Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), China has transformed in just 70 years from a poor, underdeveloped country mired by feudalism and imperialism into a sovereign socialist society and the world’s second-largest economy. 2020 marked historic new achievements in China’s socialist path: the elimination of absolute poverty and the containment of COVID-19.
As “advanced” Western capitalist nations remain plagued by the impacts of the pandemic—disproportionately born by a permanent and growing underclass—the question for socialists and all concerned people must be: why has the Chinese system produced such different outcomes? To this end, this resource list provides a starting point for understanding China’s rapid development through a close examination of Chinese socialist theory and governance. Here, Qiao Collective offers a cursory reading guide that illuminates both the history of China’s development and the theory of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (SWCC)—the CPC’s political economic philosophy.
Assessments of China’s political-economic system take on geopolitical significance in a context in which a renewed U.S.-instigated Cold War draws on longstanding patterns of anti-communism to slander the accomplishments of Chinese socialism. On the one hand, the Trump administration put U.S.-China relations in terms of a clash of ideologies, posing liberal democracy against what former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described in 2019 as a “Marxist-Leninist party focused on...international domination.” On the other hand, many self-described Western socialists have adopted a same-same pessimism which casts China as the mirror to the United States: a hyper-capitalist, imperialist power which seeks not multilateralism but an era of Chinese hegemony. This nihilist posture enables a disavowal of Cold War aggression by painting it as an “inter-imperialist” rivalry.
Accurate assessment is therefore critical amidst a bipartisan “China threat” discourse propelled by state-sponsored information war which seeks to distort the nature of China’s political economic system and its future ambitions. Far from hegemonic ambitions, China’s official political philosophy prioritizes people-centered development, peaceful coexistence, and the development of China’s national industries through strategic engagement with the global economy in order to build socialism and enable its gradual development into communism.
In the midst of heightened Western aggression, it is urgent to engage China on its own terms—and through a materialist analysis—to understand the implications and historical scope of Chinese socialism in the present day. Beyond fear mongering narratives or romanticized projections of a ‘socialist utopia’, a closer look at the theory and practice of Chinese socialist governance reveals the great accomplishments, evolving contradictions, and people-centered ambitions of the Chinese people. Such inquiry can yield opportunities for peaceful cooperation to meet the global challenges of our time, from climate change to pandemic recovery.