What is left of the Chinese Left?

Friday 26 December 2025, by Au Loong-Yu

With Trump in power, many parts of the world are swinging to the far right. This is the most pressing challenge we currently face. But what is the situation of the Left in China? And where is the Chinese far right?

The Left since 1989

About 25 years ago, at the turn of the century, the shock from the June 4th Massacre in Tinanmen Square in 1989 began fading away, and political life became slightly active again, especially among academia. Debates revived, with positions divided between the “Liberals” and the “New Left”. But the most vocal were neither liberals nor leftists. The former were more like neoliberals, interested in pushing for greater “marketisation”, rather than demanding liberal democracy. This was partly (and understandably) out of concern for their safety, and partly out of genuine belief in the (capitalist) market. The latter were mostly nationalists who defended the party state (after the massacre!) and saw it as the protector of the “national interest” or the “people’s” economic interest — but never their political rights).

On top of this, the age of the internet also brought forward voices from minjian, or “common folk”, from “Maoist” to “Trotskyist” or “Social-Democrat”. This was also the time of NGOs, which worked on and campaigned for different issues. Hong Kong’s academia and civil society organisations played a significant role in this process. Although these NGOs did not work on political campaigning, they were still closely monitored by the state (especially those working on labour issues), fearing they might radicalise.

The flourishing of political debates and of NGOs prompted many to believe that the age of liberalisation was coming. But the opposite was the case. In 2015, Xi Jinping rounded up and banned most of the labour NGOs in mainland China, and arrested human rights lawyers. In 2018 some Maoist students launched a solidarity campaign with workers at the Jasic factory, who wanted to found a workplace trade union. Soon they were arrested (or simply kidnapped), and this was followed by a ban on student-led “Marxism Societies” at various universities. In fact, targeting Maoists had begun more than 20 years ago, when some attacked the late president Jiang Zemin for giving party membership to capitalists. This in turn radicalised some Maoists, who founded the “Maoist Communist Party”. But before long, in 2009, their leader Ma Houzhi (馬厚芝) was sentenced to ten years in prison.

With the full-scale crackdown in Hong Kong in 2020, Beijing took revenge on its people for daring to resist Beijing’s extradition bill a year earlier. It exterminated all political opposition and social movements there, including trade unions and the small Left circles. Of the last players, the small Trotskyist group there was symbolic — it had been the CCP’s longest and most consistent Left opposition, dating back nearly a hundred years. Before the crackdown, the former colony had given a second chance of survival to a wide range of China’s political dissidents.

In the Mainland there has not been any organised opposition since 1949. From 1979, there was a strong liberal current, but it was not allowed to organise. From 2017, when Liu Xiaobo, the leading liberal advocate, died in prison, the liberals’ influence has dwindled under Xi’s repression, although it has managed to make noises occasionally. Only the nationalists have grown stronger and stronger, because they have the support of the regime. Nowadays, no visible Left current remains. Even more chilling: despite being persecuted for years, the Falun Gong remains the most vocal and organised current overseas (probably with an underground presence in China). As a religious cult which demands personal loyalty to its top leader, their political orientation is not helpful to working people.

What is this regime?

So how do we characterise a regime which suppresses all dissidents, from liberals to all shades of Left currents and independent civic associations? Before we give it a name, let’s briefly discuss its basic features:

1. State power is unlimited. Not only can all public affairs ultimately be controlled by the state, but also private lives as well, from women’s fertility, to holding a passport, to arresting young people enjoying Halloween.

2. The state is in turn under the absolute control of the party, which never bothers to hold free and open elections. And the party, in turn, is led by a top leader who can change the country’s constitution at will to make himself a lifelong autocrat.

3. There isThought control and indoctrination with the party’s ideology, whose essence is simple — tingdanghua, gendangzou (聼黨話，跟黨走), or “listen to the party and follow the party”.

4. Its Chinese nationalism is ethno-centric. It sees the nation as a homogenous whole and the party as its natural agent. Its Big Han chauvinism has now resulted in racism, including cultural genocide and mass incarceration of Tibetans and Uighurs.

5. The party also sees Chinese society as a homogeneous whole, so dissidents are a threat to the nation that need to be put down. Not only is organised opposition not allowed, but even individual opposition, once it becomes influential, is silenced.

6. To achieve the goal of zero political opposition, the party-state resorts to full-scale surveillance and the infamous social credit system. State-crafted digitalised money further enhances the Orwellian society.

7. Its economic strategy, since the mid-1950s, has always been to prioritise investment in infrastructure and heavy/advanced industries over people’s basic consumption and wellbeing, as the Great Leap Forward / the Great Famine have shown. Since 1979, the party has reintroduced capitalism to China, and along with it a massive influx of foreign capital. This has enabled the party to achieve the goals of both rapid industrialisation and feeding the people. Relative poverty (labour’s share of national income) has in fact risen, however, because the party bureaucracy has used its absolute power to grab and commercialise vital resources to enrich themselves. It is a bourgeoisified bureaucracy.

8. Its overseas investment has ranked in the top five of the world for many years, and it has sought commercial success and geopolitical power —this is not worse than other capitalist countries, but neither is it better. This has necessarily driven Beijing along the road of global economic expansionism. This has been followed by political expansionism, as it sees itself as the legitimate successor of imperial / Kuomintang (KMT) China, along with the “territory” it perceives to have belonged to it. This is why it has copied the KMT’s “nine-dash line” false claim over a big chunk of the South China Sea.

A far-right, imperialist regime

Only a far-right regime contains all of these features. While Trump is still in the first stage of autocratic engineering, Xi Jinping’s Orwellian autocracy has already advanced into its digitalised version, precisely because his party already has complete control. To see Beijing as something fundamentally more progressive than Trump’s administration is one of the greatest delusions.

In the midst of the trade war between the US and China, quite a few among the international Left feel happy about Beijing “standing up to Trump’s bullying”. While we are temporarily entertained by Trump’s failure, we must not forget that any Xi victory in his counter-offensive always requires the people to pay the price. And, in the face of both the trade war (an external pressure) and China’s internal of over-capacity / unemployment, Xi has resorted to accelerating China’s exports. This just shifts the problem elsewhere; it doesn’t solve it. In fact, it will magnify the global crisis.

Fundamentally speaking, Xi is not fighting imperialism. Rather, he is content with his personal agenda of haodaxigong (好大喜功) — a craving for greatness and glory, while serving the collective interest of the bourgeoisified bureaucracy. Whether Beijing has reached parity with US power is an important but secondary issue. The primary issue is that Beijing’s global expansionism has gone down the road of imperialism. Honest socialists do not wait until Beijing has fully achieved its goal before warning the world of this danger.

As a long-standing far right regime, with no checks on the state from within or from any opposition or social movement outside, Beijing poses grave dangers for the Chinese people and for the world. Yes, US imperialism is much stronger militarily and economically, and is now more harmful to the world. But China could potentially do immense harm as well. No one could stop Xi from starting an unjust war (just as Deng Xiaoping invaded Vietnam in 1979) or from prioritising his fight for hegemony over his people, just as Mao did. I have no answer to this mega challenge, but the least we can do is to call a Leviathan monster by its correct name.

First published in Amandla, December issue, 2025.

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Au Loong-Yu is a long-time Hong Kong labour rights and political activist. Author of China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility and Hong Kong in Revolt: The Protest Movement and the Future of China, Au now lives in exile.