6, 2021): “The USA are reportedly set to announce a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games this week in response to the censorship of Peng Shuai and her sexual assault allegations.” This boycott was carried out by the United States and its Western “coalition of the willing.” [Source: Screenshot courtesy of Felix Abt]

The athlete was subsequently often seen in public, laughing and talking to other people. Since she apparently did not disappear into a gulag, as Western politicians and media must have secretly hoped, she soon disappeared again from Western media discourse.

Dr. Pan Wang, a China expert from the University of New South Wales, provided background information and insights into the case on Australian television that were not available elsewhere.

She said it was only natural that Western organizations such as the World Tennis Association interpreted Ms. Peng’s social media post as a complaint of sexual misconduct and were suspicious of Beijing’s response given the lack of detailed information, communication or transparency and censorship on the matter.

However, she dismissed the accusation, saying there is no clear allegation of rape, which is a criminal offense in China, and “sexual harassment” falls under the Civil Code.

Whether the persuasion or coercion of the former vice premier described by Peng Shuai could be called “sexual assault” in the usual sense is subjective, she said.

She added that, while Beijing wants to suppress any controversy about its officials, the Western media are also pursuing their own political agenda regarding China.

“This case is about harassment, power and skepticism, and it occurred in a broader context of growing tensions between China and, for example, Australia, stemming from diplomatic tensions, trade disputes and growing accusations against China’s human rights, democracy and censorship,” she added.

She concluded: “So there’s a media war between China and the West and the Australian media here, too, and that’s reflected in the opposing views of the social media posts.”

Back to Dilana Dilixiati. She, too, is a Chinese sports star. Her team had recently won an unexpected, sensational victory in the semifinals against basketball superpower Australia at the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. Australian media reported, “They defeated the hosts 61-59 at the Sydney Superdome on Friday night in a thrilling encounter that was decided only in the final seconds.” The dramatic thriller sent shock waves.

​[Source: english.news.cn]

Those who followed the game immediately recognized that Dilana Dilixiati (on the left in the photo above) looked different from her teammates. The journalists must have noticed her. Strangely enough, the Uyghur, who writes her name in Uyghur like this: دىلانا دىلشات, which does not look like Mandarin, did not attract any interest, although she would have been more suitable than any other for a sensational success story inviting clicks.
​
The 1.94-meter (6’ 4-1/2”) center basketball player of the Guangdong Vermilion Birds, who helped the Chinese women’s national team win a silver medal at the World Cup, regularly visits her family in Xinjiang.

​[Source: Screenshot courtesy of Felix Abt]

​A Twitter user found out that a Uyghur woman played on China’s successful national women’s basketball team and that the media did not want to know about it.

The Australian think tank ASPI, funded in particular by the Australian Department of Defense, the U.S. government, and the Western war industry, published the widely cited but refuted pamphlet “Uyghurs for Sale.” The organization was one of the driving forces in spreading the propaganda campaign of “genocide” against the Uyghurs in China, which originated in the United States.
​
The case is clear: Dilana Dilixiati, a Uyghur, and her ability to pursue a career as a top athlete and to travel, contradicts the Western narrative that is ingrained in people’s minds that Uyghurs, who are totally discriminated against, are prisoners and victims of genocide and cannot leave Xinjiang. Their story had to be kept quiet by the media, because consumers would naturally have noticed that there was something wrong with the prevailing narrative, and who likes to be manipulated.

This article was republished from CovertAction Magazine.

For the Western press, the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party offered a number of signals which—if read in good faith—could have been perceived as reassuring.

Instead, establishment outlets reverted to familiar narratives regarding China’s Covid mitigation strategy and tied these into renewed predictions of a long-prophesied economic disaster—one that would inevitably befall China as a result of its government’s decision to forsake the orthodoxy of open markets.

More than anything else, corporate media fixated on Hu Jintao’s departure from the congress hall, engaging in tabloid-variety speculation around the fate of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s 79-year-old predecessor.
​
Invoking the specter of a purge, outlets like the New York Times and CNN pushed the narrative that Xi manipulated events to consolidate his power. However, the “evidence” used by corporate media to suggest that Xi orchestrated Hu’s exit as part of a power grab was far from convincing.

​If establishment outlets covering the congress were on the lookout for substantive developments—rather than additional fodder to comport with their prefabricated narratives—they could have found them.
​
Despite the Biden administration’s belligerent posture vis-à-vis Taiwan, demonstrated by escalations like Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island and Biden’s own promise to deploy US forces in the event of a forced reunification, Xi indicated that China would continue to approach cross-strait relations with restraint.

In addition, Xi’s opening report to the congress placed particular emphasis on the task of combating climate change. The section titled “Pursuing Green Development and Promoting Harmony between Humanity and Nature” presented a four-part framework to guide China’s policy efforts in this area. Even the avidly pro-Western Atlantic Council had to admit that “China is showing its leadership in green development in a number of ways.”

Since China is home to one-fifth of the global population, and is currently the most prolific CO2-emitting country on Earth, its government’s decision to prioritize a comprehensive response to the climate crisis seems like an unambiguously positive development.

The congress even provided some encouraging news for those who claim to care about human rights. In a surprise move, Chen Quanguo, who was hit with US sanctions for his hardline approach as party secretary in both Tibet and Xinjiang, was ousted from the central committee.

But US corporate media generally failed to highlight these developments as positive news. In fact, with the exception of some coverage of Xi’s statements on Taiwan—which largely misrepresented China’s posture as more threatening than a good-faith reading would indicate—US news outlets had remarkably little to say about the substance of any news coming out of the congress.

The article went on to quote Jude Blanchette, a “China expert” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), who declared, “There is nothing positive or aspirational about zero Covid.” That CSIS would disseminate such a narrative—with the assistance of the reliably hawkish Times—is unsurprising, since the think tank’s chief patrons share a common interest in vilifying China.

CSIS’s roster of major donors includes military contractors Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as a litany of oil and gas companies—all of whom derive financial benefit from America’s military build-up in the Pacific.

CSIS has also received millions of dollars from the governments of Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Sitting on its board of trustees are Phebe Novakovic, chair and CEO of General Dynamics, and Leon Panetta who—as Defense secretary in the Obama administration—helped craft the DOD’s “pivot to Asia.”

While China’s “reform and opening-up” has been immensely profitable for corporations—as evidenced in media coverage (Forbes, 10/24/22; NYT, 11/7/22) of global markets’ uneasiness over Xi’s alleged “return to Marxism”—its impact on Chinese workers has been uneven, to say the least. Living standards have improved generally, but labor conditions remain poor and inequality is growing.

Like the Times, CNN went the think tank route to support its thesis, quoting Craig Singleton—senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD):

Yesterday’s speech confirms what many China watchers have long suspected—Xi has no intention of embracing market liberalization or relaxing China’s zero-Covid policies, at least not anytime soon…. Instead, he intends to double down on policies geared towards security and self-reliance at the expense of China’s long-term economic growth.

Despite the fact that China watchers have, for as long as one can remember, predicted a collapse of China’s economy that has yet to materialize, corporate media keep on returning to that same old well.

For its part, FDD—to which CNN attached the inconspicuous label of “DC-based think tank”—is a neoconservative advocacy group that has an ax to grind with China. The chairman of FDD’s China Program is Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security advisor to Donald Trump.

Early on in the pandemic, a Washington Post profile (4/29/20) of Pottinger stated that he “believes Beijing’s handling of the virus has been ‘catastrophic’ and ‘the whole world is the collateral damage of China’s internal governance problems.’” The article quoted Trump’s second national security advisor, H.R. McMaster—who is also currently employed as a “China expert” at FDD—as calling Pottinger “central to the biggest shift in US foreign policy since the Cold War, which is the competitive approach to China.”

If consumers of corporate media only encountered one story about the congress, it probably had something to do with this seemingly innocuous development: During the congress’s closing session, aides escorted Hu Jintao—Xi’s predecessor as China’s paramount leader—out of the Great Hall of the People.

Later that day, Xinhua, China’s state news agency, said that Hu’s departure was health related. This explanation isn’t exactly far-fetched, since the 79-year-old Hu has long been said to be suffering from an illness—as early as 2012, some observers posited that the then-outgoing leader had Parkinson’s disease.
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Since the whole episode was caught on camera, however, corporate media were not satisfied with China’s mundane account of events. Instead, establishment outlets seized the moment and transformed Hu’s departure into a dramatic spectacle, laden with sinister connotations. The speculation that followed was almost obsessive in nature.

In reference to the haloed party figures whose “expressions did not change” as Hu was escorted away, the Times quoted Wu Guoguang, a professor at Canada’s University of Victoria:

Here was Hu Jintao, the former highest leader of your party and a man who had given so many of you political opportunities. And how do you treat him now?… This incident demonstrated the tragic reality of Chinese politics and the fundamental lack of human decency in the Communist Party.

While noting that Wu “said he did not want to speculate about what had unfolded,” the Times evidently did not consider this statement of caution as being at odds with his subsequent use of Hu’s departure to condemn the CCP in the broadest possible terms.

Indeed, the paper of record saw no problem with attributing the failure of Hu’s colleagues to react in a more appropriate manner—whatever that may have been—to “the tragic reality of Chinese politics” and a “fundamental lack of human decency” on the part of the CCP.

Here was a microcosm of corporate media’s contradictory approach to the episode: a professed reluctance to engage in conjecture, persistently negated by an overwhelming eagerness to cast aspersions. In line with this tack, the Times resorted to innuendo by posing a hypothetical question:
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Was Mr. Hu, 79, suffering from poor health, as Chinese state media would later report? Or was he being purged in a dramatic show by China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, for the world to see?

Rather than asserting outright that Hu was the victim of a purge, the Times advanced this familiar red-scare narrative by including two photographs from the Cultural Revolution—one of which depicts Xi’s father being subjected to humiliation during a struggle session. With these images, the Times coaxed readers into making a spurious connection between Hu’s exit and the political repressions of yesteryear.

Predictably, cable news networks and China watchers also took part in the orgy of speculation. On CNN’s Erin Burnett Out Front (10/25/22), international correspondent Selina Wang said this:

Now, I have spoken to experts who think there is more to this than that pure health explanation, including Steve Tsang of [the] SOAS China Institute. He told me that this is humiliation of Hu Jintao. It is a clear message that there is only one leader who matters in China right now and that is Xi Jinping.
She did not mention the fact that Tsang is a fellow at Chatham House, a think tank that derives a substantial proportion of its funding from the US State Department and the governments of Britain and Japan.

The day before, on CNN Newsroom (10/24/22), Wang stated, “Hu Jintao. . . was publicly humiliated at the closing ceremony of the Party Congress.” The only support she offered for this assertion came from Victor Shih, another China watcher from the aforementioned CSIS, who conjectured:

I am not a believer of the pure health explanation. And it seemed like [Hu] sat down in a pretty stable manner. And then suddenly, he was asked to leave. I’m not sure if he whispered something, said something to Xi Jinping.

Half-acknowledging that Shih’s description of events actually said nothing at all, Wang concluded: “Regardless, it was a symbolic moment. Out with Hu and the collective leadership of his era.” For Wang and for corporate media’s treatment of the episode writ large, “regardless” was the operative word—regardless of the fact that they were merely engaged in baseless speculation, they would still inevitably arrive at the most sinister conclusion.

The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) is a small, inland nation; the only landlocked country in southeast Asia. Known as the “crossroads of Indochina,” its geographic position—situated in the middle of the peninsula, bordering Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and China—historically saw the region benefit greatly from the growth of overland trade in ancient times. With the emergence of colonialism, however, Laos was placed in a similar position to that of most other global south nations at the time. Under the French colonial boot, infrastructure and development was limited to only the areas that would be profitable for the colonialists—extraction rather than construction; destruction rather than growth. Today, the Lao PDR stands on the cusp of a golden age of socialist development, not unlike the periods of growth and construction underway in neighboring China and Vietnam.

How did the Lao people get here, what developments are underway, and what might the future hold?
On 23 August 1975, the Lao People’s Liberation Army (LPLA)—also known as the Pathet Lao—entered the city of Vientiane, capital of the then-Kingdom of Laos. In the months that followed, the last King of Laos—Sisavang Vatthana—would formally abdicate, and the Kingdom would officially be replaced by the new People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), with the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) leading the way. The founding of the Lao PDR marked the end of more than a century of struggle; first against the French colonialists, then the Japanese fascists, then the American imperialists. Their struggle-filled history presented the Lao people, and their newly born Democratic Republic, with a dual problem:

First, Laos became, and remains to this day, the most heavily bombed country on the planet. During the war of resistance against imperialism, the US reportedly dropped some 2 million tons of bombs, or roughly 1 ton per person, on Laos despite never formally declaring war. The US has never fully taken responsibility for its crimes, and offers little more than hush-money to solace the victims of its brutality.
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Second, while not all infrastructure was destroyed, infrastructure and productive forces developed in Laos under the colonialists had been oriented exclusively towards extractive industries, rather than national construction. The same problem plagues most—if not all—post-colonial nations, which is also especially evident in Africa. It is due to the little surviving infrastructure that, until recently the most reliable and readily-available form of transportation, at least along the country’s western border, was by boating up and down the Mekong river.

​Mekong River, Luang Prabang, Laos. 2011 Source: Wikimedia

The withdrawal of imperialist forces and establishment of the PDR however did not, in and of itself, solve all of the myriad obstacles standing in the way of further development. Beginning from around 1960 onwards, the Sino-Soviet split marked another great obstacle to the Lao people. Laos and Vietnam sided with the Soviet Union in the split, putting them at direct odds with neighboring China, which also resulted in exacerbating isolation. A mere four years following the establishing of the Lao PDR, tensions between neighboring Vietnam and China would hit a fever pitch. The people of Laos, having maintained the closest of fraternal and Comradely relations with the Vietnamese ever since their common founding in the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in 1930, supported their Vietnamese compatriots without question—even at the cost of further isolation and tenuous relations with China. Likewise, trade relations with the United States did not become normalized until December of 2004.

​Overview of the Pan-Asia Railway Network southeastern routes Source: Bangkok Post

As highlighted by the above (now thankfully outdated) map of regional rail lines, the desperation, sacrifice, and courage of the Lao position in that period becomes apparent: although direct overtures began as early as 1976, relations with Thailand did not begin to fully normalize until the late-80’s, with armed interactions along the border being relatively frequent until around 1988. Relations with China, while never arising to the point of military conflict, would remain fraught until the late-80’s as well. In other words, during this period the only close partner Laos had was Vietnam. For their part, Vietnam reciprocated the Lao view of fraternal solidarity and comradery; however, reciprocation does not assuage material difficulties. Partly as a result of their historic status as colonial nations, and partly as a result of the US dropping millions of tons of bombs along the border, there is not a single rail connection between Laos and Vietnam. There is not, for that matter, a single rail connection between Laos and any other country, period. Or at least there wasn’t until 2015.

On 2 December, 2015, construction officially began on the Vientiane-Boten Railway, a flagship high-speed rail project of the new Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). As reported by the Vientiane Times, the first train from the Laos side departed from Vientiane by order of President Sisoulith, with Prime Minister Phankham Viphavanh leading the delegation aboard; simultaneously, President Xi gave the signal for the first train to depart Kunming as well. Not only would Laos finally have a rail network linking some of its most important cities—such as Vientiane and Luang Prabang—but it would also link directly with the Chinese side, and allow seamless travel all the way to Kunming, capital of southern China’s Yunnan province. Six years and one day later, on 3 December, 2021, President Xi Jinping and President Thongloun Sisoulith met via video conference, to officially mark the opening of the historic project. During the meeting, both sides stressed the necessity for mutual cooperation, development, and friendship—that united in the spirit of serving the people, there is nothing that cannot be overcome. As highlighted by People’s Daily, the ultimate goal of the Vientiane-Boten line is to further link with Thai networks, and thereby establish a direct rail network expanding from Beijing to Singapore. Such an achievement, coupled with ongoing developments in Vietnam and Cambodia, would permanently change the socioeconomic fabric of southeast Asia—beginning a new age of hyperconnectivity, integration, and, one hopes, peace, friendship, and common prosperity. Because the railway uses the Chinese standard gauge, traffic—logistics, transport, etc.—can seamlessly cross between China and partner countries without needing to changeover or employ specialized equipment; a problem which has plagued international rail developments for centuries. All told, construction of the line cost an estimated $62.3 billion, of which 70% was paid for by the Chinese side. The Vientiane-Boten line extends some 427.2 kilometers (265.5 miles), and uses electric-powered high speed cars capable of reaching top speeds of 160 km/h (99.4 mph). A journey from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, roughly 310 kilometers (190 miles), would normally take up to six hours by driving. Roughly equal in distance as driving from Baltimore, Maryland to New York City, New York, which in the United States would take around three-and-a-half to four hours. Instead, thanks to the Laos-China railway, the journey takes only around two hours. ​

As highlighted in subsequent reporting by both Chinese and Lao outlets, the Laos-China railway has, in a brief period of time, already achieved great milestones, and made irrevocable contributions to the development of both countries. As of writing, it is reported that total goods transported has exceeded 10 million tonnes (11 million US tons), valued at over 12 billion yuan (1.7 billion USD), and has continued increasing month-by-month since the opening of the line. The value of the Laos-China railway to the Lao people and their continued development can be made no clearer than the fact that the value of goods transported within the past 12 months is, as of writing, identical to the country’s total GDP in the year 2000.

The victory of the People’s Liberation Army all those decades ago was a great triumph of the forces of the working and oppressed masses over the forces of Capitalism and its bastard offspring—colonialism, fascism, and imperialism. In view of the situation following that triumph, the continued existence, development, and success of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic can be described as nothing less than a man-made miracle: an unquestionable triumph of people-centered governance, the strength of the masses, and the great truth of the science of Marxism-Leninism. The Lao people have faced the greatest horrors, and made the greatest sacrifices. Today it seems those long years of struggle and commitment to the great cause of socialist construction are beginning to reap the greatest harvest. As regional developments continue, it appears the crossroads of Indochina are open once again, and the great undertakings of building a community with a shared future for mankind will give way to common prosperity, dignity, and peace.

​At the 20th Congress, Xi Jinping reflected on the history of colonialism—including China’s “century of humiliation”—and the implications this would have for China going forward. “In pursuing modernization,” Xi said, “China will not tread the old path of war, colonization, and plunder taken by some countries. That brutal and blood-stained path of enrichment at the expense of others caused great suffering for the people of developing countries. We will stand firmly on the right side of history and on the side of human progress.”

Chinese officials routinely tell us that their country is not interested in seeking dominance in the world. What China would like to do is to collaborate with other countries to try and solve humanity’s dilemmas. The Belt and Road Initiative, for instance, was launched in 2013 with the purpose of “win-win” cooperation and development and has thus far built much-needed infrastructure with investment and construction contracts totaling $1 trillion in almost 150 countries. China’s interest in tackling the climate catastrophe is evidenced by its planting of a quarter of the world’s new forests over the past decade and in becoming a world leader in renewable energy investment and electric vehicle production. On the public health side, China adopted a COVID-19 policy that prioritizes lives over profit, donated 325 million doses of vaccines, and saved millions of lives as a result of this. As a result of its initiatives in the public health sector, the average life expectancy of Chinese people was 77.93 years in 2020 and reached 78.2 years in 2021, and for the first time, surpassed life expectancy in the United States--77 years in 2020 and 76.1 in 2021—making this drop “the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923.”

China’s communists do not see these events without putting them in the context of the long process undertaken by the government toward achieving and ensuring their social development. In 27 years, China will celebrate the centenary of its revolution. In 1997, then-President of China Jiang Zemin spoke about the two centenary goals—the 100-year markers following the founding of the Communist Party (1921) and the Chinese Revolution (1949)—that “underwrite all China’s long-term economic planning programs and contemporary macroeconomic policy agendas.” At that time, the focus was on growth rates. In 2017, Xi Jinping shifted the emphasis of these goals to the “three tough battles”: to defuse major financial risks, to eradicate poverty, and to control pollution. This new congress has gone beyond those “tough battles” to protect Chinese sovereignty and to expand the dignity of the Chinese people.

The general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, Xi Jinping submitted a report summarizing the major achievements of China in the past decade and its vision for the future at the 20th National Congress of the CPC in Beijing. Among the main points outlined in the report, Xi Jinping buttressed the inevitability of upholding global peace and development and invited all countries to take part in efforts to build a community with a shared future for mankind.

Xi’s report to the 20th CPC National Congress reflected the two roads proposed and built by China. The first is the national road, “the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” through which China has built an economy that currently accounts for 18.5% of the world’s GDP in 2021, ranking it as the second largest economy in the world. On this basis, China is likely to become the world’s largest economy during the third decade of the 21st century, which constitutes the country’s objective to “basically achieve socialist modernization by 2035.”
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The economic construction of this road has also permitted China to free more than 770 million rural people from poverty, according to the UN definition, providing employment to around 746.5 million people, significantly increasing the disposable income of its residents, guaranteeing health insurance to more than 1.364 billion people, and establishing the world’s largest social security system. The economic and social development of the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics is unprecedented.

​The second is the international road, called “Building a Community of Shared Future for Mankind,” being China’s proposal to the world at the 20th CPC National Congress. The report had some major takeaways which rightly analyzed the historical juncture the world has reached. Our vision for the future should firmly take its roots from the lessons learned from history and addresses the deficiencies of current global affairs management.

China shows that it will continue its active participation to reform and build an inclusive global governance system, adhering to the spirit of multilateralism. It is committed to building a community with a shared future for mankind. To support this vision, China is inviting other countries in the world to work together on the implementation of three initiatives: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Global Development Initiative (GDI), and the Global Security Initiative (GSI).

Since its inception, the initiative to build a community with a shared future for mankind has been widely welcomed and discussed in the international community, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean. Of the 33 countries in this region that maintain diplomatic relations with China, 21 have already signed up to the BRI. This enthusiastic participation makes the initiative one of the most successful programs to realize the concept of a future-sharing community in Latin America and the Caribbean.

​Some regional countries, such as the Republic of Cuba and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, have also pledged their support for the GDI and GSI, as well as expressed their willingness to participate.
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For developing countries, these three initiatives propose new situations that will require not only economic, political and social, but also cultural and academic efforts, to which China has also offered new proposals to the world.

In this sense, on January 12, the Venezuelan Center for China Studies and the Institute for a Community of Shared Future of the Communication University of China jointly launched the China-Venezuela Research Center for a Community with a Shared Future. This new center has been envisaged as a joint academic platform for building research networks between the two countries to facilitate collaborative projects, promote the dialogue of civilizations and initiate global communication on the concept of a community of shared future for mankind. Since then, we have been working closely together to seek the possibilities of cooperation and elevate our engagements to the next level.
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Building a community with a shared future for mankind can prevail across the world and a new era will emerge of prosperity and peace. Latin America and the Caribbean have enormous potential to contribute to global development movements and can aptly help materialize the efforts to build a community with a shared future for mankind.

The Western media is waging a systematic and ferocious propaganda war against China. In the court of Western public opinion, China stands accused of an array of terrifying crimes: conducting a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang; wiping out democracy in Hong Kong; militarising the South China Sea; attempting to impose colonial control over Taiwan; carrying out a land grab in Africa; preventing Tibetans and Inner Mongolians from speaking their languages; spying on the good peoples of the democratic world; and more.

Australian scholar Roland Boer has characterised these accusations as “atrocity propaganda – an old anti-communist and indeed anti-anyone-who-does-not-toe-the-Western-line approach that tries to manufacture a certain image for popular consumption.” Boer observes that this propaganda serves to create an impression of China as a brutal authoritarian dystopia which “can only be a fiction for anyone who actually spends some time in China, let alone lives there.”[1]

It’s not difficult to understand why China would be subjected to this sort of elaborate disinformation campaign. This media offensive is part of the imperialist world’s ongoing attempts to reverse the Chinese Revolution, to subvert Chinese socialism, to weaken China, to diminish its role in international affairs and, as a result, to undermine the global trajectory towards multipolarity and a future free from hegemonism. As journalist Chen Weihua has pointed out, “the reasons for the intensifying US propaganda war are obvious: Washington views a fast-rising China as a challenge to its primacy around the world.” Furthermore, “the success of a country with a different political system is unacceptable to politicians in Washington.”[2]

Propaganda wars can also be war propaganda. In this case, the war in question is the escalating US-led New Cold War.[3] The various slanders against China – particularly the most lurid accusations, such as that of genocide in Xinjiang – have much in common with the 2003 allegations regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or the 2011 allegation that the Libyan state under Muammar Gaddafi was preparing a massacre in Benghazi. These narratives are constructed specifically in order to mobilise public opinion in favour of imperialist foreign policy: waging a genocidal war against the people of Iraq; bombing Libya into the Stone Age; and, today, conducting a wide-ranging campaign of economic coercion, political subversion and military threats against the People’s Republic of China.

In his book Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah, Pan-Africanist and first President of Ghana, discusses how “ideological and cultural weapons in the form of intrigues, manoeuvres and slander campaigns” were employed by the Western powers during the Cold War in order to undermine the socialist countries and the newly-liberated territories of Africa, Asia and Latin America. “While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news’… A flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom.”[4]

The mechanisms for such “intrigues, manoeuvres and slander campaigns” have changed little since Nkrumah’s day. British media analysts David Cromwell and David Edwards explore the concept of the propaganda blitz – “fast-moving attacks intended to inflict maximum damage in minimum time.” These media attacks are “communicated with high emotional intensity and moral outrage” and, crucially, give the appearance of enjoying consensus support among experts, academics, journalists and politicians.[5] This consensus “generates the impression that everyone knows that the claim is truthful.”[6] Such a consensus is most powerful when it includes not only right-wing ideologues but also prominent leftist commentators. “If even celebrity progressive journalists – people famous for their principled stands, and colourful socks and ties – join the denunciations, then there must be something to the claims. At this point, it becomes difficult to doubt it.”

When it comes to China, many such commentators are only too happy to oblige: British columnist Owen Jones for example, writing for the Guardian, has asserted that “despite the denials of the Chinese regime, the brutal campaign against the Uighurs in the Xinjiang region is real.”[7] Jones backs his assertion up with links to two other Guardian articles, both of which rely on research provided by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) – a hawkish anti-China think tank funded by the Australian government, the US government and various multinational arms manufacturers (of which more below). That is, this self-described socialist relies on the same sources as the most extreme China hawks in Washington. Yet his public endorsement of anti-China slander, along with that of NATO-aligned commentators such as Paul Mason,[8] serves to create the impression that such slander is entirely credible, as opposed to being what it in fact is, namely yet another unhinged far-right conspiracy theory.

Although the various anti-China slanders clearly lack evidentiary support, they are nonetheless powerful, persuasive and sophisticated. It requires no great skill to persuade hardened reactionaries and anti-communists to take a hard line against China, but the propaganda war is carefully crafted such that it actively taps in to progressive ideas and sentiments. The accusation of genocide is particularly potent: by accusing China of perpetrating a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, imperialist politicians and journalists are able to mobilise legitimate sympathies with Muslims and national minorities, as well as invoking righteous indignation in relation to genocide. An emotional-intellectual environment is created in which to defend China against accusations of genocide is equivalent to being a Holocaust denier. Solidarity with China thus incurs a hefty psychological, and perhaps material and physical, cost.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 work Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media remains an authoritative and indispensable analysis of how the so-called free press works in the capitalist world. In particular, the book explores the connection between the economic interests of the ruling class and the ideas that are communicated via mass media. “The media serve, and propagandise on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”[9]
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Herman and Chomsky develop a propaganda model, in which a set of informal but entrenched ‘filters’ determine what media consumers read, watch and hear. These filters include:

• The ownership structure of the dominant mass-media firms. Media owners are members of the capitalist class, and they consistently privilege the interests of that class.
• Reliance on advertising revenue. Since most media operations can only survive, meet their costs and turn a profit if they carry advertising from large corporations, they must be sensitive to the political views of those corporations.
• Reliance on information “provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power.”[10] The authors note that the Pentagon, for example, “has a public-information service that involves many thousands of employees, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups.”[11]
• A system of ‘flak’, or negative feedback, in response to news stories that don’t conform to the values of those in power. This “may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action.”[12] With the advent of the internet – and particularly social media – methods of ‘flak’ have multiplied, and provide an important means of conditioning what information is consumed by the public.
• The pervasive ideological framework of anticommunism, which serves as “a national religion and control mechanism”. Here the authors are referring specifically to the United States, but the point holds elsewhere in the West.

According to Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model, “the raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print.”[13] The resulting news output serves to “inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state.”[14]
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Western mainstream media coverage of China fits comfortably within this model. Almost without exception the major media operations – from Fox News to the Guardian, from the BBC to the Washington Post – present a narrative consistently hostile to China. For example, in relation to the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong, the Western press was universal in its one-sided condemnation of the Hong Kong police and authorities, and in its effusive support for ‘pro-democracy’ protestors. Violence by the protestors – storming the parliament building, attacking buses, throwing petrol bombs, vandalising buildings and intimidating ordinary citizens – was either totally ignored or written off as the actions of a small minority, whereas the local Hong Kong government was subjected to an extraordinary level of scrutiny and condemnation. A Guardian editorial went so far as to state that “China is crushing any shred of resistance in Hong Kong, in breach of its promises to maintain the region’s freedoms”[15] – unironically citing Chris Patten, the last (unelected like all his predecessors) British governor of Hong Kong, in support of its claim. It apparently didn’t occur to the author to contrast the Hong Kong police’s incredibly restrained response to the protests with the US police’s shockingly violent repression of Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020, which saw several fatalities at the hands of the US police, compared to precisely zero at the hands of their Hong Kong counterparts.[16]

No major Western news outlet seriously explored the violence of the protestors; nor did they mention the protest leaders’ extensive links with some of the most reactionary US politicians;[17] nor did they choose to investigate the role of the National Endowment for Democracy in providing financial support to the movement.[18] Meanwhile they shamelessly ignored the millions of Hong Kong residents who didn’t support the protests, who saw that “rioters and mobs were everywhere destroying public facilities, paralysing railway systems and so on but they were called ‘Freedom Fighters’ by Western countries.”[19]
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Conversely, what should be positive stories about China – for example in relation to poverty alleviation,[20] or its progress in the field of renewable energy,[21] or suppressing the Covid-19 pandemic[22] – are either ignored or magically transformed into anti-China stories. The announcement that China had succeeded in its goal of eliminating extreme poverty was “delivered with much bombast but few details”, and the whole program was written off as part of a cunning strategy by Xi Jinping “to cement his position as the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong”.[23] Literally millions of lives have been saved as a result of China’s dynamic Zero Covid strategy, and yet according to the New York Times, the CPC is simply trying to “use China’s success in containing the virus to prove that its top-down governance model is superior to that of liberal democracies”. While acknowledging that a policy of saving millions of lives unsurprisingly “still enjoys strong public support”, this is put down to a familiar trope that Chinese people have “limited access to information and no tools to hold the authority accountable”.[24]
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Veteran political scientist Michael Parenti wrote in Blackshirts and Reds about the absurdity of Western propaganda against the socialist world during the Cold War, and how refraction through the lens of anti-communism could “transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence.” He notes:

Parenti’s observation certainly resonates with the contemporary media consensus against China. For such a media consensus to be coincidental would be a statistical impossibility. It represents precisely the current political agenda of the “privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state” (that is, the imperialist ruling classes); it aims precisely to manufacture consent for the New Cold War on China.

Nowhere is the propaganda model more visible than in relation to the mainstream media coverage of Xinjiang. The accusation that China is committing a genocide (or “cultural genocide”) in Xinjiang has been repeated so frequently as to become almost an accepted truth in large parts of the West. Although the accusation is backed up with precious little evidence, the story has become a global media sensation and has led to the introduction of an escalating program of sanctions, plus a “diplomatic boycott” by various imperialist countries of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022.[26] Furthermore, it has filtered into popular consciousness, fuelled by sophisticated social media campaigns. It has become the quintessential example of a propaganda blitz. As noted above, and consistent with Edwards and Cromwell’s description, this propaganda blitz is consistent across the corporate media’s conservative-liberal spectrum, from Fox News[27] to the New York Times,[28] from the Daily Mail[29] to the Guardian.[30]

Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model explains how such a story picks up steam:

The mass media is supplemented by much of the radical left in the imperialist heartlands. Popular progressive news outlet Democracy Now has parroted every lurid accusation against China in relation to Xinjiang.[32] Jacobin in 2021 gave a sympathetic interview to Sean R Roberts, author of The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Campaign Against Xinjiang’s Muslims, in which he claims that “what we see right now in the Uyghur region is a lot like the process of cultural genocide elsewhere in the world from a century ago, but benefitting from high-tech forms of repression that are available now in the twenty-first century”.[33] Meanwhile Britain’s Socialist Worker claims that “up to one million Uyghurs are locked up in internment camps.”[34] Somewhat ironically, Noam Chomsky himself is not immune to the imperialist propaganda model, stating in a 2021 podcast episode that China’s actions in Xinjiang are “terrible” and “highly repressive”, and repeating the assertion (discussed at length below) that “there are a million people who have gone through reeducation camps.”[35]
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Meanwhile in the sphere of parliamentary politics, right and left have formed an unholy alliance in pursuit of the New Cold War on China. Besides right-wing fundamentalists such as Mike Pompeo, progressive Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been hawkish regarding Xinjiang, calling on US businesses to study an Australian Strategic Policy Initiative (ASPI) report condemning China and ensure that their companies are not connected to Uyghur forced labour. Omar said: “No American company should be profiting from the use of gulag labor, or from Uyghur prisoners who are transferred for work after their time in Xinjiang’s concentration camps.”[36]

Of all the claims that are made in relation to China’s treatment of Uyghur people, the most serious is that it is perpetrating a genocide. One of the last acts of Trump’s State Department was, in January 2021, to declare that the Chinese government is “committing genocide and crimes against humanity through its wide-scale repression of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, including in its use of internment camps and forced sterilisation.”[37] The Biden administration doubled down on this slander, claiming in its 2021 annual human rights report that “genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang”, and that the components of this genocide included “the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians; forced sterilisation, coerced abortions, and more restrictive application of China’s birth control policies; rape; torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained; forced labor; and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.”[38]

Canada’s House of Commons quickly followed suit,[39] as did the French National Assembly.[40] The European Parliament adopted a somewhat less adventurist resolution claiming that Muslims in Xinjiang were at “serious risk of genocide.”[41]
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Genocide has a detailed definition under international law, which can be summarised as the purposeful destruction in whole or in part of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.[42] It is rightly considered to be one of the gravest crimes against humanity. As such, it is not the sort of accusation that should be thrown around carelessly and without evidence. And yet imperialist ideologues routinely do exactly that. As Herman and Chomsky pointed out decades ago, “genocide is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimisation in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimisation by the United States itself or allied regimes.”[43]

Prominent scholar and economist Jeffrey Sachs has written in relation to the Biden administration’s accusations of genocide that “it has offered no proof, and unless it can, the State Department should withdraw the charge.” Continuing, Sachs writes that the charge of genocide should never be made lightly. “Inappropriate use of the term may escalate geopolitical and military tensions and devalue the historical memory of genocides such as the Holocaust, thereby hindering the ability to prevent future genocides. It behoves the US government to make any charge of genocide responsibly, which it has failed to do here.”[44]

What is the nature of the actual genocide charge? A 2021 report by a highly dubious Washington think-tank, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy,[45] claims that the Chinese government has implemented “comprehensive state policy and practice” with “the intent to destroy the Uyghurs as a group.” The report doesn’t claim that Uyghurs are directly being killed, but that coercive birth control measures are being selectively applied such that the Uyghur population slowly dies off.

However, there is no credible data to support these claims. It is the case that the birth rate has been trending downwards in Xinjiang, but the same is true for every Chinese province. Meanwhile, the Uyghur population from 2010 to 2018 increased from 10.2 million to 12.7 million, an increase of 25 percent. During the same period, the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang increased by just 2 percent.[46] Reflecting on the reasons for the marginal downturn in Uyghur birthrate, Pakistani-Canadian peace activist Omar Latif noted that the causes are “the same as elsewhere; more women acquiring higher education and participating in the workforce; less necessity for parents to have more children to take care of them in old age; urbanisation; lessening of patriarchal controls over women; increased freedom for women to practice birth control.”[47]

China’s one-child policy was first implemented in 1978, at a time when China was relatively insecure about its ability to feed a large population (China has 18 percent of the global population but only around 12 percent of the world’s arable land, along with chronic water scarcity).[48] The policy was in place until 2015, and largely serves to explain the long-term decline in the birth rate in China. However, national minorities – including Uyghurs – were exempt from the policy. Indeed the Uyghur population doubled during the period the one-child policy was in force. This pattern is replicated throughout China – according to the latest census data, the population of minority groups increased over the last decade by 10.26 percent (to 125 million), while that of Han Chinese grew at by 4.93 percent (to 1.3 billion) – less than half the rate.

Another data point that tends to belie the claims of a genocide in Xinjiang is that average life expectancy in the region has increased from 30 years in 1949 to 75 years today.[49]

One question that the various anti-China think tanks have not addressed is: if there were a genocide taking place in Xinjiang – including the ‘slow genocide’ of discriminatory coercive birth control – would this not lead to a refugee crisis? There is certainly no evidence of such a crisis; no camps along the border with Pakistan or Kazakhstan, and so on. Repression, war, poverty and climate change have combined to produce numerous current refugee crises in Africa, Asia and the Middle East; it is highly implausible that a full-blown genocide in Western China would not lead to any such issue. A Time article in 2021 confirmed that, in spite of both the Trump and Biden administrations’ outspoken criticisms of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the US had not admitted a single Uyghur refugee in the preceding 12 months.[50] Given that, in the same time period, Biden offered a refuge to people “fleeing Hong Kong crackdown”,[51] it’s unimaginable that the US would not offer refugee status to thousands of Xinjiang Uyghurs fleeing persecution – if they existed.

Lamenting the fact that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ‘Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’, issued in August 2022, fails to even mention the charge of genocide, Yale Law School academic Nicholas Bequelin lets slip that there simply is not a credible evidentiary basis for such a charge. “For the crime of genocide, you need to have several elements. One of the elements is intent. You need to be able to demonstrate, and to demonstrate convincingly, before a court, that the state had the intent of committing genocide. That’s the first thing. The second is that you have a number of elements for the crime of genocide – which is that it has to be a systematic, widespread extermination, or attempted extermination, of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group. There are elements that are present in the Chinese case, but it’s not clear that the intent is to lead to the extermination of a particular ethnic group.”[52]

The handful of reports on which the genocide charge is based do not provide anything like compelling evidence. What they put forward are some highly selective birth rate statistics, and the testimony of a small number of Uyghur exiles who claim to have been subjected to abuse. Working on the basis of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, China can by no means be considered as guilty of genocide.
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An aside: at the time of writing, the total number of deaths caused by Covid-19 in Xinjiang is three.[53] It is very difficult to believe that state forces conducting a genocide against a given ethnic group would fail to take advantage of a pandemic in support of their project; indeed that the regional health authorities would go to significant lengths to prevent the people of this group dying from Covid-19.

A somewhat more sophisticated accusation against the Chinese government is that is perpetrating a cultural genocide in Xinjiang – not wiping out the Uyghur population as such but the Uyghur identity, Uyghur traditions, Uyghur beliefs. Although cultural genocide is not defined under international law, it apparently refers to “the elimination of a group’s identity, through measures such as forcibly transferring children away from their families, restricting the use of a national language, banning cultural activities, or destroying schools, religious institutions, or memory sites.”[54]

While the accusation seems less extreme than the accusation of physical genocide, the claims of cultural genocide are nonetheless similarly lacking in evidentiary basis. For example, all schools in Xinjiang teach both Standard Chinese and one minority language, most often Uyghur.[55] Chinese banknotes have five languages on them: Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and Zhuang.[56] Thousands of books, newspapers and magazines are printed in the Uyghur language. What’s more, there are over 25,000 mosques in Xinjiang – three times the number there were in 1980, and one of the highest number of mosques per capita in the world (almost ten times as many as in the United States).[57]

Turkish scholar Adnan Akfirat observes that the Quran and numerous other key Islamic texts are readily available and have been translated into the Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz languages. Further, “the Xinjiang Islamic Institute, headquartered in Urumqi, has eight branches in other cities such as Kashgar, Hotan and Ili, and there are ten theological schools in the region, including a Xinjiang Islamic School. These schools enrol 3,000 new students each year.”[58] Akfirat states that Muslims in Xinjiang freely engage in their religious rituals, including prayer, fasting, pilgrimages, and celebrating Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.

These details have been confirmed by a steady stream of diplomats, officials and journalists that have visited Xinjiang in recent years. A diplomatic delegation in March 2021 included Pakistani Ambassador to China, Moin ul Haque, who explicitly rejected the accusations of religious persecution: “The notable and important thing is that there’s freedom of religion in China and it’s enshrined in the Constitution of China, which is a very important part… People in Xinjiang are enjoying their lives, their culture, their deep traditions, and most importantly, their religion.”[59]

Fariz Mehdawi, Palestinian Ambassador to China, commented that there were a huge number of mosques and one could see there was respect for religious and ethnic traditions, saying: “You know, the number of mosques, if you have to calculate it all, it’s something like 2,000 inhabitants for one mosque. This ratio we don’t have it in our country. It’s not available anywhere.” It was put to Mehdawi that he could simply have been shown a Potemkin village. He replied: “Are we diplomats so naive that we could be manoeuvred to believe anything … Or are we part of a conspiracy, that we would justify something against what we had seen? I think this is not respectful… There is no conspiracy here, there is facts. And the fact of the matter is that China is rising and developing everywhere, including Xinjiang. Since some people are not happy about that, they would like to stop the rise of China by any means.”[60]

Looking at different countries’ voting records at the UN in relation to human rights in China, it’s striking that the only Muslim-majority country that consistently votes in support of US-led slanders is NATO member Albania. During the 50th session of the Human Rights Council in 2022, members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation overwhelmingly co-sponsored the statement supporting China’s position (by 37 to 1). This pattern is mirrored in Africa (33 to 2) and Asia (20 to 2).[61] It is very difficult to believe that the vast majority of Muslim-majority countries, and countries of the Global South, would stay silent in the face of a cultural genocide committed against Uyghur Muslims in China.

Given the lack of evidence for a cultural genocide; the data and reports concerning the protection of minority cultures in China; the large number of diplomatic missions to Xinjiang; and the near-consensus voice of Muslim-majority countries defending China against slander; the accusations of cultural genocide appear to be wholly insupportable.

The specific charge most frequently levelled against the authorities in Xinjiang is that they operate prison camps where Uyghur Muslims are locked up in huge numbers – the most oft-mentioned figure is one million, out of a population of 13 million.[62] The alleged purpose of these prison camps is to eradicate Uyghur Muslim culture and to brainwash people into supporting the government – to “breed vengeful feelings and erase Uyghur identity”.[63]

The “million Uyghurs in concentration camps” story is a quintessential propaganda blitz. Through sheer repetition across the Western media, along with support from the US State Department, this startling headline has acquired the force of a widely-accepted truth. And yet the sources for this “news” are so spurious as to be laughable.

A 2018 China File article attempting to locate the source of this one million figure identifies four key pieces of research, by the German anthropologist Adrian Zenz; Washington DC-based non-profit Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD); the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI); and US-based media outlet Radio Free Asia (RFA). A new player entered the game in 2021: the Newlines Institute, a think tank based at the Fairfax University of America, which issued the “first independent report” to authoritatively determine that the Chinese government has violated the UN convention on genocide. It is worthwhile considering whether these individuals and organisations most responsible for these high-profile accusations against China have any vested interests or ulterior motives.

Adrian Zenz was the first person to claim that a million Uyghurs were being held in concentration camps.[64] He is also something of a trailblazer in relation to allegations of forced labour and forced sterilisation. His relentless work slandering China has received an appreciative audience at CNN,[65] the Guardian,[66] Democracy Now,[67] and elsewhere. It is difficult to find a news report about China’s alleged use of concentration camps that does not reference Zenz’s work.

A hagiographic report in the Wall Street Journal highlights the outsized role of this one individual in the construction of a global anti-China slander machine: “Research by a born-again Christian anthropologist working alone from a cramped desk … thrust China and the West into one of their biggest clashes over human rights in decades. Doggedly hunting down data in obscure corners of the Chinese internet, Adrian Zenz revealed a security buildup in China’s remote Xinjiang region and illuminated the mass detention and policing of Turkic Muslims that followed. His research showed how China spent billions of dollars building internment camps and high-tech surveillance networks in Xinjiang, and recruited police officers to run them.”[68]
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Casually hinting at Zenz’s ideological orientation, the article notes that “his faith pushes him forward” and that his previous intellectual activity includes co-authoring “a book re-examining biblical end-times.”[69] He “feels very clearly led by God” to issue anti-China slanders. In other words, Zenz is not simply a politically-neutral data scientist with a passion for human rights. Rather he’s a hardened anti-communist and Christian end-timer; he is employed as the Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation,[70] an arch-conservative organisation set up by the United States Congress in 1993 in order to memorialise “the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial holocaust” such that “so evil a tyranny” as state socialism would ever again be able to “terrorise the world.”[71] His book Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation, he urges the subjection of unruly children to “scriptural spanking” and describes homosexuality as “one of the four empires of the beast.”[72]

Given Zenz’s ideological affiliations and intellectual record, it would not be unreasonable to demand that his research be subjected to serious scrutiny. In reality, however, his evaluations regarding Xinjiang have been uncritically accepted and widely amplified by the Western media and political machine.

Another organisation lending its support to the accusation that “more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Turkic Muslim minorities have disappeared into a vast network of ‘re-education camps’” is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).[73] ASPI is a think-tank set up by the Australian government, and has become highly influential in terms of moulding the Australian public‘s attitude towards China. Its reports about Xinjiang are among the most-cited sources on the topic.

ASPI describes itself as “an independent, non-partisan think tank”, but its core funding comes from the Australian government, with substantial contributions from the US Department of Defense and State Department (earmarked specifically for “Xinjiang human rights” work), as well as the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and others.[74] In summary, ASPI is knee-deep in the business of Cold War and the militarisation of the Pacific, and there is a clear conflict of interest when it comes to discussing human rights in China.

The most recent “non-partisan think tank” to amplify anti-China propaganda in relation to Xinjiang is the Newlines Institute, described by Jeffrey Sachs as “a project of a tiny Virginia-based university with 153 students, eight full-time faculty, and an apparently conservative policy agenda.”[75] The Newlines report – “the first independent expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention to the ongoing treatment of the Uyghurs in China”[76] – received extensive coverage in the Western media as the smoking gun proving China’s culpability in relation to concentration camps, forced labour and cultural genocide. The report was put together by the institute’s Uyghur Scholars Working Group, an illustrious group led by none other than Adrian Zenz. Canadian journalist Ajit Singh, in a detailed investigation for The Grayzone, points out that “the leadership of Newlines Institute includes former US State Department officials, US military advisors, intelligence professionals who previously worked for the ‘shadow CIA’ private spying firm, Stratfor, and a collection of interventionist ideologues.” Further, the institute’s founder and president is Ahmed Alwani, otherwise best known for having served on the advisory board for the US military’s Africa Command.[77]

The BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and others all treated the Newlines report as if it represented the very pinnacle of academic rigour, without mentioning even in passing its connection with the US military-industrial complex.

It is abundantly clear that the popular narrative about Xinjiang prison camps rests on highly dubious sources. The evidence offered up by Zenz, ASPI and the like is a handful of individual testimonies along with a small selection of photographs and satellite pictures purporting to show prison camps. These pictures do appear to prove that some prisons exist, but this is not a terribly interesting or unusual phenomenon. China has some prisons, although its incarceration rate – 121 per 100,000 people – is less than 20 percent that of the US.[78]

Several commentators have pointed out that it is not easy to hide a million prisoners – approximately the population of Dallas. As Omar Latif comments: “Imagine the number of buildings and the infrastructure required to house and service that number of prisoners! With satellite cameras able to read a vehicle license plate, one would think the US would be able to show those prisons and prisoners in great detail.”[79]
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Perhaps the most iconic image purporting to show a Xinjiang prison camp is that of a group of men in a prison yard wearing blue boiler suits. This turns out to be a picture of a talk given at Luopu County Reform and Correction Centre, in April 2017.[80] The Luopu Centre is an ordinary prison, with ordinary criminals, but it has been “fallaciously used to prove, show, or insinuate either concentration camps or slave labor of Xinjiang people”.[81]

The Chinese authorities claim that what Western human rights groups are calling concentration camps are in fact vocational education centres designed to address the problem of religious extremism and violent separatism. They combine classes on sociology and ethics – focused on trying to undermine ideas of religious hatred – with classes providing marketable skills such that the attendees can find jobs and improve their standard of living. The basic idea is to improve people’s life prospects so that they are less likely to be radicalised by fundamentalist sectarian groups.

The threat from such groups is real enough. The biggest among them is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which up until October 2020 was classified by the US State Department as a terrorist group.[82] It has sent thousands of its militia to fight alongside Daesh and assorted al-Qaeda groups in Syria and Afghanistan.[83]

Between the mid 1990s and mid 2010s, there was a sequence of terrorist attacks in China carried out by Uyghur separatist outfits – in shopping centres, train stations and bus stations as well as Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds of civilians. This corresponds with an increase in terrorism across Middle East and Central Asia, in no small measure related to the West’s proxy wars against progressive or nationalist states in the region. Like any population, the Chinese people demand the right to safety and security; as such, terrorism is not a problem China’s government can simply ignore.

The vocational centres were therefore set up as part of a holistic anti-terrorism campaign aimed at increasing educational attainment and economic prosperity, thereby addressing the disaffection that is known to breed radicalisation. Educational methods have been combined with a focus on improving living conditions: in the five years from 2014 to 2019, per capita disposable income increased by an average annual rate of 9.1 percent.[84]

China’s approach to tackling terrorism is based on the measures advocated in United Nations’ Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, which “calls for a comprehensive approach encompassing not only essential security-based counter-terrorism measures but also systematic preventive steps to address the underlying conditions that drive individuals to radicalise and join violent extremist groups.”[85] Thus China is actively attempting to operate within the framework of international law and best practices. This approach compares rather favourably with, for example, the US’s operation of a torture camp for suspected terrorists, not to mention innocent victims snatched more or less at random, in Guantánamo Bay – itself an illegally-occupied area of Cuba.[86]

Without conducting extensive investigations on the ground, it is obviously not possible to verify the Chinese authorities’ claims about how the vocational education centres run. What we can say with certainty is that the accusations about genocide, cultural genocide, religious oppression and concentration camps are not backed by anything approximating sufficient proof. Meanwhile the most prominent accusers all, without exception, have a known axe to grind against China.

None of the foregoing is meant to deny that there are any problems in Xinjiang; that Uyghur people are never mistreated or ethnically profiled by the police; or that there has never been any coercion involved in the deradicalisation program. But these problems – which are well-understood in China and which the government is actively addressing – are in no way unique to China. Certainly any discrimination against Uyghurs pales in comparison with, for example, the treatment of African-Americans and indigenous peoples in the United States, or the treatment of Dalits, Adivasis and numerous other minorities in India.

The perverse propaganda campaign around Xinjiang serves multiple purposes. It is a component of the US-led New Cold War – a project of hybrid warfare designed to slow down China’s rise, to maintain US hegemony and prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.[87] It also connects to a century-old pattern of vicious anti-communism that aims to disrupt the natural solidarity the working classes in the capitalist countries, and oppressed people generally, might otherwise feel towards the socialist world. Lastly, Xinjiang’s geostrategic importance means that it has a special role in any overall strategy of weakening China. Bordering Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Xinjiang constitutes a key point along the major east-west land routes of the Belt and Road Initiative. It connects China to Central Asia and therefore also to the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and Europe. Xinjiang is China’s largest natural gas-producing region, is the centre of China’s solar and wind power generation, and is crucially important for China’s security.

British political scientist Jude Woodward noted that Xinjiang’s location puts it at the heart of China’s blossoming trade relationship with Central Asia – “part of the world where the confrontation between China’s win-win geo-economics and the US’s old style geopolitics are playing themselves out with the starkest contrast… China has proposed that Central Asia should be at the crossroads of a reimagined Eurasia connected by oil and gas pipelines, high speed trains and continuous carriageways, with stability underpinned by growth and fuelled by trade. China offers a vision of a world turned on its axis, placing not the ‘middle kingdom’ but the entire Asian continent at the centre of the next phase of human development.”[88]

In order to disrupt this progress, the US has resorted to destabilisation and demonisation. The maximum goal is to lay the ground for a pseudo-independent Xinjiang which would in reality be a US client state and a powerful foothold for further aggression against China and other states in the region. The minimum, and far more likely, goal is to disrupt the value chains connecting China to the Eurasian land mass, thereby slowing down the Belt and Road Initiative and damaging China’s trade relationships with Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

As an aside, the West’s stoking of instability in Xinjiang and its imposition of sanctions expose the shallowness of its commitment to the fight against climate breakdown. In 2021, Xinjiang generated 2.48 trillion kilowatts of electricity from renewable sources (primarily solar and wind) – nearly 30 percent of China’s total electricity consumption.[89] Around half of the world’s supply of polysilicon, an essential component in solar panels, comes from Xinjiang.[90]
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If the US and its allies were serious about pursuing carbon neutrality and preventing an ecological catastrophe, they would be working closely with China to develop supply chains and transmission capacity for renewable energy. China’s investment in solar and wind power technology has already led to a dramatic reduction of prices around the world.[91] Instead, they are imposing blanket sanctions on China and attempting to cut Xinjiang out of clean energy supply chains.[92] This indicates rather clearly that the imperialist ruling classes are prioritising their anti-China propaganda war over preventing climate breakdown. It seems the slogan “better dead than red” lives on in the 21st century.

Malcolm X, the African-American civil rights leader and revolutionary, famously said that “if you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”[93]

China is rising. Its life expectancy has now overtaken that of the US.[94] Extreme poverty is a thing of the past, and people increasingly live well. China has established itself as a leading force in the fight against climate breakdown; in the fight to save humanity from pandemics; and in the movement towards a more democratic, multipolar system of international relations. It is “now the standard-bearer of the global socialist movement,” in the words of Xi Jinping.[95]

The US and its allies are pursuing a New Cold War with the aim of weakening China, limiting its rise, and ultimately overturning the Chinese Revolution and ending the rule of the Communist Party. The barrage of anti-China propaganda provides the marketing for this New Cold War. The Western ruling classes want Chinese socialism to be associated with discrimination, authoritarianism and prison camps; not with ending poverty and saving the planet. Readers in the imperialist countries should consider whether they want to have their consent manufactured in this way; whether they share the foreign policy objectives of their ruling classes.

What would the likely repercussions be if the US and its allies were successful in their aims and the People’s Republic of China suffered the same fate as the Soviet Union?

For one thing, the consequences in terms of the climate crisis would potentially be catastrophic. A capitalist government in China would have neither the will nor the resources to continue the projects of renewable energy, afforestation and conservation at the level they are currently being pursued. A pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 would be utterly devastating, resulting in several million – rather than a few thousand – Chinese deaths. Meanwhile malaria, cholera and other diseases could all be expected to make a comeback, given the perfect storm of poverty, overcrowding, rising temperatures and sea levels – ‘Goldilocks conditions’ for pathogens.

Poverty alleviation and common prosperity would be relegated to history. Hundreds of millions would be pushed into destitution by a ruling class that had no reason to prioritise their interests. Homelessness, violent crime and drug addiction would once again become commonplace, as they did in Russia following the Soviet collapse. Furthermore a capitalist China, desperate to earn the friendship and protection of the US, would end its international role promoting multipolarity and opposing imperialism.
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We must resolutely oppose and expose anti-China slander, which aims to break the bonds of solidarity within the global working class and all those opposed to imperialism; which seeks to malign and undermine socialism; and which serves to perpetuate a moribund capitalist system that everyday generates more poverty, more misery, more oppression, more violence, more environmental destruction, and that increasingly threatens the very survival of humanity.

[1]  Boer, Roland. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners. Singapore: Springer, 2021, p11
[2] Chen, W 2021, US should correct wrongs by ending propaganda war against China, China Daily, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202110/15/WS6168b867a310cdd39bc6f0b4.html>.
[3] Discussed in detail in Martinez, C 2021, The left must resolutely oppose the US-led New Cold War on China, Invent the Future, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://invent-the-future.org/2021/06/the-left-must-resolutely-oppose-the-us-led-new-cold-war-on-china/>.
[4] Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Reprinted. London: Panaf, 2004.
[5] Edwards, David, and David Cromwell. Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality. London: Pluto Press, 2018, p1
[6] ibid, p8
[7] Jones, O 2021, The right condemns China over its Uighur abuses. The left must do so too, The Guardian, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/21/right-condemns-china-over-its-uighur-abuses-left-must-do>.
[8] Martinez, C 2020, Socialists should oppose the new cold war against China – a reply to Paul Mason, Morning Star, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/socialists-should-oppose-new-cold-war-against-china-%E2%80%93-reply-paul-mason>.
[9] Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. London: Vintage Digital, 2010, p12
[10] ibid, p78
[11] ibid, p101
[12]  ibid, p111
[13] ibid, p78
[14] ibid, p490
[15] The Guardian view on Hong Kong’s crackdown: an assault on political opposition (2021), The Guardian, accessed 28 August 2022, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/06/the-guardian-view-on-hong-kongs-crackdown-an-assault-on-political-opposition>.
[16] See for example Barker, K; Baker, M; Watkins, A 2021, In City After City, Police Mishandled Black Lives Matter Protests, New York Times, accessed 28 August 2022, <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/us/protests-policing-george-floyd.html>.
[17]  Coyle, K 2020, In Hong Kong, labour movement loyalties are divided, Morning Star, accessed 19 September 2022, <https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/kenny-coyle-based-interview-hk-trade-unionist-alice-mak>.
[18]  Cheung, T; Lao, C 2022, Hongkongers with ties to US-backed group slammed by Beijing report could risk censure, analysts warn, South China Morning Post, accessed 15 September 2022, <https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3177383/hongkongers-ties-us-backed-group-slammed-beijing-report>.
[19] Coyle, K 2022, Hong Kong: truth is out, Morning Star, accessed 28 August 2022, <https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/hong-kong-truth-is-out>.
[20] Martinez, C 2022, China’s long war on poverty, Invent the Future, accessed 15 September 2022, <https://invent-the-future.org/2022/06/chinas-long-war-on-poverty/>.
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To extend a population’s life expectancy at birth (LEB) requires capabilities that are scarce in the United States. The U.S. LEB has fallen in the recent period, quite abruptly. Meanwhile, life expectancy in China and Cuba continues its long-term rise. To understand why we should explore nations’ varying capabilities to achieve social change and promote social gains.

Medical and sociological causes of death that relate to life expectancy and are specific to the United States will not be explored here. A subsequent report will cover that ground.
​
The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics on Aug. 31 set U.S. LEB for 2021 at 76.1 years, the same figure as in 1996. The decline from 77.0 years in 2020 and from 78.8 in 2019 was the greatest continuous U.S. fall in LEB in 100 years. Life expectancy for men in 2021, 73.2 years, represented an unprecedented male-female gap of almost six years (increased male mortality is routine).

Policies put in place following the two countries’ socialist revolutions led to wide-ranging social initiatives that are protective of all people’s lives and, incidentally, crucial for long life expectancy. Capitalist governments, less oriented to social change, are prone to tolerating gaps in social development.

The two socialist countries pursued particular objectives to achieve social gains. Specifically, they have endeavored to establish working-class political power, promote decent and healthy lives for all working people, eradicate major economic inequalities, and build unity.

Some capitalist countries have also attempted to fulfill a few of these objectives when under left-wing governance, with mixed success. A look at how well they may have succeeded, and at some of the consequences when they have not, may shed light on the failings of capitalist states to support the lives of their people, particularly the U.S.’ failure to sustain a LEB that in 2020 was already lower than that of 53 other countries.

The subject of providing social support is, of course, vast. On that account, the discussion here pays more attention to health care and less to other areas. It draws on the insights of Vicente Navarro, professor of public health and public policy at universities in Baltimore and Barcelona.

As regards working-class political power, Navarro maintains that “countries with strong labor movements, with social democratic and socialist parties…have developed stronger redistribution policies and inequality-reducing measures…. These worker-friendly countries consequently have better health indicators [including LEB] than those countries where labor movements are very weak, as is the case in the United States.”

Navarro blames the lack of universal health care in the United States, unique among industrialized nations, on the lack there of a strong labor movement and/or a labor or socialist party. Political power exerted by the organized working class in industrialized nations may vary, but it almost always exceeds workers’ power in the United States, where statistical markers of health outcome are decidedly less favorable.

The political weakness of the organized workers’ movement in the United States is clear. “The working class,” Navarro writes in 2021, does not appear anywhere in the Cabinet nor the Senate, and only appears in the House with an extremely limited representation of 1.3 percent.” Most “members of these institutions belong to the corporate class, closely followed by upper-middle class.” He condemns the “privatization of the electoral process,” in which “there is no limit to how much money can go to the Democratic or Republican party or their candidates.”

Decent and healthy lives are far from routine in capitalist countries, where poor health is associated with low social-economic status. Navarro reports that, in the United States, the “blue-collar worker has a mortality rate from heart conditions double that of the professional class. Mortality differentials by social class are much larger in the United States than in Western Europe.”

He notes that “top level British civil servants live considerably longer than do lower level ones,” and that “members of the [Spanish] bourgeoisie…live an average of two years longer than the petit bourgeoisie…who live two years longer than the middle class, who live two years longer than the skilled working class, who live two years longer than members of the unskilled working class, who live two years longer than the unskilled [and unemployed] working class.”

Alienation under capitalism exacerbates health problems. According to Navarro, “the distance among social groups and individuals and the lack of social cohesion that this distance creates is bad for people’s health and quality of life.” The social isolation he describes adds to challenges faced by social support systems and detracts from the usefulness of interventions.

Attempts by capitalist countries to remove wealth inequalities, especially in the health care arena, show mixed success. As commercialization of healthcare advances, difficulties mount. As the result of profit-taking in that sector, society-wide inequalities are aggravated, and working people lose equal access to quality care.

And yet some form of public overview of, or support for, health care sectors is more or less routine in the various capitalist countries. In many, public authorities operate and pay for hospitals, nursing homes, staffing, drugs, equipment, and training. But the infiltration of market prerogatives and privatization in the health care systems of richer countries now threatens long established goals of accessible health care for all.

In Europe, austerity campaigns under neoliberal auspices have led to cutbacks in publicly provided care. Privatization inroads blunted the institutional response in Europe to the COVID-19 pandemic. Investor groups have been eyeing the hospital and nursing home sectors as profit-making opportunities. According to the Lancet medical journal, privatization within the British National Health Service contributed to an increase in preventable deaths from all causes between 2013 and 2020.

The United States is the poster child of war in defense of privilege. There are stories, from health care:

In 2020 salary and benefits for William J. Caron, Jr., CEO of MaineHealth, a major care provider in the author’s locality, were $1,992,044; for Richard W. Petersen, Maine Medical Center CEO, they were $1,822,185. A commentator notes that “Hospital CEOs are compensated primarily for the volume of patients that pass through their doors—so-called “heads in beds.” Average annual income for U.S. primary care physicians was $260,000 in 2021; for specialists, $368,000.

According to bain.com, “Medtech companies are among the most profitable in the healthcare industry, with margins averaging 22%…profit pools [will] grow to $72 billion in 2024.” And “HME (home medical equipment) retail companies average 45 percent gross profit margin (GPM).”

Researchers found that between 2000 and 2018, the “median annual gross profit margin” (gross profit is revenue minus costs) of 35 pharmaceutical companies was 39.1% higher than that of 357 non-pharmaceutical companies. The CEOs of three major pharmaceutical companies” increased their wealth by “a total of $90 million” in 2018. As for COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers: “Moderna’s and BioNTech’s 2021 net profit margins reached 66% and 54%, respectively.”

The matter of creating unity to establish socialism and arrange for the common good needs little comment. Unity within society is a near impossibility under capitalism, inasmuch as divisions there are inherent to a world of greed and individualism. Meanwhile, China, opting in favor of life, put on a magnificent display of socialist unity as its people grappled with the pandemic.

The government imposed strong preventative measures and accepted the inevitability of economic disruption and loss. China’s COVID-19 mortality rate is 1.07 deaths per 100,000 persons. Its U.S. counterpart never seemed to choose and, that way protected economic growth. The U.S. COVID-19 mortality rate is 319.59 deaths per 100,000 persons.

It is important, finally, to lay to rest any suggestion that the riches of the United States and other capitalist nations automatically enable them to offer long life expectancies. Individualized entitlement to wealth is basic to how they operate, and that’s a contradiction and an obstacle.

A society aiming to pursue social initiatives that are comprehensive and directed to all population groups equally is a society that has to redistribute wealth. Wealth redistribution is the necessary adjunct to the objectives already discussed. The message here is that capitalist-inspired measures don’t make the grade and that socialist programs, as in Cuba and China, do work and do offer the promise of decent and secure lives to entire populations.
​
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author.

​The following speech was given by Xi Jinping at the 28th group study session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee on November 23, 2015.

Today, we are holding the 28th group study session of the Political Bureau, and our focus is on the basic principles and methodology of Marxist political economy. The aim of this study session is to strengthen our understanding of the basic principles of Marxism. We have previously held sessions on subjects related to historical materialism and dialectical materialism. On this occasion, we will deepen our understanding and grasp of the laws underlying economic development by reviewing Marxist political economy so that we can become more competent and proficient at leading the nation’s economic development.

I would now like to discuss some of my thoughts.

Marxist political economy is an important component of Marxism and required learning for our efforts to uphold and develop Marxism. Marx and Engels carried forward historic achievements made in the field of economics, especially British classical political economy, through a process of critical examination based on the worldview and methodology of dialectical materialism and historical materialism. After intensive study of human economic activities, they founded Marxist political economy, which drew back the curtain on the laws underlying the economic workings of human society and capitalist society in particular. Engels said that the whole theory of a proletarian party was derived from the study of political economy, while Lenin regarded political economy as the most profound, most comprehensive, and most detailed proof and application of Marxist theory. Though there is now a rich diversity of economic theories, our study of political economy must be based on Marxist political economy and not any other economic theory.

There are people who believe Marxist political economy and Das Kapital are obsolete, but this is an arbitrary and erroneous judgment. Setting aside more distant events and looking at just the period since the global financial crisis, we can see that many capitalist countries have remained in an economic slump, with serious unemployment problems, intensifying polarization, and deepening social divides. The facts tell us that the contradictions between the socialization of production and the private possession of the means of production still exist, but they are manifested in ways and show characteristics that are somewhat different. After the global financial crisis, many Western scholars began studying Marxist political economy and Das Kapital again for the purpose of reflecting on the deficiencies of capitalism.

Last year, the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French scholar Thomas Piketty aroused broad discussion in international academic circles. Using accurate and abundant data, Piketty shows that levels of inequality are as high or higher than they have ever been in the U.S. and other Western countries. He argues that unconstrained capitalism has aggravated phenomena such as wealth inequality, and that the situation will continue to get worse. His analysis is mainly conducted from the perspective of distribution and does not touch significantly upon more fundamental questions of ownership, but the conclusions he reaches are nonetheless well worth our consideration.

​Since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee in 1978, our Party has integrated the basic principles of Marxist political economy with the practice of reform and opening up, and made constant efforts to enrich and develop Marxist political economy. After the “Decision of the CPC Central Committee on Reform of the Economic Structure” was passed in October 1984, Deng Xiaoping commented that this represented a “first draft” of political economy that fused the basic principles of Marxism with the practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics. As reform and opening up has constantly pushed deeper in the more than three decades that have passed since then, we have brought about many important theoretical achievements in the Marxist political economy of contemporary China. Some examples are the theory on the essence of socialism; the theory on the basic economic system for the primary stage of socialism; the theory on establishing and implementing the philosophy of innovative, coordinated, green, open, and shared development; the theory on developing the socialist market economy and making the market play the decisive role in resource allocation while ensuring that the government better plays its role; the theory on China’s entrance into a new normal of economic development; the theory on coordinating the processes of new industrialization, digitalization, urbanization, and agricultural modernization; the theory on the nature of ownership rights, contract rights, and usage rights for contracted farmland; the theory on making effective use of domestic and international markets and resources; and the theory on promoting social equity and justice and bringing about common prosperity for everyone. These theoretical achievements were never discussed by the authors of the Marxist classics, and before reform and opening up we had no experience or understanding of the issues with which they are concerned. Instead, they form a body of knowledge about political economy that has been molded by the conditions of contemporary China and the nature of the times. This has not only provided firm guidance for China’s endeavors in economic development, but also opened up new frontiers for Marxist political economy.

In the volatile and unpredictable tide of the world economy today, a major test of our Party is whether or not we can effectively steer the great ship of China’s economy. With an extremely complex economic landscape both at home and abroad and an overwhelming profusion of economic phenomena to contend with, studying the basic principles and methodology of Marxist political economy can help us master sound means of economic analysis, understand the processes through which the economy runs, build a grasp of the laws underlying social and economic development, and become more competent at keeping the socialist market economy on course. This will enable us to address theoretical and practical challenges in our nation’s economic development more effectively.

The purpose of studying Marxist political economy is to better lead China’s economic development. While we must ensure that we uphold its basic principles and methodology, it is even more important that we integrate Marxist political economy with the realities of our nation’s economic development, and constantly strive toward new theoretical achievements in the process.

First, we must uphold a people-centered approach to development. Development is for the people; this is the fundamental position of Marxist political economy. Marx and Engels stated that “the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority,” and that in future societies, production would be “calculated for the wealth of all.” Deng Xiaoping said that emancipating and developing productive forces and eliminating exploitation and polarization in order to ultimately bring about common prosperity represents the essence of socialism. The Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee in October 2015 clearly emphasized the need to uphold a people-centered approach to development, and to make improving the people’s well-being, promoting their all-around development, and pursuing steady progress toward common prosperity the immutable aims of economic development. This is something that we must never lose sight of. When planning economic work, formulating economic policies, and promoting economic development, we must always adhere firmly to this fundamental position.

Sixth, we must uphold the fundamental national policy of opening up. According to Marxist political economy, human society will ultimately witness the transcendence of history from the level of individual nations to the global scale. Today, the degree of our country’s connection with the world is unprecedented, as is our economy’s impact on the world economy and vice versa. With globalization advancing deeper, we could not possibly pursue development by closing ourselves off. Instead, we must be adept at keeping an eye on the landscape both at home and abroad and making good use of domestic and international markets and resources. Conforming to the trend of our economy’s deep integration into the world economy, we must develop a more open economy, actively participate in global economic governance, and push the global economic order in a more just, equitable, cooperative, and mutually beneficial direction. At the same time, we must firmly safeguard our nation’s development interests, forestall risks of all kinds, and ensure our economic security. In carrying out these tasks, there are many theoretical and practical questions that we must explore further.

To conclude, our commitment to upholding the basic principles and methodology of Marxist political economy does not imply rejection of the rational components of the economic theories of other countries. Western economic knowledge on topics such as finance, prices, currency, markets, competition, trade, exchange rates, industries, enterprises, growth, and management do reflect one side of the general laws underpinning socialized production and market economics and should therefore be used as reference. At the same time, however, we must cast a discerning eye on the economic theories of other countries, particularly those of the West, making sure that we separate the wheat from the chaff. Putting our own interests first while using the strengths of others to our advantage, we must ensure that we do not mechanically copy the aspects of these theories that reflect the nature and values of the capitalist system or that are colored by Western ideology. Although the discipline of economics is devoted to the study of economic issues, it does not exist in a vacuum, and therefore cannot be separated from social and political issues. Therefore, when our educators teach economics, they must not advocate the indiscriminate absorption of foreign concepts. They must discuss Marxist political economy and the socialist political economy of contemporary China thoroughly and at length so to prevent their marginalization.

For Marxist political economy to remain vital, it must evolve with the times. Practice is the source of theory. In the space of mere decades, we have completed a process of development that took centuries for developed countries. Behind all our incredible progress and achievements in economic development have been the tremendous momentum, vigor, and potential of theoretical innovation. Today, our economy and the world economy are facing many major new challenges, and these need to be addressed by sound theories. Grounded in China’s national conditions and our experiences in development, we must thoroughly look into new issues and circumstances faced by the domestic and global economies, bringing new patterns and characteristics to light. We must review and refine the achievements we have made in recognizing underlying laws through the process of economic development and elevate our practical experience to the level of systematized economic theories. By doing so, we will constantly open up new frontiers for Marxist political economy in contemporary China and contribute Chinese wisdom to the discipline’s innovation and development.

Originally appeared in Qiushi Journal, Chinese edition, No. 16, 2020.

​The Communist Party of China (CPC) was formed in July 1921. From that time up to the present day, it has led the Chinese Revolution – a revolution to eliminate feudalism, to regain China’s national sovereignty, to end foreign domination of China, to build socialism, to create a better life for the Chinese people, and to contribute to a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity.

Some of these goals have already been achieved; others are ongoing. Thus the Chinese Revolution is a continuing process, and its basic political orientation remains the same.

Feudalism was dismantled in CPC-controlled territories from the early 1930s onwards, and throughout the country in the period immediately following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Similarly, warlord rule was ended and a unified China essentially established in 1949; Hong Kong was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 and Macao in 1999. Only Taiwan continues to be governed separately and to serve foreign interests. And yet in a world system still principally defined by US hegemony, the imperialist threat remains – and is intensifying with the development of a US-led hybrid war against China. Therefore the project of protecting China’s sovereignty and resisting imperialism continues. Similarly, the path to socialism is constantly evolving.

In the course of trying to build socialism in a vast semi-colonial, semi-feudal country, mistakes have certainly been made. The collected works of Marx and Lenin bubble over with profound ideas, but they contain no templates or formulae. Chinese Marxists have had to continuously engage in “concrete analysis of concrete conditions”,1 applying and developing socialist theory, creatively adapting it to an ever-changing material reality. In their foreword to Agnes Smedley’s biography of Zhu De, The Great Road, Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy wrote that the Chinese communists, “in the midst of their struggle for survival … have proceeded to evolve a more flexible and sophisticated theory which enriched Marxism by reflecting and absorbing the stubborn realities of the Chinese scene.”2

As Liu Shaoqi, a prominent CPC leader until his denunciation during the Cultural Revolution, explained: “because of the distinctive peculiarities in China’s social and historical development and her backwardness in science, it is a unique and difficult task to apply Marxism systematically to China and to transform it from its European form into a Chinese form… Many of these problems have never been solved or raised by the world’s Marxists, for here in China the main section of the masses are not workers but peasants, and the fight is directed against foreign imperialist oppression and medieval survivals, and not against domestic capitalism.”3

This article argues that, while the Chinese Revolution has taken numerous twists and turns, and while the CPC leadership has adopted different strategies at different times, there is a common thread running through modern Chinese history: of the CPC dedicating itself to navigating a path to socialism, development and independence, improving the lot of the Chinese people, and contributing to a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity.

​The CPC was formed in response to a clear need for revolutionary leadership. The 1911 bourgeois revolution that had finally overthrown the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China had come to a dead end, owing to the manoeuvring of the imperialist powers and their comprador agents. Most of the country was run by warlords. The feudal economy remained in place and the bulk of the population remained permanently on the brink of starvation, indebted to landlords. The various imperialist powers maintained their footholds, with Britain, the US, Japan and Germany competing for control of China’s land and resources.

Young people in particular were searching for a path forward. “Youth organisations and study circles sprang up in great profusion”, writes Israel Epstein,4 including the New People’s Study Society in Hunan, led by a certain Mao Zedong. A turning point came on 4 May 1919, when the students of Beijing marched on the government buildings in protest at the Treaty of Versailles, which legalised the Japanese seizure of Shandong province and rejected China’s demands for the abolition of foreign spheres of influence and the withdrawal of foreign troops. The demonstrations caught the imagination of students, workers and radical intellectuals throughout the country. “The May 4 Movement was a climactic point of the Chinese revolution. It took place after, and was one of the results of, the October Revolution in Russia.”5 Han Suyin described the May 4 Movement as “a leap of consciousness, a radicalisation, which would determine the course of history.”6

The CPC, formed two years later, was the first organisation to put forward the slogan ‘Down with imperialism’, recognising that China’s weakness and backwardness were inherently bound up with foreign domination. Some relatively forward-thinking elements of the emerging capitalist class had hoped that the US or Japan might help China to establish itself as a modern capitalist power, but the communists recognised that this reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of imperialism. The major capitalist powers were compelled by the nature of their economic system to compete for control of China – a country offering an abundance of land, people, natural resources, and geostrategic advantage. Japan, the US, Britain, Germany and others wouldn’t hesitate to support feudal warlords where it suited their interests; nor would they hesitate to suppress the Chinese people’s desire for independence and progress. The CPC’s anti-imperialist position quickly won it the support of a significant section of the population.

Soon after its formation, at its Third Congress in 1923, the CPC pushed for a united front with the Guomindang (GMD)7, a revolutionary nationalist party set up by Sun Yat-sen in 1912 (the veteran politician and doctor Sun was elected as provisional president of the Republic of China following the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty). The idea of the united front was to construct an anti-imperialist alliance incorporating workers, peasants, intellectuals and the patriotic elements of the capitalist class, with a view to decisively ending feudalism, uniting the country under a single central government, and driving out the imperialist powers. Denied recognition or support by the West, the GMD was in the process of orienting towards the recently-formed Soviet Union, which had already demonstrated itself to be a supporter of Chinese sovereignty (the Bolsheviks had indicated their support for Sun Yat-sen as early as 19128 and, once in power, renounced all privileges in China granted to the tsarist regime). Recognising that the CPC would be more effective in mobilising the masses of the working class and peasantry, the GMD agreed to the CPC’s proposal, and the CPC leadership took joint membership of both organisations.

This first united front started to fracture after the death in 1925 of Sun Yat-sen. The GMD’s right wing gained the ascendancy under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek (who would later go on to become the highly authoritarian leader of Taiwan from 1949 until his death in 1975). Chiang “believed that communism was inhuman and that, unless defeated, it would mean oppression for the Chinese people and the destruction of their traditional culture.”9 Fearing that the communists were gaining too much popular support, Chiang orchestrated a coup against them, in collaboration with the various foreign powers that had recognised in Chiang a potential partner in the pursuit of an ‘acceptable’ political conjuncture in China.

When, in April 1927, Shanghai was liberated from warlord control as the result of an insurrection of the local working class (led primarily by CPC forces), Chiang’s forces won control of the city by means of a massacre of its liberators, killing an estimated 5,000 people. This marked the start of a several-year campaign of mass killings by Chiang’s forces against communists and progressive workers. With CPC members formally ejected from the GMD and the united front dismantled, Chiang Kai-shek set up a new regime in Nanjing, under which “communism became a crime punishable by death.”10 The government focused its efforts not on resisting imperialism or uniting the country but on suppressing communists. Facing something close to physical annihilation, the membership of the CPC fell from 58,000 at the start of 1927 to 10,000 by the end of the year.

These disastrous events led the communists to a strategic reorientation. It was clear that a united front policy focused on the major urban centres was no longer a viable option. Meanwhile, “as every schoolboy knows, 80 per cent of China’s population are peasants,”11 and, as William Hinton writes in the preface to his classic account Fanshen, “without understanding the land question one cannot understand the Revolution in China.”12 The CPC was moving towards the development of a rural-based revolutionary movement.

Following a failed uprising in his native Hunan, Mao Zedong fled with his forces into the Jinggang mountains, in the border region of Jiangxi and Hunan provinces. This became the birthplace of the Chinese Red Army and the site of the first liberated territory. The Jiangxi Soviet expanded over the course of several years to incorporate parts of seven counties and a population of more than half a million.

Han Suyin notes that Mao Zedong “was the first in the party who abandoned the city orientation and devised a major strategy born from China’s reality.” The working class were a growing force, but constituted less than one percent of the population. “Mao saw that setting up rural bases, dedicated to the liberation of the peasantry from the oppression of landlordism, was the only way in which revolution would succeed.”13 Not only was the mass of the peasantry against feudal exploitation, but it could also understand the connection between foreign domination and domestic poverty. The period of foreign aggression from 1840 had led to wars and instability, much of the burden of which fell on the peasantry, which was expected to provide soldiers and sustenance. Any agricultural surplus from good harvest years was redirected to the state (or local warlord), leaving grain reserves empty and thus contributing to vast famines.

The CPC and Red Army grew in strength and experience during this time. Chiang Kai-shek’s obsessive focus on eliminating communism led Mao and his comrades to develop a theory of guerrilla warfare that would prove decisive in the CPC’s rise to power. However, China was rendered vulnerable to attack by Chiang’s pacification programme. Even when the Japanese occupied Manchuria in September 1931, siphoning Manchukuo off as an ‘independent’ puppet state a year later, Chiang’s clearly stated policy was: “Internal pacification first, before external resistance”.

Between 1929 and 1934, Chiang’s forces led a series of brutal encirclement campaigns in an attempt to bury the Jiangxi Soviet. After suffering a series of defeats at the hands of a highly motivated and skilled Red Army, the Guomindang mobilised warlord armies from around the country, organising a force of more than a million troops. The communists had no choice but to abandon the liberated territory and break the siege. This process became the Long March: the extraordinary year-long retreat to the North-West, covering over 9,000 kilometres and ending with the establishment of a revolutionary base area in Shaanxi. This area would serve as the centre of the CPC’s operations until shortly before the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

In the liberated territories, the communists led the creation of a new political economy in the countryside that – along with their determined struggle against Japanese militarism – would earn them the support of the broad masses of the peasantry. In his classic account Red Star Over China, Edgar Snow paints a vivid picture of life in the red base areas: “Land was redistributed and taxes were lightened. Collective enterprise was established on a wide scale… Unemployment, opium, prostitution, child slavery, and compulsory marriage were reported to be eliminated, and the living conditions of the workers and poor peasants in the peaceful areas greatly improved. Mass education made much progress in the stabilised soviets. In some counties the Reds attained a higher degree of literacy among the populace in three or four years than had been achieved anywhere else in rural China after centuries.”14

Opium production was ended and replaced by food agriculture. Antiquated feudal practices such as foot-binding, infanticide and the keeping of slave girls were prohibited. Peng Dehuai, one of the top Red Army leaders and later the Defence Minister of the PRC, commented on the decisive importance of the CPC’s progressive and popular policies in the liberated areas:

> “Only by implanting itself deeply in the hearts of the people, only by fulfilling the demands of the masses, only by consolidating a base in the peasant soviets, and only by sheltering in the shadow of the masses, can partisan warfare bring revolutionary victory… Tactics are important, but we could not exist if the majority of the people did not support us.”15

By the mid 1930s, the Japanese armed forces were consolidating and expanding their occupation of Northeast China, aided and abetted by the Western powers, who were motivated by the idea of cooperating with Japan to attack the Soviet Union. Chiang Kai-shek’s position was becoming untenable. He granted concession after concession to the Japanese, but he could no longer justify his refusal to defend China’s national sovereignty. In July 1937, Japanese forces marched out of their puppet state of Manchukuo, going on to occupy Beijing and Shanghai.

In this context, more progressive elements within the GMD took the initiative, detaining Chiang in the northwestern city of Xi’an and forcing him to agree to cooperate with the CPC against Japanese occupation. Thus was formed the Second United Front. The red base at Yan’an (Shaanxi) was recognised as a provincial government and the CPC was legalised; the Red Army was re-designated as the Eighth Route Army.

​In the period of the Second United Front, the CPC won enormous prestige for its leadership of the national defence efforts and for its commitment to improving the lives of the population in the territories under its control. Yan’an became a pole of attraction for revolutionary and progressive youth throughout the country. British academic Graham Hutchings writes that “Yan’an seemed to stand for a new type of society. Visitors, foreign and Chinese, found it brimming with purpose, equality and hope. Many students and intellectuals chose to leave areas under the control of a central government they felt lacked a sense of justice, as well as the will to confront the national enemy, for life in the border regions and the communist or ‘progressive’ camp.”16

It was increasingly clear that the communists were the most cohesive, committed and competent political force in China; the only political party with the potential to restore China’s sovereignty, unity and dignity. Mao and the CPC leadership took the time to theorise the type of society they were trying to build; what the substance of their revolution was. The results of these debates and discussions are synthesised in Mao’s 1940 pamphlet On New Democracy, which describes the Chinese Revolution as necessarily having two stages: “first of New Democracy and then of socialism.”17

New Democracy was not to be a socialist society, but a “democratic republic under the joint dictatorship of all anti-imperialist and anti-feudal people led by the proletariat.” Extending a friendly hand to patriotic non-communist forces, Mao invoked the spirit of Sun Yat-sen, calling for “a republic of the genuinely revolutionary new Three People’s Principles with their Three Great Policies.” (The Three People’s Principles were – approximately – nationalism, people’s government, and social welfare; the Three Great Policies were alliance with the Soviet Union, alliance with the CPC, and support for the workers and peasants).

The key elements of this stage of the revolution were to defeat imperialism and to establish independence, as an essential step on the road to the longer-term goal of building socialism. How long would this stage last? It would “need quite a long time and cannot be accomplished overnight. We are not utopians and cannot divorce ourselves from the actual conditions confronting us.”18

Such a society would not be a dictatorship of the proletariat; that is, the working class would not exercise exclusive political control. Rather, political power would be shared by all the anti-imperialist classes: the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie (ie those elements of the capitalist class that stood against foreign domination).

In economic terms, New Democracy would include elements of both socialism and capitalism. “The state enterprises will be of a socialist character and will constitute the leading force in the whole national economy, but the republic will neither confiscate capitalist private property in general nor forbid the development of such capitalist production as does not ‘dominate the livelihood of the people’, for China’s economy is still very backward.” Land reform would be carried out, and the activities of private capital would be subjected to heavy regulation.

In conversation with Edgar Snow, Mao envisaged China taking its place within an ever-more globalised world – perhaps anticipating the ‘opening up’ of four decades later: “When China really wins her independence, then legitimate foreign trading interests will enjoy more opportunities than ever before. The power of production and consumption of 450 million people is not a matter that can remain the exclusive interest of the Chinese, but one that must engage the many nations. Our millions of people, once really emancipated, with their great latent productive possibilities freed for creative activity in every field, can help improve the economy as well as raise the cultural level of the whole world.”19

Following Japan’s defeat in 1945, the CPC and GMD attempted to negotiate a post-war government alliance. However, the agreement forged in Chongqing in October 1945 fell apart as Chiang’s forces continued their military attacks on the CPC-controlled areas. A bitter four-year civil war ensued, resulting in the communists’ victory, Chiang Kai-shek’s flight to Taiwan, and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. The newly-installed government, led by the CPC, attempted to build the type of society described in On New Democracy. Its governance was based on the Common Programme – an interim constitution drawn up by the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (a united front body created by the CPC), with 662 delegates representing 45 different organisations. The Common Programme did not call for the immediate establishment of a socialist society, and it promised to encourage private business. As Mao had written earlier in the year, “our present policy is to regulate capitalism and not to destroy it.”20 Patriotic capitalists were invited to participate in government.

The most important immediate economic change was the comprehensive dismantling of feudalism: the abolition of the rural class system and the distribution of land to the peasantry (a process already well underway in the areas under CPC control). Land reform resulted in a large agricultural surplus which, along with Soviet support, created the conditions for a rapid state-led industrialisation. Hutchings notes that “dramatic improvements in life expectancy and literacy rates and increases in living standards accompanied the appearance of factories, roads, railways and bridges across the country.”21 Along with this came an unprecedented shift in the status of women, who had suffered every oppression and indignity under feudalism. Via a system of “barefoot doctors”, basic medical care was made available to the peasantry. “As a consequence, fertility rose, infant mortality declined, life expectancy began to climb, and the population stabilised and then grew for the first time since the Japanese invasion of 1937.”22

The New Democracy period only lasted a few years. By 1954, the government was promoting collectivisation in the countryside and shifting private production into state hands. By the time of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, there was no more talk of a slow and cautious road to socialism; the plan now was to “surpass Britain and catch up to America” within 15 years.

The reasons for moving on from New Democracy are complex and contested, and reflect a shifting global political environment. The CPC had envisaged – or at least hoped for – mutually beneficial relations with the West, as is hinted at in the quote above that “legitimate foreign trading interests will enjoy more opportunities than ever before”. However, by the time of the founding of the PRC, the Cold War was already in full swing. After the defeat of Japan in 1945, and with the outbreak of civil war between the communists and the nationalists, the US came down on the side of the latter, on the basis that Chiang understood the civil war to be “an integral part of the worldwide conflict between communism and capitalism”23 and was resolutely on the side of capitalism.

The US made its hostility to the People’s Republic manifestly clear from early on. The US involvement in the Korean War, starting in June 1950, was to no small degree connected to “the West’s determination … to ‘contain’ revolutionary China.”24 The genocidal force directed against the Korean people – including the repeated threat of nuclear warfare – was also a warning to China’s communists (although the warning was returned with interest, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese volunteers joined hands with their Korean brothers and sisters, rapidly pushing the US-led troops back to the 38th parallel and forcing an effective stalemate). Soon after the arrival of US troops in Korea, US President Truman announced that his government would act to prevent Taiwan’s incorporation into the PRC, since this would constitute “a threat to the security of the Pacific area and to United States forces performing their lawful and necessary functions in that area.”25 Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet of the US Navy into the Taiwan Strait in order to prevent China from occupying it (such, incidentally, are the imperialist origins of the notion of Taiwanese independence). Along with these acts of physical aggression, the US imposed a total embargo on China, depriving the country of various important materials required for reconstruction.

The dangerously hostile external environment made New Democracy less viable. There are parallels here with the Soviet abandonment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1929. Much like New Democracy, the NEP had consisted of a mixed economy, with private business encouraged in order to increase production and enhance productivity. Introduced in 1921, the NEP proved highly successful, allowing the Soviet Union to recover economically from war whilst minimising internal class conflict. By the end of the decade, however, new external dangers were emerging and it became clear to the Soviet leadership that the imperialist powers were starting to mobilise for war. From 1929 the Soviet economy shifted to something like a wartime basis, with near-total centralisation, total state ownership of industry, collectivisation of agriculture, and a major focus on heavy industry and military production.

Similarly in China in the mid-1950s, the shifting regional situation contributed to an economic and political shift. Beyond that, there was undoubtedly a subjective factor of the CPC leadership wanting to accelerate the journey to socialism – to “accomplish socialist industrialisation and socialist transformation in fifteen years or a little longer”, as Mao put it in 1953.26 With the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the gradual deterioration of relations between the CPC and the new Soviet leadership under Nikita Khrushchev, the Chinese came to feel that the Soviets were abandoning the path of revolutionary struggle and that responsibility for blazing a trail in the construction of socialism had fallen to China. To move from a position of economic and scientific backwardness to becoming an advanced socialist power would require nothing less than a great leap.

​To this day, the most popular method for casually denigrating the People’s Republic of China and the record of the CPC is to cite the alleged crimes of Mao Zedong who, from the early 1930s until his death in 1976, was generally recognised as the top leader of the Chinese Revolution. If the CPC was so dedicated to improving the lot of the Chinese people, why did it engage in such disastrous campaigns as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?

The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, was an ambitious programme designed to achieve rapid industrialisation and collectivisation; to fast-track the construction of socialism and allow China to make a final break with centuries-old underdevelopment and poverty; in Mao’s words, to “close the gap between China and the US within five years, and to ultimately surpass the US within seven years”.27 In its economic strategy, it represented “a rejection of plodding Soviet-style urban industrialisation,”28 reflecting the early stages of the Sino-Soviet split. The Chinese were worried that the Khrushchev leadership in Moscow was narrowly focused on the avoidance of conflict with the imperialist powers, and that its support to China and the other socialist countries would be sacrificed at the altar of ‘peaceful coexistence’. Hence China would have to rely on its own resources.

For all its shortcomings, the core of the GLF was pithily described by Indian Marxist Vijay Prashad as an “attempt to bring small-scale industry to rural areas.”29 Mao considered the countryside would once again become the “true source for revolutionary social transformation” and “the main arena where the struggle to achieve socialism and communism will be determined.”30 Agricultural collectivisation was fast-tracked, and there was a broad appeal to the revolutionary spirit of the masses. Ji Chaozhu (at the time an interpreter for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later China’s ambassador to the UK (1987-91)) notes in his memoirs: “The peasants were left with small plots of their own, for subsistence farming only. All other activity was for the communal good, to be shared equally. Cadres were to join the peasants in the fields, factories, and construction sites. Even Mao made an appearance at a dam-building project to have his picture taken with a shovel in hand.”31

The GLF was not overall a success. Liu Mingfu writes that “the Great Leap Forward did not realise the goal of surpassing the UK and US. It actually brought China’s economy to a standstill and then recession. It caused a large number of unnatural deaths and pushed China’s global share of GDP from 5.46% in 1957 to 4.01% in 1962, lower than its share of 4.59% in 1950.”32

The disruption to the basic economic structure of society combined with the sudden withdrawal of Soviet experts in 1960 and a series of terrible droughts and floods to produce poor harvests. Meanwhile, with millions of peasants drafted into the cities to work in factories, “no one was available to reap and to thresh.”33 The historian Alexander Pantsov writes that the “battle for steel had diverted the Chinese leadership’s attention from the grain problem, and the task of harvesting rice and other grain had fallen on the shoulders of women, old men, and children… A shortage of grain developed, and Mao gave the command to decrease the pace of the Great Leap.”34 Ji Chaozhu observes that “malnutrition leading to edema was common in many areas, and deaths among the rural population increased.”35

Certain of the GLF’s goals were achieved – most notably the irrigation of arable land. However, it didn’t achieve its overall objective, and the disruption it caused contributed to a deepening of poverty and malnutrition. It was called off in 1962. It remains a highly controversial topic in Chinese history. For anticommunists, the GLF provides incontrovertible proof of the monstrous, murderous nature of the CPC – and Mao Zedong in particular. Western bourgeois historians seem to have settled on a figure of 30 million for the estimated number of lives lost in famine resulting from the Great Leap. On the basis of a rigorous statistical analysis, Indian economist Utsa Patnaik concludes that China’s death rate rose from 12 per thousand in 1958 (a historically low figure resulting from land reform and the extension of basic medical services throughout the country) to a peak of 25.4 per thousand in 1960. “If we take the remarkably low death rate of 12 per thousand that China had achieved by 1958 as the benchmark, and calculate the deaths in excess of this over the period 1959 to 1961, it totals 11.5 million. This is the maximal estimate of possible ‘famine deaths.’”36

Patnaik observes that even the peak death rate in 1960 “was little different from India’s 24.8 death rate in the same year, which was considered quite normal and attracted no criticism.” This is an important point. Malnutrition was at that time a scourge throughout the developing world (sadly it remains so in some parts of the planet). China’s history is rife with terrible famines, including in 1907, 1928 and 1942. It is only in the modern era, under the leadership of precisely that ‘monstrous’ CPC, that malnutrition has become a thing of the past in China.

In other words, the failure of the GLF has been cynically manipulated by bourgeois academics to denigrate the entire history of the Chinese Revolution. The GLF was not some outrageous crime against humanity; it was a legitimate attempt to accelerate the building of a prosperous and advanced socialist society. It turned out not to be successful and was therefore dropped.

In the aftermath of the GLF, Mao’s more radical wing of the CPC leadership became somewhat marginalised, and the initiative fell to those wanting to prioritise social stability and economic growth over ongoing class struggle. Principal among these were Liu Shaoqi (head of state of the PRC, widely considered to be Mao’s successor) and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping. Liu, Deng, Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai put forward the concept of the Four Modernisations (in agriculture, industry, defence, and science and technology) which would come to constitute a cornerstone of post-Mao economic policy.

In the years that followed, Mao and a group of his close comrades began to worry that the deprioritisation of class struggle reflected an anti-revolutionary ‘revisionist’ trend that could ultimately lead to capitalist restoration. As Mao saw it, revisionist elements were able to rely on the support of the intelligentsia – particularly teachers and academics – who, themselves coming largely from non-working class backgrounds, were promoting capitalist and feudal values among young people. It was necessary to “exterminate the roots of revisionism” and “struggle against those in power in the party who were taking the capitalist road.”37

The Cultural Revolution started in 1966 as a mass movement of university and school students, incited and encouraged by Mao and others on the left of the leadership. Student groups formed in Beijing calling themselves Red Guards and taking up Mao’s call to “thoroughly criticise and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois ideas in the sphere of academic work, education, journalism, literature and art”.38 The students produced ‘big-character posters’ (dazibao) setting out their analysis against, and making their demands of, anti-revolutionary bourgeois elements in authority. Mao was enthusiastic, writing the students in support of their initiative: “I will give enthusiastic support to all who take an attitude similar to yours in the Cultural Revolution movement.”39 He produced his own dazibao calling on the revolutionary masses to “Bombard the Headquarters” – that is, to rise up against the reformers and “bourgeois elements” in the party.

These developments were synthesised by the CPC Central Committee, which in August 1966 adopted its Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. “Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do the exact opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticise and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities’ and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.”40

Thus the aims of the Cultural Revolution were to stimulate a mass struggle against the supposedly revisionist and capitalist restorationist elements in the party; to put a stop to the hegemony of bourgeois ideas in the realms of education and culture; and to entrench a new culture – socialist, collectivist, modern. The Cultural Revolution also marked a further escalation of the Sino-Soviet split, as the revisionist illness was considered to have a Soviet etiology (Liu Shaoqi, previously considered as Mao’s successor and now the principal target of the radicals, was labelled China’s Khrushchev). Li Mingjiang notes that, “throughout the Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union was systematically demonised. Sino-Soviet hostilities reached an unprecedented level, as exemplified by Mao’s designation of Moscow as China’s primary enemy.”41

Han Suyin describes the chaotic atmosphere of the early days of the Cultural Revolution: “Extensive democracy. Great criticism. Wall posters everywhere. Absolute freedom to travel. Freedom to form revolutionary exchanges. These were the rights and freedoms given to the Red Guards, and no wonder it went to their heads and very soon became total licence.” In August 1966, “the simmering Cultural Revolution exploded in a maelstrom of violence… Mao had not reckoned that he would lose control of the havoc he had launched.”42

There was widespread disruption. Universities were closed. “Red Guards occupied and ransacked the Foreign Ministry, while most ambassadors were recalled to Beijing for political education. The British embassy was attacked, and the Soviet embassy was laid under siege by youthful Maoists for several months.”43

Many of those accused by the Cultural Revolution Group (CRG, a body of the CPC initially reporting to the Politburo Standing Committee but becoming the de facto centre of power) suffered horrible fates. Posters appeared with the slogan “Down with Liu Shaoqi! Down with Deng Xiaoping! Hold high the great red banner of Mao Zedong Thought.” Liu’s books were burned in Tiananmen Square – “they were declared to be poisonous weeds, yet they had been a mainstay of the theoretical construct which in Yen’an in 1945-47 had brought Mao to power.”44 He was expelled from all positions and arrested. “Liu had been repeatedly tortured and interrogated, confined to an unheated cell, and denied medical care. He died in November 1969, his remains surreptitiously cremated under a false name. His death was kept from his wife for three years, and from the public for a decade.”45

Peng Dehuai, former Defence Minister and the leader of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army’s operations in the Korean War, had been forced into retirement in 1959 after criticising the Great Leap Forward. Jiang Qing – Mao’s wife, and a leading figure in the CRG – sent Red Guards to Sichuan, where Peng was living. “A band of thugs burst into his house, seized him, and brought him to the capital, where he was thrown into prison. Peng was tortured and beaten more than a hundred times, his ribs were broken, his face maimed, and his lungs damaged. He was repeatedly dragged to criticism and struggle meetings.”46 He died in a prison hospital in 1974.

Even Premier Zhou Enlai, unfailingly loyal in spite of his quiet horror at the CRG’s extremism, didn’t escape unscathed: in November 1966, according to Han Suyin, he had a heart attack after 22 hours of being surrounded and shouted at by Red Guards.

Although Mao had only intended it to last for a few months, the Cultural Revolution only came to its conclusion shortly before Mao’s death in 1976, albeit with varying intensity – realising that the situation was getting out of control, in 1967 Mao called on the army to help establish order and re-organise production. However, the Cultural Revolution flared up again with the ascendancy of the ‘Gang of Four’ from 1972.

Historians in the capitalist countries tend to present the Cultural Revolution in the most facile and vacuous terms. To them, it was simply the quintessential example of Mao’s obsessive love of violence and power; just another episode in the long story of communist authoritarianism. But psychopathology is rarely the principal driving force of history. In reality, the Cultural Revolution was a radical mass movement; millions of young people were inspired by the idea of moving faster towards socialism, of putting an end to feudal traditions, of creating a more egalitarian society, of fighting bureaucracy, of preventing the emergence of a capitalist class, of empowering workers and peasants, of making their contribution to a global socialist revolution, of building a proud socialist culture unfettered by thousands of years of Confucian tradition. They wanted a fast track to a socialist future. They were inspired by Mao and his allies, who were in turn inspired by them.

Such a movement can get out of control easily enough, and it did. Mao can’t be considered culpable for every excess, every act of violence, every absurd statement (indeed he intervened at several points to rein it in), but he was broadly supportive of the movement and ultimately did the most to further its aims. Mao had enormous personal influence – not solely powers granted by the party or state constitutions, but an authority that came from being the chief architect of a revolutionary process that had transformed hundreds of millions of people’s lives for the better. He was as Lenin was to the Soviet people, as Fidel Castro remains to the Cuban people. Even when he made mistakes, these mistakes were liable to be embraced by millions of people. Han Suyin comments that “Mao was prone to making contradictory remarks, but each remark had the force of an edict.”47

The Cultural Revolution is now widely understood in China to have been misguided. It was “the most severe setback … suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”48 The political assumptions of the movement – that the party was becoming dominated by counter-revolutionaries and capitalist-roaders; that the capitalist-roaders in the party would have to be overthrown by the masses; that continuous revolution would be required in order to stay on the road to socialism – were explicitly rejected by the post-Mao leadership of the CPC, which pointed out that “the ‘capitalist-roaders’ overthrown … were leading cadres of Party and government organisations at all levels, who formed the core force of the socialist cause.”49 Historian Rebecca Karl posits that this post-Mao leadership in fact benefitted from the Cultural Revolution, in the sense that it became “the saviour of China from chaos.”50

Unquestionably the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution impeded the country’s development and brought awful tragedy to a significant number of people. What so many historians operating in a capitalist framework fail to understand is why, in spite of the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution, Mao is still revered in China. For the Chinese people, the bottom line is that his errors were “the errors of a great proletarian revolutionary.”51

It was the CPC, led by Mao and on the basis of a political strategy principally devised by him, that China was liberated from foreign rule; that the country was unified; that feudalism was dismantled; that land was distributed to the peasants; that the country was industrialised; that a path to women’s liberation was forged. British academic John Ross points out that, “in the 27 years between the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, life expectancy in China increased by 31 years – or over a year per chronological year… China’s rate of increase of life expectancy in the three decades after 1949 was the fastest ever recorded in a major country in human history.”52

The excesses and errors associated with the last years of Mao’s life have to contextualised within this overall picture of unprecedented, transformative progress for the Chinese people. The pre-revolution literacy rate in China was less than 20 percent. By the time Mao died, it was around 93 percent. China’s population had remained stagnant between 400 and 500 million for a hundred years or so up to 1949. By the time Mao died, it had reached 900 million. A thriving culture of literature, music, theatre and art grew up that was accessible to the masses of the people. Land was irrigated. Famine became a thing of the past. Universal healthcare was established. China – after a century of foreign domination – maintained its sovereignty and developed the means to defend itself from imperialist attack.

Hence the Mao as monster narrative has little resonance in China. As Deng Xiaoping himself put it, “without Mao’s outstanding leadership, the Chinese revolution would still not have triumphed even today. In that case, the people of all our nationalities would still be suffering under the reactionary rule of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism.”53 Furthermore, even the mistakes were not the product of the deranged imagination of a tyrant but, rather, creative attempts to respond to an incredibly complex and evolving set of circumstances. They were errors carried out in the cause of exploring a path to socialism – a historically novel process inevitably involving risk and experimentation.

​From 1978, the post-Mao Chinese leadership embarked on a process of ‘reform and opening up’ – gradually introducing market mechanisms to the economy, allowing elements of private property, and encouraging investment from the capitalist world. This programme of socialism with Chinese characteristics posited that, while China had established a socialist society, it would remain for some time in the primary stage of socialism, during which period it was necessary to develop a socialist market economy – combining planning, the development of a mixed economy and the profit motive – with a view to maximising the development of the productive forces.

Deng Xiaoping, who had been one of the most prominent targets of the Cultural Revolution and who had risen to become de facto leader of the CPC from 1978, theorised reform and opening up in the following terms: “Marxism attaches utmost importance to developing the productive forces… [The advance towards communism] calls for highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth. Therefore, the fundamental task for the socialist stage is to develop the productive forces. The superiority of the socialist system is demonstrated, in the final analysis, by faster and greater development of those forces than under the capitalist system. As they develop, the people’s material and cultural life will constantly improve… Socialism means eliminating poverty. Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism.”54

Was this the moment the CPC gave up on its commitment to Marxism? Such is the belief of many. For supporters of capitalism, the idea that China ‘ascended’ to capitalism from 1978 onwards is a validation of their own ideology; China was socialist and poor, and then became capitalist and rich. This view is near-universal among mainstream economists. Even the well-known Keynesian Jeffrey Sachs, who is both politically progressive and friendly towards China, considers that the key turning point in Chinese history was not 1949 but 1978: “After nearly 140 years of economic and social strife, marked by foreign incursions, domestic rebellions, civil wars, and internal policy blunders of historic dimensions, China settled down after 1978 to stable, open, market-based production and trade.”55

On the other hand, for many on the left (particularly in the West), 1978 marked a turning point in the wrong direction – away from socialism, away from the cause of the working class and peasantry. The introduction of private profit, the decollectivisation of agriculture, the appearance of multinational companies and the rise of Western influence: these added up to a historic betrayal and an end to the Chinese Revolution.

The consensus view within the CPC is that socialism with Chinese characteristics is a strategy aimed at strengthening socialism, improving the lives of the Chinese people, and consolidating China’s sovereignty. Although China had taken incredible steps forward since 1949, China in 1978 remained backward in many ways. The bulk of the population lived a very precarious existence, many without access to modern energy and safe water. China’s per capita income was $210. Food production, and consequently average food consumption, was insufficient. “An estimated 30 percent of rural residents, about 250 million, lived below the poverty line, relying on small loans for production and state grants for food.”56 The low per capita income figure is deceptive in the sense that the poor in China had secure access to land and housing – by which measure they were doing much better than most of their counterparts in the developing world; nonetheless the vast majority were genuinely poor.

Meanwhile the capitalist world was making major advances in science and technology, and the gap in living standards between China and its neighbours was growing sufficiently wide as to threaten the legitimacy of the CPC government. Chinese economist Justin Yifu Lin notes that, at the time of the founding of the PRC, there was only a relatively small per capita income gap between China and its East Asian neighbours. “But by 1978 Japan had basically caught up with the United States, and South Korea and Taiwan, China, had narrowed the income gap with developed countries. China, although boasting a complete industrial system, an atomic bomb, and a man-made satellite, had a standard of living a far cry from that of the developed world.”57

In Guangdong, the southern province bordering Hong Kong, many were fleeing because, in the words of Hua Guofeng (Mao’s chosen successor as head of the CPC), “Hong Kong and Macao were wealthy and the PRC was poor.” The leadership simply decided to “change the situation and make the PRC wealthy.”58

Opening up to foreign capital, learning from foreign technology, and integrating into the global market would allow for a faster development of the productive forces. Export manufacturing would allow China to build up sufficient hard currency to acquire technology from rich countries and improve productivity. Foreign capital would be attracted by China’s virtually limitless pool of literate and diligent workers.

All this was highly unorthodox compared to the experience of the socialist world up to that point (with some partial exceptions, such as Yugoslavia and Hungary). Deng Xiaoping’s strong belief was that, unless the government delivered on a significant improvement in people’s standard of living, the entire socialist project would lose its legitimacy and therefore be in peril. Assessing that China was around 20 years behind the advanced countries in science and technology, he stated: “When a backward country is trying to build socialism, it is natural that during the long initial period its productive forces will not be up to the level of those in developed capitalist countries and that it will not be able to eliminate poverty completely. Accordingly, in building socialism we must do all we can to develop the productive forces and gradually eliminate poverty, constantly raising the people’s living standards… If we don’t do everything possible to increase production, how can we expand the economy? How can we demonstrate the superiority of socialism and communism? We have been making revolution for several decades and have been building socialism for more than three. Nevertheless, by 1978 the average monthly salary for our workers was still only 45 yuan, and most of our rural areas were still mired in poverty. Can this be called the superiority of socialism?”59

Interestingly, this sentiment contains echoes of Mao in 1949: “If we are ignorant in production, cannot grasp production work quickly … so as to improve the livelihood of workers first and then that of other ordinary people, we shall certainly not be able to maintain our political power: we shall lose our position and we shall fail.”60

Marx wrote in volume 3 of Capital that “the development of the productive forces of social labour is capital’s historic mission and justification. For that very reason, it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production.”61 The vision of the CPC leadership was to replace “unwittingly” with “purposefully”: using capital, within strict limits and under heavy regulation, to bring China into the modern world.

Rather than selling out to capitalism, reform and opening up is better understood as a return to the policies of the New Democracy period. The CPC has always been adamant that what China is building is socialism, not capitalism – “it is for the realisation of communism that we have struggled for so many years… It was for the realisation of this ideal that countless people laid down their lives.”62 The basic guiding ideology of the CPC has not changed in its century of existence, as was summed up succinctly by Xi Jinping: “Both history and reality have shown us that only socialism can save China and only socialism with Chinese characteristics can bring development to China.”63

In borrowing certain techniques and mechanisms from capitalism, China is following a logic devised by the Bolsheviks during the New Economic Policy, using markets and investment to stimulate economic activity, whilst maintaining Communist Party rule and refusing to allow the capitalist class to dominate political power. As Lenin put it in 1921: “We must not be afraid of the growth of the petty bourgeoisie and small capital. What we must fear is protracted starvation, want and food shortage, which create the danger that the working class will be utterly exhausted and will give way to petty-bourgeois vacillation and despair. This is a much more terrible prospect.”64

Modern China has gone much further than the NEP, in the sense that private property is not limited to “the petty bourgeoisie and small capital”; there are some extremely wealthy individuals and companies controlling vast sums of capital. And yet their political status is essentially the same as it was in the early days of the PRC; their existence as a class is predicated on their acceptance of the overall socialist programme and trajectory of the country. As long as they are helping China to develop, they are tolerated. Even in 1957, with socialist construction in full swing, Mao considered that “the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie comes under the category of contradictions among the people… In the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods.”65

The reform strategy has been undeniably successful in terms of alleviating poverty and modernising the country. Economist Arthur Kroeber notes that workers’ wages have increased continuously, pointing out that, in 1994, a Chinese factory worker could expect to earn a quarter of what their counterpart in Thailand was earning; just 14 years later, the Chinese worker was earning 25 percent more than the Thai worker.66 Jude Woodward writes that per capita income in China doubled in the decade from 1980, “whereas it took Britain six decades to achieve the same after the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century and America five decades after the Civil War.”67

The combination of planning and ever-rising productivity has created a vast surplus, which has been used partly to “orchestrate a massive, sustained programme of infrastructure construction, including roads, railways, ports, airports, dams, electricity generation and distribution facilities, telecommunications, water and sewage systems, and housing, on a proportional scale far exceeding that of comparable developing countries, such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.”68

The fundamental difference between the Chinese system and capitalism is that, with capital in control, it would not be possible to prioritise the needs of the working class and peasantry; China would not have been able to achieve the largest-scale poverty alleviation in history. Deng understood this: “Ours is an economically backward country with a population of one billion. If we took the capitalist road, a small number of people in certain areas would quickly grow rich, and a new bourgeoisie would emerge along with a number of millionaires — all of these people amounting to less than one per cent of the population — while the overwhelming majority of the people would remain in poverty, scarcely able to feed and clothe themselves. Only the socialist system can eradicate poverty.”69

In adapting its strategy in accordance with new realities and a sober assessment of the past, the CPC was following the same principle it had always stood for: to seek truth from facts and to develop a reciprocal relationship between theory and practice. In Mao’s words, “the only yardstick of truth is the revolutionary practice of millions of people.”70 The CPC’s experience in practice was that “having a totally planned economy hampers the development of the productive forces to a certain extent.”71 Its leaders therefore conjectured that a combination of planning and markets would “liberate the productive forces and speed up economic growth.” This hypothesis has been proven correct by material reality. As John Ross puts it, “China’s extraordinary success during reform and opening up was based on adherence to Marxist theory and is the largest possible scale vindication of the Marxism in the framework of which reform and opening up was developed.”72

Reform and opening up wasn’t purely a correction of earlier mistakes; it was also a response to changing objective circumstances; specifically, a more favourable international environment resulting from the restoration of China’s seat at the United Nations (1971) and the rapprochement between China and the US. Thomas Orlik, chief economist at Bloomberg Economics, correctly observes that, “when Deng Xiaoping launched the reform and opening process, friendly relations with the United States provided the crucial underpinning. The path for Chinese goods to enter global markets was open.”73 So too was the door for foreign capital, technology, and expertise to enter China – first from Hong Kong and Japan, then the West. Zhou Enlai reportedly commented at the time of then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s historic visit to Beijing in 1971 that “only America can help China to modernise.”74 Even allowing for Zhou’s legendary diplomatic eloquence, this statement nevertheless contains an important kernel of truth.

Mao and Zhou had seen engagement with the US as a way to break China’s isolation. The US leadership saw engagement with China as a way to perpetuate and exacerbate the division between China and the Soviet Union. (Everyone was triangulating; for its part, the Soviet leadership was hoping to work with the US to undermine and destabilise China.75) Regardless of the complex set of intentions, one key outcome of the US-China rapprochement in the early 1970s was that a favourable external environment was created in which a policy of ‘opening up’ could feasibly be pursued.

Deng was also not the first to recognise that the productive forces were undergoing historic changes in the West and that China would have to catch up. Zhou Enlai noted that “new developments in science are bringing humanity to a new technological and industrial revolution… we must conquer these new heights in science to reach advanced world standards.”76 Indeed it was Zhou that first conceptualised the Four Modernisations that Deng made the cornerstone of his strategy. Zhou talked in January 1975 – during his last major speech – of the urgent need to take advantage of the more peaceful and stable international context and “accomplish the comprehensive modernisation of agriculture, industry, national defence and science and technology before the end of the century, so that our national economy will be advancing in the front ranks of the world.”77

The economic take-off of the post-1978 period “would not have been possible without the economic, political and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period”, in the words of the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin.78 Even with the disruption caused by the Cultural Revolution, the early period of socialist construction achieved “progress on a scale which old China could not achieve in hundreds or even thousands of years.”79 This is widely understood within China. Prominent economist Hu Angang writes that, by 1978, all children received an education, adult illiteracy had fallen from 80 percent to 33 percent, and basic healthcare was available to everyone. Industry had been built up from almost nothing. Meanwhile, “China succeeded in feeding one-fifth of the world’s population with only 7 percent of the world’s arable land and 6.5 percent of its water. China’s pre-1978 social and economic development cannot be underestimated.”80 This can be usefully compared with the same time period in India, which following independence from the British Empire in 1947 was in a similarly parlous state, with a life expectancy of 32. At the end of the pre-reform period in China, ie 1978, India’s life expectancy had increased to 55, while China’s had increased to 67. As John Ross elucidates, “this sharply growing difference was not because India had a bad record – as an increase of 22 years in life expectancy over a 31-year period graphically shows. It is simply that China’s performance was sensational – life expectancy increasing by 32 years in a 29-year chronological period.”81

Xi Jinping has observed that, although the two major phases of the People’s Republic of China are different in many ways, “they are by no means separated from or opposed to each other. We should neither negate the pre-reform phase in comparison with the post-reform phase, nor the converse.”82

The two major phases are both consistent with the CPC’s guiding philosophy and raison d’être. Both have played an invaluable role in China’s continuing transformation from a divided, war-torn, backward and phenomenally poor country in which “approximately one of every three children died within the first year of birth”83 to a unified, peaceful, advanced and increasingly prosperous country which is blazing a trail towards a more developed socialism.

In each stage of its existence, the CPC has sought to creatively apply and develop Marxism according to the prevailing concrete circumstances; always seeking to safeguard China’s sovereignty, maintain peace, and build prosperity for the masses of the people. Through many twists and turns, this has been a constant of a hundred years of Chinese Revolution.