CHINA
Did 1.4 billion Chinese Achieving Poverty Alleviation Cut into Washington’s Cake?
The hopeless fault-finder. Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
These days the People’s Republic of China is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Over the past 75 years, China has grown from a poor and backward country to the world’s second-largest economy, with about one-sixth of the world’s population escaping poverty.
However, as China continued to rise, the US’ attitude toward China has changed dramatically. Be it the “China threat” narrative or the “China challenge” theory, US politicians have become increasingly anxious about China’s development. This anxiety has turned into slander and attempts to portray China as a force threatening global development.
Recently, a former American government official claimed that China aims to impose its ideology on the rest of the world, posing an unprecedented threat to the US.
Over the past few years, many US politicians have stressed the threat of China. But what exactly has China’s development taken away from the US?
When China was still a poor and backward country, the US never worried about China’s ideology “threatening” the world. However, as soon as China achieved economic takeoff, US politicians began exaggerating China’s “ideological threat.”
Over the past 75 years, if China’s ideology had been detrimental to development and harmful to its own and the world’s progress, China would not be standing so proudly before the US today. China’s development demonstrates that its ideology contributes to global growth, as proven by its achievements.
Even though China has become the world’s second-largest economy, its per capita GDP is still far below that of the US. In 2023, China’s per capita GDP was about $12,720, while the US was about $76,000, nearly six times higher. China must continue to advance steadfastly on its chosen path of development.
In 2020, the US Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China (May 20, 2020) read, the CPC has “accelerated its efforts to portray its governance system as functioning better than those of what it refers to as ‘developed, Western countries.'” Based on this assumption, then such competition should contribute to global development. Indeed, only through such competition can we show that human development is a diverse process. Every country has the right to choose its own path of development.
Isn’t it good for humanity if more countries develop through self-reliance like China? China has always adhered to the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs and has never attempted to export its ideology to other countries. However, China has proven that a country can achieve economic takeoff and social progress without copying Western models.
This successful approach has shaken the long-held discourse power and dominance of the West, especially the US, thus posing a significant challenge to the US’ global strategy.
Suppose the development model and path advocated by the US are no longer the only correct ones. In that case, the foundation of its global strategy and influence will be shaken.
When some US politicians claim that China’s ideology poses a threat, they are actually making excuses for Washington’s hegemonism. The “rules-based international order” in the mouths of American politicians is actually an order where the US makes the rules and other countries obey. Any country that attempts to challenge this order, regardless of its intentions, will be labeled an “ideological threat.”
China has chosen a suitable path for itself and achieved great success. This success should not be a reason for demonization. If Washington cannot accept and recognize a prosperous and stable China and tries to set China as an opponent or even an enemy of the US, that would be a huge threat to world peace and development.
Your Mind is a Battlefield: Decolonize Your Mind to Prevent Global Catastrophe!
Talk delivered for the event “Changes Not Seen in a Century: 75th Anniversary of the Founding of PRC.”
Friends, Colleagues, Comrades,
It’s a great honor for me to join you in this extraordinary, historical moment of celebration and reflection on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the PRC.
As has been said, we are seeing changes unseen in a century. Changes both great and terrible.
We are currently seeing the unravelling of Empire–and its last desperate, violent, hideous death rattle. We are seeing the unmasking of 500 years of western “civilization”, and the laying bare of its hypocrisy and unspeakable brutality. We are seeing the true face of capitalist imperialism, not its made up public relations face, but its resting bastard face.
It’s not pretty.
One of the precipitating factors of the end of Empire–not the only one, but a very important one, because it allows countries to resist hegemony together–is the rise of China.
The rise of China is one of the greatest success stories in the history of human civilization. So we could talk about China’s accomplishments all day. I’d like to highlight three.
We all know in 1949 when China stood up, liberating half a billion people, 10-20% of China’s population was still addicted to opium. In 4 years, the CPC eradicated opium addiction, liberating 90 million people from this colonial scourge. It’s also one of the greatest public health accomplishments of the 20th century. And I bet you’ve never heard of it.
By giving everyone the means of production–at the time, by distributing land–and by offering everybody education, community, meaning, hope, purpose–and by doing it at scale–because it has to be done at scale–the Party was successful.
You can’t do this in dribs and drabs. tinkering at the edges. You have to do it all at once for everyone.
The Power of People’s Solidarity
We all know this and understand this: we don’t liberate anyone, until everyone is liberated. We liberate each other. It’s because we are fundamentally socially interconnected.
This is our species being.
You don’t help anyone, until we all help each other, because we all are implicated in each other’s futures.
We saw the same thing with extreme poverty alleviation. Poverty was not seen as an individual failing–as it is, in the capitalist west. It was a whole of society responsibility requiring a whole of society response. It focused on everyone.
So, 850 million were brought out of extreme poverty–which lets the world know that poverty is not an immutable, social, historical fact. It is a policy choice. You can raise everyone up, if we all work together.
That’s the way it works–and it works for everything: if we start from this approach, we can succeed, no matter how vast and immense the challenge is.
So China is proof positive of the power of people’s solidarity, the power of a people’s leadership, the power of scientific planning according to socialist principles to overcome unthinkable challenges.
This is how China accomplishes things, and it accomplishes them at scale–at a scale so vast that nothing under heaven–as they say–is left behind.
Now, there is another achievement that China is working on.
Yes, a socialist society, that’s the ultimate goal, but this is an important stepping stone on the way to it. And it is a big one. It is the creation of an ecological civilization.
China is literally greening the planet, creating, single-handedly, the conditions and means to transition to a sustainable energy regime, to enable sustainable development, to turn back the tide of global warming. And it is doing it at a scale that is truly inconceivable–but necessary.
China knows how to accomplish things at scale. It knows how to solve problems even when the problems are unthinkably immense. And the leadership and the people do not flinch at the immensity of the challenge.
Ecological transition with Chinese characteristics:
China is concretely showing us the pathway out of Global Climate catastrophe. And as I said before, none of us are safe, good or well until all of us are. Until all of us are safe from the effects of the climate crisis, none of us are.
And China is leading the way. All the west has to do is work together with China: China has provided the tools and the map and it is showing the path out.
So, to reduce it to its simplest terms, going green means going red. But–and there is a but: from the US standpoint, they don’t want that.
They do not want energy transition if it means the Chinese are going to be leading it. They would rather be dead than red. The US would rather burn up the planet than give China its place in the sun.
If China is on the side of renewable energy, then the US has to be firmly on the side of Global Warming: it’s more important to beat China than to beat Global Warming.
We can see that right now, in the massive sanctioning of Chinese sustainable technologies that could shift the balance. If the planet heats up, we’re all dead, but if China cools the planet and saves the world, then we are no longer the coolest, and that’s worse than death. That’s how the leadership in the US thinks.
Preparing for War: Not if but When
So we can’t talk about China’s successes, without talking about the US hostility towards China. The US sees China as the enemy. It is determined to take down China and all its accomplishments.
Now, China has overcome–countless threats–but this one is an existential threat.
Let’s be very clear. The US is preparing for war–kinetic war–against China. Washington is abuzz with talk of war with China. It’s seen as necessary, inevitable, and incredibly, winnable.
Winnable means they are planning to use nukes.
We see with Palestine, and now Lebanon, that there are no limits to the depravity of what the Imperial ruling class will do to stay in power. Nothing is off the table. Nothing is too inhumane, too brutal, too illegal, too dangerous. Nothing shocks the conscience. In fact, nuclear war is definitely on the table, in the policy papers being distributed, in the military table-top exercises they conduct, in the field training and air exercises that are now being conducted with the greatest intensity since WWII. We are headed towards war, towards nuclear war.
To put it bluntly, the US ruling class would rather see the end of the world than the end of their power and privilege. So we are at a turning point in history. a crisis: both opportunity and danger, hope and terror, unseen possibility and unthinkable tragedy.
This Imperial ruling class has actually been escalating to war against China–covertly since 2009 and now overtly. It has calendared dates–2027.
It’s not if, but when.
Three Steps to War
Now there are three distinguishable steps on the way to war:
The first is Information war: inventing the enemy and then demonizing them: manufacturing consent, shutting down opposition, like you shut down the skies before bombing. We’re being fire-hosed and carpet bombed with lies about China.
The second is shaping the theater logistically for war, with arms, alliance, exercises, material/fuel–pre-positioned stocks–and troops.
The third is provocation. There is non-stop provocation by the US–in the Taiwan strait, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, on the Korean peninsula, everywhere.
This follows the increasing, expanding ambit and intensity of proxy war in Europe, in the genocidal terror in the middle east, and in the building war momentum in the Pacific. Kurt Campbell, Biden’s Asia Czar and the architect of the Pivot, has threatened to unleash “a magnificent symphony of death” across a “unified field [of war]”.
Martial Arts in the No-Think Zone
And we can all see and feel the shutting down of anti-war dissent, of opposing voices and alternative media. That’s a key characteristic of the information war–silencing opposition, silencing voices of peace. It’s like taking out anti-aircraft batteries, and imposing a no fly zone. You shut down the skies, before you drop the bombs. You shut down the opposition before you drop the narrative bombs. You attack opposition to war, attack those who want good relations with China, or negotiations. You attack divergent voices and platforms in order to create a no-think zone.
No critical thinking. No thinking, no dialogue, no peace.
The US literally seeks full spectrum dominance in all domains of war, but especially in the space domain: outer space, cyber space, and information space, mental space. It literally seeks to occupy your mind.
So resistance in this critical moment–at the most fundamental level–begins with first not letting your mental space be occupied, colonized, dominated. It means resisting the narrative dominance of the dominant narrative; that China is threatening the world, that war is thinkable, that war is justified. It means resisting the normalization of war, of genocide, of terror, of atrocity, of lies and propaganda.
We can all be vectors of this transmission of lies of propaganda, or we can impede its transmission.
So it’s incumbent on all of us to re-engage in the mental martial art of critical thinking: we strengthen our psychic immune system against this type of mental virus, this colonization of our mental spaces. We re-orient, de-occupy ourselves, we kick out the colonizing narratives, and we recommit to “seeking truth from facts.”
What we need to do is tune up our critical thinking engines constantly, with the precision tools of wit, humor, parody, perspective, context–and facts.
The flipside of this is that we can also spread the facts and the truth, as many are doing together today. Share the truth. The rise of China, and the liberation of the Global South is not a threat to the peoples of the world. It is a transformative moment of hope for human history.
But the stakes are immense. The future of the planet is at stake. As Brian Berletic said, “A war against China is a war against the world.” And we all have a part to play. We have already been inducted.
Where do we start? We start with our clear minds and our courageous hearts. Decolonize and de-propagandize your minds, and resist! Together!
The future of China, the future of the Global South, the future of the world depends on it!
A Walk Along the Baiyangdian Lake in the Xiong’an New Area
Detail of: Ye Wulin (China), 红星颂 (Ode to the Red Star), 2015.
Seventy-five years ago, on 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is important to note that the Communist Party of China (CPC) did not name the new state the Socialist Republic, but instead called it the People’s Republic. That is because Mao and the CPC did not foresee China being immediately ushered into socialism; rather, the country was embarking on the road to socialism, a process that would likely take decades, if not a century. That was very clear to the people who began to shape the new state and society. The People’s Republic would have to be built out of the embers of a very long war, one that began when the Japanese invaded northern China in 1931 and that lasted for the next 14 years and took the lives of over 35 million people. ‘From now on our nation will belong to the community of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world’, Mao said at the first plenary session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on 21 September 1949. The new China, he continued, will ‘work courageously and industriously to foster its own civilisation and well-being and at the same time to promote world peace and freedom. Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up’.
Mao’s words echoed the sentiments of anti-colonial movements from around the world, including those of leaders of movements that were not socialist, such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. For them, the decolonisation process required world peace and equality so that the formerly colonised people of the world could stand up and build their lives with dignity. Reading and reflecting upon these words in 2024 allows us to appreciate both the advances made by the world’s peoples since 1949 and the obstinacy of the old colonial powers that have long sought to prevent this new world from being built. The ongoing US-Israeli genocide against Palestinians and bombardment of Lebanon reflect the barbarousness to which the colonial powers are willing to resort as they attempt to hold us in this past that we want to transcend. The attitudes and wars imposed by the old colonial powers divert us from building our ‘own civilisation and well-being’ and from promoting ‘world peace and freedom’. Mao’s words, which are really the words of all people emerging from colonialism, offer the world a choice: either we live as adversaries with our resources poured into ugly and meaningless wars or we build a ‘community of peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world’.
Detail of: Ye Wulin (China), 红星颂 (Ode to the Red Star), 2015.
The average life expectancy in the PRC – 77 years – exceeds the global average by four years, coming a long way from 1949, when the figure was a mere 36 years. This is one of many indicators of a society that prioritises the well-being of people and the planet. Another was explained to me by a Chinese official a few years ago, who told me about how his country planned to create a post-fossil fuel economy soon. The word ‘soon’ interested me, and I asked him how it would be possible to do something of that nature so quickly. He began to tell me about the importance of planning and marshalling resources but, when he realised that I was not asking him about the strategy for this new economy but about the timeframe, said that this could be done ‘within the next half century, maybe, if we work hard, by [2049,] the hundredth anniversary of the formation of the PRC’. The confidence in the PRC allows for this kind of long-term planning, rather than the short-term compulsions imposed on states by the logic of capitalism. This long-term attitude pervades Chinese society, and it allows the CPC the luxury to harness resources and plan decades into the future, rather than mere months or years.
It was this sort of thinking that gripped Beijing’s city managers over twenty years ago, when the rapid rise of automobiles in the capital and the burning of coal to generate heat enveloped the population in toxic smog. The national five-year plans for 2001–2005 and 2011–2015, as well as Beijing’s own Five-Year Clean Air Action Plan (2013–2017), made it clear that economic growth could not ignore the environment. The city managers began to centre their planning around public transportation and transit corridors rooted in an older Chinese urban design that built shops and apartment buildings in a way that would promote walking rather than driving. In September 2017, the city established low-emission zones to prevent polluting vehicles from entering Beijing and created incentives for the use of new energy vehicles, which are powered by electric energy. China owns 99 percent of the world’s 385,000 electric buses, 6,584 of which are on Beijing’s streets. Though there is still a long way to go for Beijing’s air to meet its own standards, the toxicity of the air has noticeably declined.
Fan Wennan (China), 嫦娥同志 (Comrade Cháng’é), 2022.
In Mao’s founding speech in 1949, he declared that one of the PRC’s goals would be to foster the people’s well-being. How is it possible to do that within a neocolonial world system that enforces the poorer nations’ dependency on the former colonial powers? In the global production chain, the poorer nations produce goods at a lower cost, with wages and consumption suppressed, which allows multinational corporations (MNCs) to sell commodities for higher prices around the world and earn larger profits. These large profits are then invested by the MNCs to develop new technologies and productive forces that reinforce the permanent subordination of the poorer nations. If a poor nation exports more goods in an attempt to earn higher returns, it simply digs itself into a deeper and deeper spiral of lowered living standards for its exploited workers and into a debt trap that simply cannot be exited. It is one thing to be able to plan, but how does one acquire the resources to execute a plan?
At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been looking closely at the experience of China and other countries in the Global South that have attempted to rattle this cage of dependency. As Tings Chak and I show in an article on the 75th anniversary of the PRC, in its first decades China marshalled whatever minimal resources were available to it, including assistance from the Soviet Union, to build a new agricultural system against landlordism, create an education and health system that improved the people’s quality of life, and fight against the wretched hierarchies of the past. That first phase, from 1949 to the late 1970s, endowed China with a culture that is far more egalitarian and a population that is far more educated and in better health than those in other post-colonial states. It is the CPC’s commitment to transform people’s lives that created this possibility. In the second phase, from 1978 to the present, China has used its large labour force to attract foreign investment and technology, but it has done so in a way that ensures that science and technology will be transferred to China and that the state’s control over exchange rates will allow the CPC to raise wages (which were improved by the 2008 Labour Contract Law), avoid the middle-income trap, enhance technological capabilities, and drive state-owned enterprises to develop high-tech productive systems. That is what accounts, in large measure, for the rapid growth that China has experienced over the past decades and its ability to lift up the well-being of its population and environment within the overall structure of the neocolonial world system.
Fan Wennan (China), 中国2098: 欢迎回家 (China 2098: Welcome Home), 2019–2022.
In April 2017, the Xiong’an New Area (roughly 100 kilometres south of Beijing) was officially established to accommodate five million residents in order to relieve the emergent congestion in Beijing, whose growing population of 22 million faces serious problems of scale. This is being done, for instance, by absorbing many of the non-government institutions that are currently located in the capital city (among them research, higher education, medical, and financial institutions). One of the key motivations for the construction of the Xiong’an New Area was to address the plights facing the densely populated capital without embarking on urban reconstruction that could ruin the character of this city that first emerged in 1045 BCE.
To take advantage of the clean slate afforded by building this new city, PRC officials set a zero-carbon emissions target for the Xiong’an New Area, its landscape defined by the blue-green hues of water and vegetation rather than the grey smog of a concrete jungle. The first priority as the city was planned was to rehabilitate the Baiyangdian, the largest wetland in northern China. Its water area, known as the ‘kidney of North China’, was expanded from 170 square kilometres to 290 square kilometres; its water quality was improved from Class V (unusable) to Class III (able to drink); and the critically endangered diving duck Baer’s pochard was settled in the area and now thrives on the lake. The Baiyangdian anchors the city.
The Xiong’an New Area is being built as ‘three cities’: a city above ground; an underground city of commercial centres, transportation, and pipelines (for fibre optic cables, electricity, gas, water, and sewage); and a cloud-based city that will provide data for smart transportation, digital governance, intelligent equipment inspection, elderly monitoring, and emergency response. As the National Development and Reform Commission of Hebei Province’s January report describes, the Xiong’an New Area is:
creat[ing] an urban ecological space where city and lake coexist, where city and greenery are integrated, and where forests and water are interdependent. … [It e]mphasise[s] the integration of greenways, parks, and open spaces to create a city with parks within cities and cities within parks, where people can live and enjoy nature.
Seventy-five years into its revolutionary process, China has indeed made rapid advances, though it will have to settle the many new problems that have emerged (which you can read about in the international edition of the journal Wenhua Zongheng, or 文化纵横). China’s feat of shaking the chains of dependency is worthy of detailed debate, perhaps while walking along the Baiyangdian Lake in the Xiong’an New Area
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