Against Imperialism: China’s History of Resistance
On August 20th, The People’s Forum hosted a Zoom call and YouTube stream led by Qiao Collective, a collective of diaspora Chinese which provides revolutionary education focused on China to Western leftists, especially those leftists living in the United States’ imperial core. This lecture, which focused on U.S. imperialism, the U.S./China trade war, and the very real history of Chinese socialism, was extremely informative, and can serve as a powerful foundation for Western leftists to better understand China.
Support for the PRC is still a pretty contentious topic among the American left. One of the most common complaints about the PRC that I hear from American leftists is that China isn’t truly socialist, and as such, doesn’t really deserve our support. This argument is frustrating, because it shows that people often forget that socialism is a scientific process. If a country is on the path to communism, if a country is prioritizing the well-being of the masses and runs their government in accordance with socialist theory, then that country is socialist. Socialism isn’t the immediate accomplishment of total egalitarianism and euphoria; socialism is the act of striving to meet those goals. Qiao Collective said it better than I ever have: “Socialism is not a fantasy. It is a real science, it is a continuing, living being.”
Qiao Collective goes further and says that whether or not China is truly socialist doesn’t matter in our discussion of U.S./China relations, which is really a discussion of U.S. imperialism. When we talk about supporting China, we must reframe our discussion in that light, because China is probably the most powerful nation in the global south that has still managed to resist Western hegemony. U.S. imperialism is bad! Imperialism is bad! We should all be able to agree on these points, and the PRC is a bastion against U.S. imperialism. So why is it that when discussions of supporting China in their opposition to the U.S. come up, so many Western leftists sit on their hands and refuse to pick a side?
I think that this is because of the fervent anti-China propaganda that the U.S. has spent the last 80 or so years developing. Americans really, truly do live in the imperial core, and no matter how much indoctrination we strip away from our minds, there’s always more lying just beneath the surface. When I was first radicalizing, the few American leftist friends that I had were very supportive of me reading Marx and Lenin, but when I would ask them about Mao, they would always get really weird and on edge. Western leftists get anti-China propaganda both from the state and from their comrades. I want to pause and note that China is not Mao, and Mao is not China — in the lecture, Qiao Collective are careful to distance themselves from the word “Maoist” in an effort to quash the personality cult that so many leftist ideologies have fallen prey to (I am as guilty of participating in that as the rest of us). However, while I was separating myself from the anti-China propaganda of the U.S., I became acquainted with anti-Mao propaganda from fellow leftists, which, in my mind, served to replace the anti-China propaganda. They filled similar functions. I do not think that my story is unique among well-meaning Western leftists: Mao became a stand-in for Chinese socialism, and Mao was so thoroughly demonized among my comrades that I became convinced that Chinese socialism had failed.
That is a completely faulty conclusion, and it is one I have been working to distance myself from for a good year or so. The truth is that the U.S. recognizes China as a socialist threat, and as such, wants to paint China as a rival empire rather than a victimized nation. The U.S. claims to be so terrified of the Chinese military that we justify sending two aircraft carriers, many smaller ships, and fleets of bombers to the South China Sea, all in the name of “containing” China. (Where, by the way, have we seen American rhetoric of “containment” before? With the other two socialist threats that the U.S. spent decades propagandizing against, namely the USSR and DPRK.) The U.S. claims to be so outraged by China’s apparent neo-colonialism in Africa that we label them an imperial power. The U.S. claims to be so threatened by the Chinese economy that we have recently decided to “end engagement” with China, signalling a possible return to the disastrous international embargo between 1949 and 1972. And what exactly has China done to warrant these suspicions? They’ve refused American occupation, granted loans to African nations to build infrastructure which they then forgave when the debt proved too much, and contested American imperialism by focusing on domestic industry rather than allowing American investors to swallow up the country’s productive sectors. None of those are the behaviors of an imperialist power. The U.S./China rivalry is not a rivalry between two empires — it is a rivalry between one empire, the biggest still extant in the world, and a nation with an almost century-long history of resisting its imperial growth.
With that reframing in mind, we have to look at the U.S./China trade war in a different light. It has been a long attempt at suffocation, at making the conditions in another country so unbearable that it has no choice but to capitulate to Western demands. It isn’t a trade war at all — it’s a siege, and an entire country is the victim. As such, if life in rural China is difficult, whose fault is that? If China has taken longer to modernize than other comparably sized nations, whose fault is that? If the Chinese government has had to make some, and I emphasize the small amount here, some concessions to the soul-crushing economy of the Western world, whose fault is that?
Qiao Collective argue, and I completely agree, that it is on those terms that we need to talk about China, especially now, when it’s plain to see that the U.S. is gearing up for war with China. China is a nation resisting the American empire, and that is a very, very good thing, regardless of whether or not they are an “ideologically pure” socialist nation. Western leftists tend to fall back on purity tests, which I am opposed to, not in the way that liberals who claim to be socialists are opposed to them — i.e., “wow, Biden doesn’t pass your purity test so you won’t vote for him?” — but rather, in the way that every socialist should be opposed to them. They’re not helpful. We need to be able to draw a line between groups which claim to be socialist but in fact are reactionary, liberal, etc., and groups which are socialist, but not in the exact way that Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao or Minh or Il-Sung… etc, described them. Even Soviet Russia deviated from the existing socialist theory during their revolution, but Western socialists tend to apply purity tests to China far more often than they do to Russia, which I again attribute to the anti-China bias that has infiltrated even leftist circles in the U.S. I’ll paraphrase from Qiao Collective again here to emphasize this point: we, as Western leftists, live in the imperial core. It is our duty to combat the empire internally, and to aid those who resist it externally. If we nitpick and propagandize against China, we are contributing to the further success of the American empire, especially when we do so from the left.
If that wasn’t enough for you, Qiao Collective also gave a wonderful description of what “socialism with Chinese characteristics” means, which I will attempt to do justice here before commenting on it. When most socialists who don’t hate Mao critique Chinese socialism, they claim that the downfall began with Deng Xiaoping, the economic reforms, and the Open Door Policy. It’s true that, starting in 1978, the PRC allowed Western capital to enter their country. What matters, however, is how they used it. As Qiao Collective explains (though they don’t explicitly mention Deng Xiaoping in this explanation), while we might cringe at the notion of trade with capitalist countries, the China of 1978 couldn’t afford to stay isolated from the Western world. They were wildly behind in terms of industry and technology, largely due to the American attempt to strangle the PRC with their embargo, and allowing Western capital in allowed the state to divert that capital to benefit the people of China.
Since 1982, China has reduced the number of their citizens living in poverty by eight hundred and fifty-two million. Although we may fault them for using Western capital to keep themselves from collapsing, we should find no fault with their results. And that, really, is the center of socialism with Chinese characteristics: it is a socialism of hardship, a socialism of survival, a socialism that does what it needs to do to improve the lives of its people without capitulating to anti-communist interests.
It is also worth refuting the notion that China practices “state capitalism.” State capitalism is a meaningless phrase. It is used to refer to nations whose governments control the means of production, and is used to intentionally muddy the waters regarding socialist economic policies. Soviet Russia, it has been argued, practiced state capitalism, because the government seized industries from the bourgeoisie and distributed their fruits to the proletariat — nevermind the widespread examples of workplace democracy and worker ownership of factories. More often, Westerners argue — and I’m referring specifically to Western leftists — that China isn’t socialist because China is “state capitalist.” Yes, the Chinese state owns those companies and industries which provide goods necessary for the survival of the Chinese people; and what does the Chinese government do with those companies? It makes sure that their goods are accessible to the public. To call that capitalism is absurd, because there is no profit motive present. The Chinese government owns the businesses so that the businesses cannot harm the people, and anyone arguing in good faith would acknowledge that capitalism is not and has never been designed to benefit the people, “state” or otherwise.
What I came away from Qiao Collective’s lecture understanding, more than anything else, is that Chinese socialism is pragmatic. This is not the pragmatism of the capitalists and the liberals, who would tell us that it is simply not pragmatic to raise the standard of living for the masses; rather, it is the pragmatism of a country which has been the constant target of the world’s most violent empire, and which has had to make relatively minor concessions to continue improving the lives of its people. Qiao Collective make yet another wonderful point in calling imperialism the “primary contradiction” — for as long as the PRC existed, it has actively resisted imperialism from the U.S. and its allies, and its socialism has necessarily been shaped by that resistance. In truth, the Communist Party of China is a model vanguard party. They have not yet had a Khrushchev, or if they have (because I recognize that many compare Deng Xiaoping to Khrushchev, although I disagree with that impulse), they have not surrendered to revisionism and Westernization. As a result, supporting China in their fight against Western imperialism isn’t something that leftists should have to grit their teeth and grimace to do — we should do it happily. The point here is not to disregard critical support. The point is to acknowledge that sometimes, the support part really is more important than the critical part.
My closing thoughts on this lecture are almost entirely positive. I do not think it would be productive to nitpick — I think there were one or two points I was iffy on, but those are as easily reconciled by wording choices as by genuine ideological disagreements. If I could have changed anything, I would have made it longer — never a bad complaint! I do feel that their discussion of “Chinese imperialism” would have benefited by an explanation of, say, China’s relationship with Hong Kong, which is often portrayed in the west as imperialism, and I would have liked to hear some mention of the Uighur population, but I also understand that the latter situation is so shrouded by American propaganda as to be almost entirely unintelligible from the outside. Regardless, we all have time limits, and hey, if you’re left with any questions, Qiao Collective has a helpful group of reading lists which can be found here! Overall, I am unendingly grateful to Qiao Collective for this lecture and for their continued work and existence, and I cannot recommend their website enough, nor can I recommend the lecture in question enough.
I’m a white American leftist, and I’ve left this article shorter than it otherwise would have been so you can go watch the video and get the opinions of the diaspora Chinese folks at Qiao Collective firsthand. Please, when you have a free evening, watch it and ask yourself whether your opinions on the PRC have been unduly influenced by Western propaganda. They explain their positions in clear terms, and they ask only that you listen with an open mind and engage with their points sincerely. That’s what revolutionary education is all about!
