“We want to do business.” Quite right, business will be done.

— Mao Zedong, 1949. On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship. [1]

———

Introduction

US Presidents historically reach their highest approval ratings due to war. George W. Bush reached an all-time-high of 90% in 2001 as the wrathful nation geared up to invade Afghanistan, and his father George H. W. Bush ranks second place with 89% in 1991, right as the US declared the end of its (first) invasion of Iraq and the “liberation of Kuwait.” [2] So when Harvard University’s Ash Center released a 2020 study of Chinese public opinion showing that, as of 2016, “95.5 percent of respondents were either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Beijing,” it was all the more remarkable given the fact that this was a country at peace. [3]

Though it came as a shock to Western audiences, who understand China to be a tyrannical state-capitalist authoritarian regime, observers in the imperial periphery have always seen things rather differently. As far back as 2004, Fidel Castro argued that “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries,” [4] and in August 2014, he reaffirmed this sanguine outlook: “Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.” [5] In May 2018, Professor Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance, assuaged an anxious member of the audience at a Cambridge Forum: “I have to tell you that, from my understanding of China, it’s a very interesting social experiment, in the sense that at the local level or the regional level you now have a boisterous democracy, with popular success stories in overthrowing local authorities, local bureaucrats who have been corrupt.” [6] Later that same year, before his 2019 ouster in a US-backed coup, Evo Morales said “I trust China very much. China has always accompanied us in many of our aspirations in the social, cultural, political and economic spheres” [7] and that “China’s support and aid to Bolivia’s economic and social development never attaches any political conditions.” [8] In 2020 the former Liberian Minister for Public Works W. Gyude Moore bluntly wrote “China has built more infrastructure in Africa in two decades than the West has in centuries, China is also our friend,” [9] and in 2021 Iran signed a 25-year cooperation agreement with China. Despite the vehement insistence of Western punditry, world consensus against China’s “tyranny” fails to materialize.

The imperial core is not bereft of insightful testimony either, especially outside of the salacious atrocity propaganda that currently jams the airwaves. A 2021 Politico memo urged policymakers: “To Counter China’s Rise, the U.S. Should Focus on Xi.” [10] The White House was similarly unequivocal in a June 2020 assessment:

Let us be clear, the Chinese Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist organization. The Party General Secretary Xi Jinping sees himself as Josef Stalin’s successor. In fact, as the journalist and former Australian government official John Garnaut has noted, the Chinese Communist Party is the last “ruling communist party that never split with Stalin, with the partial exception of North Korea.” [11]

Leaked cables from 2009 give a clear sense of why Xi Jinping aggravates the US:

Unlike many youth who “made up for lost time by having fun” after the Cultural Revolution, Xi “chose to survive by becoming redder than the red.” … Xi is not corrupt and does not care about money, but could be “corrupted by power,” in our contact’s view. [12]

Elsewhere, a 2015 piece for the New York Times titled “Maoists in China, Given New Life, Attack Dissent” expresses outright anxiety:

“China watchers all need to stop saying this is all for show or that he’s turning left to turn right,” said Christopher K. Johnson, an expert on China at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who formerly worked as a senior China analyst at the C.I.A. “This is a core part of the guy’s personality. The leftists certainly feel he’s their guy.” [13]

My favourite article in this genre, though, comes from The Guardian. Perfectly illustrating Marx’s observation that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” Richard McGregor’s “How the state runs business in China” appears blissfully unaware that his scaremongering portrayal of the trials and tribulations of capitalists in China is actually rather heartwarming:

But Xi’s support for mixing private and public ownership structures was purely pragmatic. It had value, he said in another forum, because it would “improve the socialist market economic structure.” Xi’s assessment is echoed by Michael Collins, one of the CIA’s most senior officials for Asia. “The fundamental end of the Communist party of China under Xi Jinping is all the more to control that society politically and economically,” Collins argued earlier this year. “The economy is being viewed, affected and controlled to achieve a political end.”

…

The party’s overarching aim, though, has remained consistent: to ensure that the private sector, and individual entrepreneurs, do not become rival players in the political system. The party wants economic growth, but not at the expense of tolerating any organised alternative centres of power.

… “[Capitalists] act as if they are being chased by a bear,” wrote Zhang Lin, a Beijing political commentator, in response to these comments. “They are powerless to control the bear, so they are competing to outrun each other to escape the animal.” [14]

The horror!

The bourgeois press, articulating the fears of really nobody other than its owners, rattles off one tragedy after another:

• At moments, it’s hard to tell whether the driving force behind China’s green policy is a desire for a cleaner environment, or an obsession with social controls. [15]

• China’s vow to end extreme poverty in 2020 involves stunning numbers: billions of $ spent, millions moved from rural homes. But don’t miss what it really is: a political campaign to integrate the poor into the natl economy, & train them to thank the Party. [16]

• Hong Kong’s opposition has been tamed. Now, Beijing is turning to the city’s wealth gap and lack of affordable housing, which it blames for the social unrest. Up for consideration: Reforming the tax structure and increasing land supply. [17]

• A Chinese entrepreneur may drive a Maserati and send his son to Harvard, but he is a political slave. [18]

• China will soon open a new stretch of rail across Tibet. … To the party, it appears no expense is too great in its campaign to integrate the vast, isolated region more closely with the interior. [19]

• China’s crackdown on Didi is a reminder that Beijing is in charge. … Regulators met with Didi and told them to ensure fairness and transparency when it came to pricing and drivers’ incomes. [20]

Taken together, these accounts tell a pretty compelling and straightforward story: a worker state led by a vanguard party has placed the productive forces developed by capitalism under human control once again, for the benefit of the many rather than the few, and so definitively begun the complex and difficult transition away from capitalism and into communism that we call socialism. Capitalists, sheltered and insular in their dealings with fellow human beings, don’t understand that they are not sympathetic characters, so they shamelessly self-victimize in the press in the hopes of winning sympathy from the masses, in a futile effort to rally the necessary fervor for military intervention. The situation looks grim for the forces of reaction.