[English] – This a summary of the book China in Global Capitalism. Building International Solidarity against Imperial Rivalry by Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu, and Ashley Smith (Haymarket Books 2024). For a critique of the book, see the review on the Spectre-website by Ralf Ruckus.
In this book, the authors provide an account of the PRC’s current economic and political system (Part I), and they turn the attention to social struggles challenging that system (Part II). They shed light on the rivalry between capitalist forces in the PRC and in the US as well as the role of that rivalry for the current global crises (Part II). And they aim to broaden the base for solidarity between social and political grassroots struggles in the PRC and elsewhere, especially in the US (Part IV).
Part I: The Rise of Chinese Capitalism
In Chapter 1, China is Capitalist, the authors make clear that private and state-owned capitalist enterprises in the PRC exploit workers for profit, recreating class structures and social inequality. The state institutions try to maintain good conditions for overall profitability and economic growth, representing the interests of the capital class. That role includes acting against individual capitalists for the sake of systemic stability and making welfare concessions to the proletariat to prevent worker insurgency. The CCP-led state also acts against the latter through legal restrictions to labor agency and police repression. Workers, as well as other social groups, are prohibited from organizing independently for their interests.
The state-owned enterprises (SOEs) function as profit-oriented entities, exploiting workers just as their private counterparts. They have also collaborated with foreign capital for decades, for instance, by forming joint ventures with foreign auto brands. And they also play a role in the global expansion of PRC capital.
Land in the PRC is officially still owned by the state (in the cities) and by the village collectives (in the countryside). In reality, urban governments have leased vast amounts of land to profit-oriented developers. The countryside has seen a mass dispossession of peasants who have thereby lost their means of subsistence in the village. Meanwhile, agriculture “has undergone a profound capitalist transformation” (page 24) with large-scale agribusinesses playing a decisive role.
In Chapter 2, The Emergence of a New Great Power, the authors go a step back and lay out the development of the PRC from its founding in 1949 until today. In the 1950s, the CCP regime followed the Soviet model to “develop” the country. By squeezing out surpluses from peasants and workers it generated the resources for “a version of what Marx called the primitive accumulation of capital” (28) in the PRC. When that did not bring the expected results, the regime launched the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s to speed up the construction of infrastructure and industrialization. Mao Zedong, the CCP leader, was sidelined after the Leap failed, but he and his supporters tried to regain leadership by launching the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s. When social mobilizations and strikes got out of control, the group around Mao called in the army, cracked down on the unrest, and reimposed their order.
In the early 1970s, the CCP regime “struck an alliance with the US against the USSR” (29) hoping to gain support for economic improvements. Soon after Mao’s death in 1976, the new leadership around Deng Xiaoping carried out market reforms while maintaining party rule and state ownership of key industries. Special Economic Zones were created for foreign investments in manufacturing, and rural migrants were exploited in new foreign- and domestic-owned factories. The reforms created economic crises in the 1980s that eventually led to the Tian’anmen Square Uprising in Beijing and elsewhere in 1989 which was, again, brutally suppressed by the army.
In the early 1990s, the CCP leadership accelerated the reforms and opened up even more to foreign investors, and these were happy to gain access to the vast reservoir of “cheap” labor to restore previously decreasing profitability. The PRC economy started growing, while state and private capital became an important part of global supply chains. This process continued after the PRC joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. At this point, the CCP regime began to encourage PRC capital to invest in companies abroad, “especially in transportation, infrastructure, and natural resources.”
Throughout the 2000s, the PRC became one of the biggest economies in the world and a central hub for global manufacturing. After the 2008 global recession, the CCP regime implemented a massive stimulus program that reignited the economy in the PRC and beyond. This showed that the country was now the “main growth engine” (33) of global capitalism. The PRC had also become the main trading partner for many countries around the globe, including in the Global South where PRC capital extracts primary products while selling manufactured goods, a setup that has mostly generated profits for PRC capital and resembles “the classic imperialist pattern.” (34) In the 2010s, the CCP regime led by Xi Jinping has facilitated that process with programs like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and respective institutions designed to support investments of PRC capital around the globe.
To secure these investments and fight off threats from rival capital factions in other countries, namely the US, the CCP regime began bolstering the PRC’s status as a “great power.” Domestically, it strengthened CCP rule by reigning in social upheavals and disciplining party and state officials as well as conflicting capitalist interest groups. Abroad, it tried to forge and maintain economic, political, and security alliances both in Asia and beyond, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of the BRICS alliance. And it orchestrated a military buildup to be able to push through its territorial interests in East Asia and develop the capacity to defend its interests beyond.
According to the authors, today’s strength of the PRC should not be exaggerated, though, as economic growth has slowed, debts have risen, corruption is still rampant, and the workforce is shrinking and aging while wages have increased. Many BRI projects abroad have not materialized or failed, and the PRC economy is still dependent on other capitalist countries’ economies, especially the US economy. So, it remains unsure whether the PRC’s further strengthening as a “great power” will continue.
Part II: Class, Social, and National Struggles in China
Chapter 3, Class Struggle in the Countryside, Cities, and Workplaces, picks up on the argument that the PRC is capitalist and describes the social struggles of workers and peasants against exploitation and dispossession, both of which “expanded dramatically over the 1990s and 2000s” (48). In the countryside, peasants have faced large-scale corruption around land confiscation and evictions. Developers lease the supposedly publicly owned land through local government officials who bag bribe money and compensation payments meant for the peasants. This has repeatedly led to struggles and uprisings. Similar processes could be seen in the cities. The urbanization rate rose from not even one fifth in 1980 to about two thirds in 2022. This expansion of the cities required “massive displacement and relocation of urban residents” (52). Again, residents fought for compensation, while city officials and developers enriched themselves.
A large wave of resistance began in the late 1990s in the SOEs, when the CCP regime began restructuring, privatizing, or closing them. The state workers drew on experiences with workplace struggles in previous decades to stop layoffs and the loss of welfare. The CCP regime made some concessions and cracked down on larger struggles. Meanwhile, migrant workers soon became the largest section of the working class. They have been discriminated by the household registration system (hukou) that glues them to their rural background and deprives them of resources offered to other urban residents. And they have faced harsh working conditions in private and state-owned, domestic and foreign workplaces in manufacturing, construction, household services, and other sectors.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the number of migrant workers’ wildcat strikes increased steadily. In the late 2000s and the early 2010s, these struggles became more sophisticated and “used a greater variety of tactics” (57). The CCP regime reacted with repression, but it also adapted the labor laws and sent the CCP-controlled unions to try and reign in the struggles. Meanwhile, the workers’ actions (combined with labor shortages) led to an increase in wages, and that increased the costs of labor. Capital reacted with relocating manufacturing capacities to the Chinese hinterland and abroad. And it began to invest in less capital-intensive technologies and the service sector. Workers began to organize and strike for improvements in the Chinese hinterland and the new service jobs, too, but the “structural changes in the economy dissipated the wave of struggle” of earlier years. The CCP regime intensified the repression of labor organizing in the mid- and late 2010s, further weakening the movement. Protests still happen, though, such as in 2022, at the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, when migrant workers revolted against harsh conditions during the lockdown system.
Chapter 4, Feminist Resistance and the Crisis of Social Reproduction, starts with stating that the crisis of social reproduction is a result of the effects of commodification and privatization of social reproduction in the 1990s and after. In the countryside, rural workers and peasants have faced a lack of jobs, underfunded services, and poverty, so they have moved to the cities as migrant workers. In the cities, they are not entitled to most urban welfare services so they have to pay for them, for instance, children’s elementary schools. Migrant women have suffered most from the effects of the crisis of social reproduction. As domestic caregivers in the cities, they look after other people’s children while their own are left behind in the villages where they do not get enough attention or they are brought to the cities where they are denied access to public schools. Domestic workers are also not protected by labor law and get a low wage.
For urban workers, the state still provides basic pensions and health care, but most other welfare systems have been privatized so that people have to pay for them, too. The prices of childcare, health care, and education “have skyrocketed” (63) in the past decades. Many families struggle to generate enough money, for instance, for the education of their children or health care. Meanwhile, housework is still mostly put on women’s shoulders. This also affects middle-class women, and some give up wage labor to manage housework.
As a result of these pressures on women, many delay marriage and having children, and fertility rates have declined. Already existing labor shortages have slowed down the development of PRC capitalism and threaten to become more serious. The CCP regime overturned the One-Child-Policy in 2015 and began to campaign for early marriage, it made divorce more difficult, it promised material perks for each new birth, and it intensified the oppression of LGBTQ people as it campaigns for a reactionary family model. Just like the earlier birth control policies, the new pronatalist campaigns’ “intent has been to limit women’s reproductive autonomy” (66), but, so far, many women in the PRC have reacted to the pronatalist policies of the CCP regime with continuing their refusal to marry early, have any or more than one child, and fulfill the social or family role the party demands.
The second part of the chapter follows the feminist movements in the PRC. During the socialist period, feminists in the CCP had to face male party leaders’ resistance when they fought against patriarchal structures and for economic, political, and social improvements for women. In the reform period, when gender inequalities grew, feminists formed NGOs and campaigned against sexualized violence. The CCP regime intensified the repression of these groups in the 2010s, alongside other social opposition. A new generation of young feminist activists tried to find new spaces and used rather decentralized methods and new tactics, often employed on social media, to continue the fight. More struggles on this front can be expected.
Chapter 5, China’s National Questions, discusses the social resistance in the PRC’s periphery between 2008 and 2020, namely in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong, as well as in Taiwan. According to the authors, the CCP’s legitimacy has been constructed on two pillars: “regular improvements of living standards and ethnonationalist pride in China’s rise” (75). With the slowdown of economic growth, living standards have hardly improved for most people in the PRC in the past decade, so Han ethnonationalism became even more important. Its assertion in peripheral regions “triggered struggles for self-determination,” the regime responded with “violent repression, forced assimilation, and militarization” (76).
In Tibet, the dislocation and dispossession of Tibetans, cultural control and assimilation, and the discrimination of Tibetans on the labor market and elsewhere are evidence of colonial rule. The CCP regime reacted to a wave of protests in 2008 with police repression and a “labor transfer” program for hundreds of thousands of Tibetans.
In Xinjiang, the CCP regime has run a major “development” program since the 1990s, with infrastructure projects and other investments. On the backdrop of settler colonial practices and structures from the socialist period, it continued the racist discrimination of Muslim Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other groups in the region in the labor market and in other areas. After sporadic riots and mostly small-scale violent attacks by Uyghurs between 2009 and 2014, the CCP regime called the “People’s War on Terror” against “Islamic extremism.” Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other groups were send to “re-education centers” to be “de-radicalized,” often on the base of simply practicing their faith. Besides this mass incarceration, the regime ran a campaign to Sinicize Uyghur cultural sites or destroy them, it reduced education in Uyghur language, and it took Uyghur children from their families.
In Hong Kong, the former British colony which became a Special Administrative Region of the PRC in 1997, the CCP regime successfully coopted a large part of the capitalist class in the city and pushed it to gradually limit the ability of Hong Kongers to organize as well as other “civil rights” granted at the end of British rule. The largest mobilizations were the 2014 Umbrella Movement demanding electoral rights, and the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement against the CCP regime’s rising influence in Hong Kong. The harsh conditions of Hong Kong’s large working class, defined by poverty, small living space with high rents, low wages, and long working hours, were not at the center of these movements. However, both were supported by large parts of the Hong Kong population, including many workers. And despite its limited demands, many leftists in the city got involved in the movements, especially in 2019, including labor organizers, feminists, environmentalists, and LGBTQ activists. The Hong Kong government, which is closely tied to the CCP regime, used police repression to crush the movements.
Taiwan is a different case because it is not ruled by the CCP nor “under the jurisdiction” (91) of the PRC. The authors shortly review the history of the island. In the 17th century, Taiwan, inhabited by Indigenous people speaking Austronesian languages, was partially colonized by Dutch and Spanish invaders. The Dutch colonizers organized the first Han migration to the island. Further Han settlers came after the Chinese empire had taken over the island in the mid-17th century. After the Sino-Japanese war in 1985, Taiwan was ruled by Japanese colonizers for fifty years. In the course of Han settler colonization and imperial conflicts over the island, the Indigenous people were dispossessed, displaced, or killed, and the remaining became a minority in their home territory.
After World War II, Taiwan was placed under the rule of the KMT government in Mainland China. The KMT lost the civil war against the CCP, and its leadership and large parts of its troupes and their families fled to Taiwan where they opened the next chapter of settler colonization, against the local Han population that had come during earlier waves of migration, and against the remaining Indigenous people. The KMT continued to claim governance over the whole of China, while it ruled over Taiwan in an authoritarian form over a capitalist system.
In the 1980s, a growing movement pressed for democratic reforms, which the KMT regime conceded in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The democratic system has since been largely dominated by two parties, the KMT and the DPP. Both are working to safeguard capitalist relations and profitability while the working class is faced with high levels of social inequality, a large low-wage sector, and rising housing costs. They also established a racist and exploitative “guest worker” program to import labor power from Southeast Asia for low-wage jobs in sectors like manufacturing, fishing, and domestic labor.
A part of Taiwan’s capital is interested in closer relations with the CCP regime to further develop business ties and exploit workers in the PRC. When the KMT government supported a new trade deal with the PRC in 2014, this triggered the so-called Sunflower Movement, a mass mobilization demanding and end to the trade deal. This movement was followed by the election of a DPP government in 2016 that opposes closer relations to the CCP regime.
The authors argue that the left in other regions should support all movements in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan against repression and threats from the CCP regime, insofar as these movements demand autonomy and self-determination as well as “radical democracy,” and “economic equality” (98).
Part III: Imperial Rivalry and Crises of Global Capitalism
In Chapter 6, The US v. China: The Twenty-First Century’s Central Interimperial Rivalry, the authors turn to the relation between the great powers. The previous world order dominated by the US hegemon has been undone by different developments. The global capitalist expansion between the early 1980s and 2008 produced “new centers of capital accumulation” (104), most importantly the PRC which has become a rival to the hegemonic power. Meanwhile, US governments and military spent two decades fighting insurgencies in the Middle East, and their relative defeats there weakened US control in the region and beyond. The great recession 2008 hit the US and European economies especially hard and led to a long depression, while the CCP regime’s massive stimulus program reignited the PRC economy and, along with it, other economies. And the pandemic and connected global recession intensified the conflict between the regimes in the US and the PRC who are increasingly using nationalist economic strategies. As a result of these developments, the “US has suffered relative decline” (105). It is still the dominant power, but its competitors, and especially the PRC, got stronger. Meanwhile, US and PRC are today still “deeply integrated in both economic and geopolitical institutions” (106).
US governments have adapted their polices towards the PRC in the past two decades. Under president Barak Obama, the US government switched to a policy of containment of the PRC. It tried to integrate Asia economically through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which did not include the PRC and shifted military capacities to the Asia Pacific region. Under Donald Trump TPP was abandoned. The US government now followed a strategy of economic nationalism even vis-à-vis allied countries. It escalated the confrontation with the PRC by imposing protectionist measures and export bans on high-tech goods. US military engagement in the region was again increased. Under Joe Biden the US government continued these containment policies but closely collaborated again with allied governments to defend the global capitalist order under US domination. It also forged or revived military alliances, such as the Quad alliance with the regimes of Australia, India, and Japan which is directed against the influence and growing military power of the CCP-led PRC in the Asia Pacific region. The attack of Russia’s military on the Ukraine in early 2022 helped the US government to revitalize and expand NATO as a possible counterforce to the further expansion of PRC influence globally.
The CCP regime reacted to the global recession, the slowdown of economic growth in the PRC, and the intensified competition and protectionist measures of the US government with its own strategy. It increased its attempts to raise domestic consumption and lower the dependency on exports. It increased its support for the PRC’s high-tech industry to lower the impact of the US exports bans on high-tech goods. It raised defense spending and stepped up its military activity in the South China Sea and around Taiwan. And it continued its attempts to “lure countries away from Washington and into Beijing’s sphere of influence” (119).
According to the authors, competition and confrontation between the regimes of the US and the PRC will intensify and possibly escalate, most likely around the question of Taiwan that the CCP regime claims as its own territory. However, several factors speak against escalation and a direct confrontation: the interconnectedness of the US and the PRC economy; the relative weakness of the PRC and strength of the US regarding high-tech goods, the role of the dollar as the global reserve, and military capacities; the “international architecture of interstate institutions” (121) designed to stabilize relations between states; and the possibility of mutual destruction in the case of a nuclear escalation. It seems more likely that the confrontation will lead to proxy wars in other global regions while both sides try to protect and expand their sphere of influence.
In Chapter 7, China and Global Capitalism’s Ecological and Climate Crises, the authors state that these crises cannot be properly addressed due to the growing rivalry between the great powers US and China. The US surpassed Europe as the largest CO2 emitter in the mid-20th century. The PRC became the largest emitter in 2006, after the US regime and those of allied core countries relocated the dirtiest industries to peripheral countries including the PRC. The pollution of land, water, and air have led to environmental struggles in the PRC, while the effects of the climate change have produced regular droughts, floods, and heatwaves. As a result, the CCP regime has recognized the growing problems and “at least partially address(ed) environmental degradation” (128). At the same time, it expanded coal consumption and has not managed to reduce CO2 emissions.
The situation in the PRC is not exceptional, and the environmental crises are a global problem that will not be overcome in one country alone. While environmentalist struggles in the PRC putting pressure on the CCP regime have won some concessions, any breakthrough depends on a global mass movement “of increasingly radical mass actions and climate strikes” (124). Those could enforce a program that effectively solves these crises in the PRC and beyond.
Chapter 8, Pandemics in an Epoch of Imperial Rivalry, analyzes the trajectory of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Global capitalism created conditions for the outbreak of pandemics, for instance, through the cutting down of forests and expansion of industrial farming or the cutting and underfunding of public health care system. After an outbreak, viruses can spread quickly through the capitalist chains of production and trade.
Any outbreak demands a concerted action to contain it, but during the Covid-19 pandemic the governments in most countries chose strategies that put nationalist interest first. After it began in the PRC in late 2019, the CCP regime managed to contain it temporarily through mass quarantines, lockdowns, and digital surveillance. These strategies would not have worked, though, without the initiatives of volunteers and grassroots activists who organized medical supplies and protective gear, monitored people’s and sanitation workers’ health, and campaigned for the self-protection of workers and against increasing domestic male violence during lockdowns.
While the CCP regime celebrated the “success” of its “zero-Covid” policy, many people, and most of all workers, suffered in the case of quarantine or lockdown, for instance, because of inadequate access to food and health care. When the virus finally spread across the PRC in 2022, extensive lockdowns as well as the “closed-loop management” used to make manual workers stay and sleep in the factories led to large-scale protests that escalated in late November 2022. The CCP regime abandoned “zero-Covid” almost immediately and let the virus spread. Within weeks, it infected large parts of the population and killed an untold number of people.
The rivalry between US and PRC “prevented a coherent global response” (134) to the pandemic, just like in the case of environmental crises, and instead further intensified during this time. The US regime under Trump also failed to respond to the pandemic with a consistent strategy, leading to a large number of unnecessary deaths. To “deflect attention from its responsibility for the catastrophe in the US” (144), it blamed the CCP regime for the spread of the pandemic and triggered a spike of anti-Chinese or anti-Asian racism in the US.
Part IV: International Solidarity from Below
Chapter 9, “China” in the US: The Roots and Nature of Diasporic Struggles, addresses the need “to build solidarity across borders” to counter the “imperial rivalry” (149) between the PRC and the US and to address the multiple crises global capitalism has produced. Central groups for building such solidarity across the divide between the PRC and the US are Chinese Americans and Chinese migrants in the US. Like others with Asian heritage, they were the target of assaults of anti-Chinese or Anti-Asian racism in the wake of the pandemic. But Asian American communities comprising of multiple backgrounds have been subject to racist attacks by other social groups and the US state for a long time and created community organizations to defend themselves.
More recently, Chinese migrants came to the US for different reasons, for instance, as refugees who do not see a future from themselves in the PRC or as oppositional labor or feminist activists who are faced with repression. The largest group are Chinese students of whom some stay on, for instance, as young professionals. With the intensified rivalry between the PRC and the US regimes, these Chinese migrants were increasingly suspected of being Chinese spies, a view that is mirrored in the PRC where the CCP often portraits foreigners as potentials spies.
The authors put hope into a section of the young Chinese and Chinese Americans in the US who have joined or supported recent mobilizations, including Occupy, climate strikes, and Black Lives Matter. Chinese feminists living in the US have continued to support feminist struggles in the PRC while engaging in similar activities in the US. And Chinese graduate students have participated in the unionization drive at US universities. Chinese students have also taken part in solidarity demonstrations in support of the White Paper Movement in the PRC against the CCP’s “zero-Covid” policy.
In the Conclusion, Neither Washington, Nor Beijing: International Solidarity against Imperialist Rivalry, the authors first look at the decade after the great recession 2008 that began with “one of the largest waves of revolt in recent history” (162), virtually on all continents and including in the US and in the PRC. At the same time, economic crises have increased the pressure for working classes for years, with women bearing the brunt of the burden produced by the crises of social reproduction. For the future, the authors foresee intensified social struggles both in the US and the PRC. They argue that the left needs to build up solidarity from below against both “imperial states and their ruling classes” (160).
While the ruling classes in the US and in the PRC have turned to “great power nationalism” (162) to bring workers and other oppressed behind their capitalist and imperialist goals, the left, and the authors mainly address the US left here, needs to avoid two pitfalls: it cannot align with the US imperial project pursued by both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party; and it must avoid supporting the CCP regime as an alleged socialist or anti-imperialist alternative.
The authors refute the promotion of “internationalism from above” (165), i.e., the attempt to push for the cooperation of the two capitalist regimes in the US and the PRC. The ruling classes in the two countries have contradicting economic and geo-political interests, and any agreement would be not more than the result of “tactical maneuvers in a strategic rivalry” (166).
The only viable alternative is “internationalism from below,” the build-up of solidarity across borders between workers and other oppressed against the great powers. The conditions for such solidarity are set: workers in the US and in the PRC are connected through global structures of production and logistics; the economic integration is also the base for the large immigration of Chinese people in the US; and the crises of global capitalism will provoke “waves of struggles from below that are opening up subjective possibilities for organizing international solidarity” (167). The left needs to be “embedded in the struggles in both these countries as well as the rest of the world” (168), struggles of workers, women, and groups facing racism or other forms of oppression. This includes mobilizations such as in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, even if those are politically heterogenous, because if the left does not intervene here, “the right will fill the vacuum” (170). Central to a left-wing strategy is also the collaboration with the left in the PRC and the Asia Pacific, which has been already organized by several small collectives and publications but needs to be further developed.
闹清楚 [nau̯ tɕʰiŋ ʈʂʰu] 
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