China: A new imperial capitalist power
China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry
By Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu and Ashley Smith
Haymarket Books, 2024
China in Global Capitalism is an excellent introduction to China today. It discusses the nature of Chinese society and the reasons for China’s growing conflict with the United States.
The book begins by arguing (convincingly, in my opinion) that: “Twenty-first century China is capitalist.” [p.11] The authors show that the profit motive dominates the economy:
Across a wide range of sectors, it is clear that production of commodities for the sake of profit governs the economy, not production for human need...
Items such as food, housing, education, health care, transportation, and time for leisure and socialising are not provided by the government. Rather, the vast majority of people in China must sell their labor power — their ability to work — to private or state-owned corporations in return for a wage in order to pay for necessities. [p.14]
This is a big change from the previous system:
The appearance of a capitalist labor market was politically contentious in the late 1970s, as many in the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] still supported the Maoist ‘iron rice bowl’ system of lifetime employment. Although wages were paltry under this system, urban workers in most enterprises had free or nearly free access to housing, education and health care. Most importantly, it was nearly impossible to remove people from their employment... But by the 1990s the state had clearly decided that capitalist labor markets were the future, signalled most clearly by 1994’s labor law, which established a legal framework for wage labor... Rather than ushering in a highly regulated labor market in the social democratic mold (as many reformers wanted), however, labor has been commodified and remains highly informal. [p.15]
The authors argue that the Chinese state
rules in the general interests of capital... The state’s capitalist nature is abundantly clear in shop-floor politics. China has seen an explosion of worker insurgency over the past three decades; the country is the global leader in wildcat strikes. How does the state respond when workers employ the time-honored tradition of withholding their labor from capital? Its police intervene almost exclusively on behalf of the bosses against workers, a service they provide to private domestic, foreign and state-owned enterprises alike. There are innumerable instances in which police or state-sponsored thugs have used coercion to break a strike. [p.17]
They explain that there are no genuine unions:
The only legal union is the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), an organization that is controlled by CCP. Rather than representing workers and defending their interests, the ACFTU ensures labor peace for corporations. Unsurprisingly, it is standard practice for enterprise HR managers to be appointed as the chair of the company-level union. [p.18]
Capitalists have been allowed to join the CCP and government bodies:
By the 1998-2003 session of the National People's Congress (NPC) workers made up just 1 percent of representatives while entrepreneurs constituted 20.5 percent, a stark reversal from the 1970s. Today the NPC and Chinese People's Consultative Congress have an astonishing concentration of plutocrats. In 2018 the wealthiest 153 members of these two central government bodies had an estimated combined wealth of USD $650 billion. [p.19]
As in the United States, there is a “revolving door” between corporations and state institutions. [p. 19]
China’s relatively strong state sector of the economy is sometimes cited as evidence that China is not capitalist. However, the authors point out that prior to the neoliberal era, state-owned enterprises [SOEs] were common in capitalist countries. Plus, China’s state sector has been cut drastically:
Tens of millions of state-sector workers were laid off in the 1990s and early 2000s as part of the state's campaign to “smash the iron rice bowl”. Thrown into a labor market for which they were wholly unprepared, this privatization campaign engendered subsistence crises and massive class struggle. Following this wave of sell-offs and theft of worker pensions, the remaining SOEs have been subjected to market forces, including in their labor regimes. [p.21]
This includes the widespread use of temporary workers.
An ‘imperial power’
The authors argue China has become “a new imperial power”:
It battles for its share of the world market, reinforces the underdevelopment of the Global South, and cuts deals to secure resources throughout the world. China’s integration into global capitalism has generated both collaboration and competition between it and the US as well as the other imperialist powers. [p.27]
China’s economy has grown rapidly:
China’s economy exploded from a mere 6 percent of US GDP in 1990 to 80 percent of it in 2012. Multinational corporations spurred the boom. But China required foreign high-tech and capital-intensive corporations to transfer their technology to local state and private enterprises. Thus, the Chinese state supported the development of indigenous capital and enabled it to compete in the world system. [p.32]
The authors say China has contributed to the continued underdevelopment in the Global South:
In Latin America its cheap exports have undercut the region's industries and reduced countries to shipping raw materials to China - the classic dependency trap. [p.34]
China has also raised its military spending to $293.35 billion in 2021, the second highest in the world after the US. [p.41]
It has also pursued an aggressive program of establishing military bases on islands it claims in the South China Sea as well as territorial claims against various states in the East China Sea...
This projection of power in the South and East China Seas has brought China into conflict with several Asian states, like Japan, the Philippines, Brunei, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. [p.42]
The authors note that,
despite its rise, China remains dependent on advanced capitalist countries, especially the US. It needs them for markets as well as for inputs, especially advanced microchips that it is not yet able to manufacture on its own. [p.43]
I agree China is increasingly acting like an imperialist power. But the situation is complex: China’s working class is still being super-exploited by foreign capital, a pattern usually indicative of a semi-colonial country.
Resistance
China’s rapid economic growth is sometimes called a “miracle”. But the authors say,
China’s growth is predicated on the exploitation of the working class, unpaid reproductive labor, especially of women, and dispossession of people's land, natural resources and collectively held assets. These forms of exploitation and theft benefit not only China’s elites, but have helped ensure the profitability of capitalism at the global level, thereby enriching corporations and investors from the wealthy countries of North America, Europe and Asia. [p.47]
There has also been resistance to oppression and exploitation:
Peasants have consistently fought back against the corrupt and anti-democratic practices of land seizure and marketization. Their urban counterparts have done the same. People have organized against the razing of whole neighborhoods at the behest of land-greedy developers and their allies in city government. In the 1990s workers mobilized against the theft of public assets during the privatization of state-owned firms… Migrant workers from the countryside have taken up the mantle of resistance within factories and in the rapidly expanding service sector...
Social unrest expanded dramatically over the 1990s and 2000s. “Mass incidents”, as the government calls worker and peasant collective acts of more than twenty-five people, hit 87,000 in 2005, the year the government stopped reporting data...
Even without formal organization, these struggles have wrested major symbolic, legal and material victories from the state and capital alike. [p.47-48]
Many strikes have won pay rises or better working conditions. But the unrest has also forced the government to change some of its policies.
An example is the resistance to privatisation of SOEs:
Workers resisted these market reforms with a wave of struggle. From the late 1990s through the late 2000s, they staged protests and strikes against layoffs, pension thefts, and privatization. Perhaps the most famous example was the movement in Liaoyang in 2002, where tens of thousands of SOE workers rose up against factory closures, threatening social stability. Many other protests employed radical tactics like road and rail blockades. In 2009, workers at Tonghua Iron and Steel Group in Jilin province captured and beat to death an executive from a private company that was leading a privatization effort. The state responded with repression, arresting and sentencing leaders to long prison sentences. Workers who lost their jobs found themselves in the private labor market without much hope of finding decent work. Nevertheless, their fierce resistance contributed to Hu Jintao's decision to back off further privatization of state industry. [p.55]
Another example is the struggle of migrant workers:
Migrants from the countryside are second-class workers in the stratified internal citizenship regime. They are excluded from social services in their adopted cities because their household registration, their hukou, is tied to their rural towns. On the one hand, their access to benefits there does provide them with some buffer during spells of unemployment. But, on the other hand, their precarious status in the cities makes them a super-exploitable workforce for both Chinese and multinational industries...
These workers responded to their exploitation with militant labor struggles, just like working classes in other countries that have undergone similar processes of industrialization. Their demands centred on wages, conditions and legal protections…
In an attempt to quell this wave of militancy, the Chinese government enacted labor reforms that codified basic workers’ rights… Yet this did not succeed in tamping down strikes or protests and may have actually inspired workers by rewarding their actions and giving them legal legitimacy...
Workers went on the offensive, demanding wage increases above the legal requirements. A strike at the Honda Nanhai transmission plant triggered a massive strike wave in the auto industry in the summer of 2010. [p.55-57]
The book discusses women’s oppression and feminist resistance. Privatisation has deepened women’s oppression. In the past, state-owned enterprises provided their employees with housing, health care, child care and elder care. Privatisation meant the loss of these services.
Parents have to pay for commercial child care, look after children at home or, in the case of many migrant workers, get grandparents in their home village to look after them.
Today China is among the very few countries in the world where there is zero government expenditure on care services for children under three. [p.64]
This situation increases the burden on women and has contributed to the increasing pay gap between men and women.
Some women have organised to try to improve the situation. A group called Youth Feminist Activism have
campaigned, protested, fought legal cases, set up social media platforms, performed plays, and staged walkathons, all calling for reforms to address gender discrimination and violence throughout society. [p.71-72]
Five leaders of the group were arrested in 2015.
China’s national questions
China has 56 officially recognised ethnicities, but 92 percent of the population belong to the Han majority. The minorities mainly live on China’s peripheries.
These areas have experienced outbreaks of rebellion:
From 2008 to 2020, China's periphery was the site of intense social resistance. This twelve year sequence witnessed massive upheavals in Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan. Hong Kong has seen two spectacular bouts of mass insurgency, first in 2014 and then again in 2019. [p.77]
There were different immediate causes for these events, but
in sharp contrast to the character of protest in China’s core regions, these were all marked by overt hostility to the Chinese state. [p.77]
Regarding Tibet, the authors say:
Although the region’s GDP growth has been impressive, most good jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities have gone to Han settlers… Anti-Tibetan discrimination in the labor market is well documented...
Han settlers in Tibetan regions have been the overwhelming beneficiaries of expanded government spending on infrastructure — and these projects themselves often entail the dislocation and dispossession of Tibetan populations. [p.81]
Along with repression of Tibetan culture, economic discrimination has led to “simmering resentment at Han colonial rule.” [p.82] The authors say that:
Faced with such national oppression, Tibetans have the right to national self-determination and the right to shape their own future as they see fit. [p.83]
The situation is similar in Xinjiang:
The central government has financed major infrastructure projects and incentivized private investment in the region...
Uyghurs, however, have benefited little from Xinjiang’s impressive economic growth, whose spoils have largely gone to Han settlers. This racial inequality is the product of discrimination in schooling and the labor market. Advancing in China’s system of higher education requires mastery of Mandarin, which puts native Uyghur speakers (as well as speakers of Tibetan, Kazakh, and other minority languages) at a distinct disadvantage. [p.84]
This situation led to race riots in 2009, followed by
a low-level and occasionally violent insurgency [that] simmered for years. Uyghurs engaged in numerous knife attacks on police stations in Xinjiang. [p.85]
The Chinese state launched a “people’s war on terror” to root out “Islamic extremism”. The authors describe this “war” as follows:
By 2017, the state had constructed massive camps , euphemistically referred to as “re-education centres”, where it jailed hundreds of thousands of Muslims. While the pretense was that these were merely job training sites, extensive leaks as well as publicly available government documents have revealed that the camps were intended to promote “de-radicalization” and a sense of “ethnic unity,” as well as submission to CCP rule. [p.85]
Uyghur language and culture have been attacked, and a “dystopian system of surveillance” created throughout Xinjiang. [p.85]
Western companies have benefited from the repression of the Uyghurs by supplying some of the surveillance technology and using the forced labour in the camps to produce commodities for sale on the world market.
The protests in Hong Kong mainly focused on democratic rights issues — opposition to repressive laws and demands for free elections. The authors argue that the lack of democracy is linked to the very high level of economic inequality in Hong Kong, where a wealthy oligarchy controls the government while public housing is inadequate and poor people are “forced to squeeze into tiny apartments with exorbitant rents.” [p.90] Discrimination against those who do not speak Mandarin also causes discontent.
Taiwan has never been controlled by the CCP, but the latter claims it is part of China because it was once part of the Qing empire. Taiwan was ruled by Japan between 1895 and 1945, then taken over by the Kuomintang (KMT), the US-backed party that ruled China until defeated by the CCP in 1949.
The authors say the Taiwanese people saw the KMT as a “brutal occupying force”. When they rebelled, the KMT “responded with brutal repression, killing many thousands and arresting and torturing thousands more.” [p.94]
In the 1980s, Taiwan’s pro-democracy movement succeeded in winning political liberalisation and parliamentary democracy. Meanwhile Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms created opportunities in mainland China for Taiwanese capitalists:
Taiwan’s companies have poured huge sums of investments into China’s rapidly expanding export processing zones. The most famous example is Foxconn, which found in China a union-free environment with local government actors able to secure huge swaths of land and gargantuan workforces at low prices… Ironically it has been the CCP's old nemesis the KMT that has advocated on behalf of Taiwan’s moneyed elite for deeper integration between the two economies. [p.96]
However, in 2014,
hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets, expressing their opposition to a neoliberal trade deal that would enhance China's economic leverage. Hundreds of protesters occupied the Legislative Yuan building for weeks, mobilizing massive public support in a successful effort to derail the trade deal. [p.97]
Summing up, the authors say:
Thus, the CCP’s open embrace of Han chauvinism and ethnonationalism has detonated struggles for national self-determination in its territory and periphery. [p.99]
While recognising that Western politicians try to take advantage of such movements, they argue that the left should support struggles for democracy and self-determination.
US and China
Rivalry between the US and China is growing:
As the conflict over Taiwan makes clear, China’s rise as a new capitalist power has brought it into increasing confrontation with the US. [p.103]
Up until the first Trump administration, US policy toward China had been “a combination of containment and engagement.” [p.108] The US tried to incorporate China into its neoliberal world order.
At the same time, Washington remained wary because of Beijing’s reluctance to fully follow its dictates and therefore hedged its bets by retaining elements of a policy of containment toward China. For example, it maintained its vast archipelago of military bases in the Asia Pacific and regularly patrolled its waters, including the Taiwan strait, with aircraft carriers and battleships. [p.109]
Trump took a more openly hostile approach, launching a tariff war and trying to end technology transfer between US and Chinese companies. Biden largely continued this policy. The authors comment that:
This conflict has set in motion a logic of restructuring globalization, fragmenting the system into rival national security blocs in some strategic economic areas while maintaining global supply chains in others. [p.121]
There is also an “arms race in the region”, with the US, China and other states increasing their military spending. [p.122]
Environment
China became the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2006. By 2019, China’s annual carbon dioxide emissions were double those of the US. Industrialisation has also led to the pollution of land, water and air.
These problems result from China’s capitalist development:
Multinational corporations… relocated many of their “dirty industries” to China where environmental regulation was and is lax. [p.127]
Pollution has led to mass protests:
In fact, popular discontent and resistance has forced the state to enact measures that at least partially address environmental degradation. For instance, popular criticism by urban residents against air pollution in major cities like Beijing pushed the government to shut down or relocate highly polluting industries. [p.130-131]
International solidarity
In the context of the intensifying rivalry between the US and China, the authors argue for international solidarity:
The rulers of both states have turned to nationalism to deflect popular anger onto oppressed people and their imperial rivals. At the same time, increased exploitation and oppression have and will produce intense struggles by workers and the oppressed in both the US and China. In this context the left must adopt a clear approach of building international solidarity from below against both imperial states and their ruling classes. [p.163]
They add:
Our job is to stitch together the networks of activists, however rudimentary, in the US, China and elsewhere who can in the future make reciprocal solidarity from below a force to oppose global capitalism, great power nationalism, and the inter-imperial rivalries they stoke. [p.175]