Photo by Li Yang
“China has entered an ‘Age of Sarcasm’. Anywhere outside of state-sponsored parties, entertainment shows, or the comedies and skits on television, China’s rulers and official corruption have become the main material for the sarcastic humor that courses through society. Virtually anyone can tell a political joke laced with pornographic innuendo, and almost every town and village has its own rich stock of satirical political ditties. Private dinner gatherings become informal stage shows for venting grievances and telling political jokes; the better jokes and ditties, told and retold, spread far and wide. This material is the authentic public discourse of mainland China, and it forms a sharp contrast with what appears in the state-controlled media. To listen only to the public media, you could think you are living in paradise; if you listen only to the private exchanges, you will conclude that you are living in hell. One shows only sweetness and light, the other only a sunless darkness.”
— Liu Xiaobo
Since the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the Kuomintang (KMT) in the Chinese Civil War, and the subsequent retreat of the Republic of China (ROC/ Taiwan) to the island of Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been the recognizable state of mainland China. During this time, China was certainly an independent actor forging their own destiny, but wasn’t really a player in the global arena at large, having been incorrectly viewed by Western intelligence agencies as a Soviet satellite or proxy. Reality was far different and much has changed the last 70+ years as China is now the second most powerful empire, the third largest in area (influence/hegemony), and the second strongest military power in the world.
China, like the US more than a century ago, is the clear rising power globally, whereas the US is much like the British were around the time of WWI—the most powerful empire in existence but in noticeable decline. China is also projected to become the largest economy in the world by 2030 in terms of GDP (gross domestic product). Although, in terms of PPP (purchasing power parity), which accounts for different services and costs in separate countries, China has already overtaken the US economy and became the worlds top manufacturer in the early 2010’s. This was a title the US had held since 1890. Let’s examine how this all unfolded and what the future could hold.
FRONTIER WARS & CONSOLIDATION OF POWER
Immediately after seizing power and creating the modern Chinese state, Mao Zedong immediately moved to invade Tibet and bring it under Sino control permanently. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty, there was a subsequent intermediary period where it had been a de-facto independent state. 40,000 Chinese troops effectively forced Tibet to surrender at gun point, although in China this is what’s called the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.” A phrase that Orwell could’ve easily predicted. China wanted Tibet for its natural resources and to militarize a strategic border with their rival India, an increasingly important geopolitical matter today.
During 1950, with the West being named the biggest threat to China’s security, the Chinese intervened in the Korean War to thwart the American advance on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea represented a buffer of sorts between China and US-occupied Japan, with the Chinese fearful of another invasion after dealing with the century of humiliation from Western powers and the Japanese. In essence, North Korea functions as a bulwark for China against American power. More than 180,000 Chinese troops died in the Korean War until a ceasefire was reached and demilitarized zone established. What emerged from the conflict, still technically ongoing, was North Korea as a pariah nation and completely reliant on the Soviets and Chinese to maintain their state, while South Korea was under the umbrella of American empire. Over the next several decades, North Korea would become increasingly close to and reliant on China, and with the fall of the Soviets the Chinese have developed what’s called a “special relationship” with Pyongyang. They’re one of Beijing’s most important allies and are effectively under Sino control. China doesn’t demand compliance unless a vital interest is at stake, but the CCP and Workers’ Party of North Korea have shared interests against the collective and US-dominated West. Absent Chinese aid, the North Korean state and its apparatus of internal repression could not exist.
During the early 1950’s, the CCP also worked domestically to consolidate its power through a massive land reform movement to the peasantry. This resulted in executions of 1-2 million landowners. I can’t say I feel too bad for the landlords but mass murder surely isn’t the best path forward for anyone or anywhere. By the mid 1950’s the land reforms had been completed, though locations in Western and Central China such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, and Sichuan didn’t see such reform. Many people in these areas remain acutely poor even today.
From 1953 onwards, the CCP began to implement the collective ownership of expropriated land through the creation of so-called “Agricultural Production Cooperatives”, transferring property rights of the seized land to the Chinese state. Farmers were compelled to join collective farms, which were grouped into what were called “People’s Communes” with centrally controlled property rights. However, it’s not as if the workers on the farms actually controlled anything—the CCP did. In other words, the land was really transferred primarily from bourgeois private ownership to bourgeois state ownership. A key sticking point with Anarchists and Marxists is what occurred in post-revolutionary Russia and China. Anarchists support land and industry collectivization, whereas the Bolsheviks and CCP simply nationalized them with strict autocratic control from the maximal elites of the party.
Following an uprising from Tibetans in 1959, where hundreds of thousands of people resisted, the CCP put the uprising down with force and killed at least a couple thousand rebels. The CCP then dissolved Tibet’s Government and the Dalai Lama was forced to flee into exile. In the late 1950’s/early 1960’s, China developed nuclear weapons and began reforms in the economy (Great Leap Forward) that created famine and killed tens of millions, although literacy rates greatly improved and China was able to create an independent industrial system. In the mid 1960’s, Mao and the CCP launched the “Cultural Revolution,” which was really China’s maximal leaders consolidating power following the failures of the Great Leap Forward. This led to harsh repression of dissent, many massacres, and a totalitarianism that defines the modern Chinese state to this day.
SINO-AMERICAN RAPPROCHEMENT
In the early 1970’s, a major shift occurred in global politics—the rapprochement between the US and China. After the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960’s, this made natural sense for both countries. For the US it allowed them to (temporarily) prevent a united Chinese and Russian front against the West, created tremendous investment opportunities for Western corporations, and it was hoped this would bring China under Washington’s control in the long term. For the Chinese this allowed them to grow their economy on the back of Western capital and created a peaceful status quo in the Taiwan strait off their coast. This was really about business.
During this time China also became a permanent member of the UN Security Council and replaced the ROC in the United Nations outright. This is what’s responsible for creating the “Taiwan issue.”
After Mao’s death in 1976, the leaders of the cultural revolution were arrested by new leader Hua Guofeng for their roles in the mass killings. Deng Xiaoping then took power and instituted economic reforms. The CCP loosened control over citizens’ personal lives, and communes were gradually disbanded. Mao’s agriculture system was dismantled and farmlands were privatized, while foreign trade—especially with the US—became a major new focus. Inefficient state-owned enterprises were restructured and unprofitable ones were closed outright, resulting in massive job losses. This marked China’s transition from a mostly planned economy to a mixed economy with liberalized markets. This led to many Chinese people gaining in wealth, although also predictably greater inequality as well. Deng Xiaoping’s rule is controversial in China. Some praise him as the “architect of the modern Chinese economy,” while others despise the neoliberal reforms as strengthening capitalism.
Deng no doubt is largely responsible for the transition towards China’s economic growth and its vastly inequitable distribution of wealth, having established concrete diplomatic relations with the US that helped expand US commercial investment in the country, but I’ll keep to how he entered his time as the head of empire and how it ended. Deng invaded Vietnam in 1979 to support the genocidal Khmer Rogue, killing at least tens of thousands of Vietnamese (and Chinese troops) to “teach Vietnam a lesson,” and then a decade later ended his rule with the Tianenmen Square massacre. Protesters and student activists were calling for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, reforms within the undemocratic CCP, freedom of association, social equality and economic democracy. The international working class leader of the Chinese Communists thus responded by killing thousands of civilians in cold blood. This was a very interesting, and disturbing, feature of Chinese “socialism” towards supposed Communism, I must say.
Jiang Zemin controlled China in the 1990’s and continued to pull citizens out of poverty, although continually creating even greater inequality in return, a regular consequence of neoliberal policies. Hong Kong and Macau were returned to China in the late 1990’s, the last remnants of the British and Portuguese empires. This has meant a tremendous amount of democratic backsliding in both, with each suffering harsh repression from the Chinese state.
Hu Jintao came to power in the early 2000’s, which was a time that saw one of the most consequential global decisions of the last century with China being admitted to the World Trade Organization. China has benefitted enormously from Western economies the last couple decades since. The growth has been faster than anything anyone has ever seen, with economists calling China’s rise “meteoric.” However, the growth has been at the expense of China’s poor (who are struggling more every year), the environment, and has caused major social displacement. During the this time, and not unlike the US post-WWII, China also established many institutions in which it plays a leading role such as BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, etc.
XI JINPING & CHINA’S GLOBAL AMBITIONS
In the early 2010’s, Xi Jinping came to power and with him has brought a far more assertive China, creating Chinese-led investment banks for international lending, as well as consolidating his own personal power. Political repression has increased greatly under Xi, with routine human rights violations against marginalized parts of Chinese society and regular purges of political opponents. Since 2017, the CCP has been engaged in a harsh crackdown (genocide?) in Xinjiang, with over a million people—mostly Uyghurs but including other ethnic and religious minorities—imprisoned in internment camps. The Chinese congress in 2018 also altered their constitution to remove the two-term limit on holding the Presidency of China, permitting Xi Jinping to remain president of the PRC (and general secretary of the CCP) for an unlimited time. Xi is a dictator, in effect.
In 2020, China passed a national security law in Hong Kong that gave the government wide-ranging tools to crack down on dissent and Chinese citizens had to endure some of the most draconian measures in the entire world during the COVID pandemic. While Xi’s domestic policies have been the topic of much debate, it’s also under his rule that China’s true global ambitions took shape. In 2012-2013, China’s economy began to slow amid domestic credit troubles, weakening international demand for Chinese exports. China then launched an ambitious global infrastructure investment project called the Belt and Road initiative (BRI). China sought to expand its commercial sector across the globe, from Indochina and Africa to Europe and Latin America.
What China is trying to do is expand its ever growing soft power into regions they hope to one day project hard power. This gives them diplomatic leverage over weaker countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, thus gaining greater control of their resources gradually, as well as their fidelity in global affairs. It also further entrenches China into the economic future of even many American allies in Europe, Oceania, and the Western hemisphere. Xi’s rule has seen Beijing’s influence explode in Africa and Indochina, with the Chinese empire using the economic conquest route to project power over places like Angola, Tanzania, Laos, Myanmar, etc. These countries and their futures are directly linked with the fate of China’s economy. There’s no reason to think Chinese influence won’t continue expanding in the developing world.
While it’s great that these places will indeed develop, it will be in the interests of the corporate-owned economy (I.E. political and economic elites in these locales) and that of China’s domestic leadership class. Sure, these countries will have newly built infrastructure and will modernize but the benefit is really for empire, not the people. Nothing about the internal subjugation of the working class and poor will change whether it’s American or Chinese empire partaking in the looting. In fact, one could argue that repression of the mass populace will be more acute in areas controlled by China as their leaders don’t pay lip service to optics about democracy, human rights, etc. China’s empire is more inclusive in the sense that they, more or less, let you do as you please with your country so long as their flow of raw materials continues unabated. Beijing will work with anyone, while Washington only works with countries they deem valuable enough to exploit while putting up with negative public opinion of supporting authoritarians and dictators (“You’re either with us or against us,” unless they’re vital to the imperial interest of course). For example, the US seeks to isolate countries like Eritrea or Cuba but works with the Saudi’s and Israeli’s who are just as brutal, if not worse, while China maintains ties with all of the regimes.
China is simply updating the playbook of empire, evolving its own variant of neocolonialism, and there’s no reason to think China won’t eventually use its expanding military power to protect these Chinese investments across Africa, Asia, and Latin America once they come under threat of rebel forces, rival regimes, leaders who won’t adhere to their interests, etc. It’s how imperialism works and China is already expanding its military presence into the Solomon Islands, having signed a security agreement with their government, as well as their existing base in Djibouti. China also has investments across nearly the entire African coastline that will allow for possible future Chinese naval bases and military assets. They’ve also been building many artificial islands that they turn into military installations in the South China Sea. International waters claimed as their own. Prompting fierce condemnation from Vietnam, the Philippines, and other countries with their own claims. China is preparing for the event of a major armed conflict with the US over Taiwan or the South China Sea. The tensions in this region have bever been higher and Chinese planners know they’ll have to take these waterways if they hope to dislodge the US from Asia and the Western Pacific.
Taking control of the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea would allow them to control globally important semiconductor and microchip industries in Taiwan, as well as to dominate vital commercial shipping lanes, which they could use as leverage to force the US out of the region, and would open doors for further power projection in the Indo-Pacific where China wants to dominate.
Besides the possibility of great power conflict with the US, the Chinese are also dealing with a rising India to their south. Both have a very real territory dispute in the Himalayas which led to skirmishes between Indian and Chinese forces as recently as a few years ago. China’s ruling elite have a vested and existential interest in containing India’s rise, just as the Americans want to contain China. A strategy the Chinese seek to implement is remarkably similar to Island chain containment strategy the US has deployed against them. It’s called the “String of Pearls” theory. The term refers to the expanding network of Chinese military and commercial facilities/relationships that extend from the Chinese mainland to the Horn of Africa. These sea lanes run through major maritime choke points. Many political experts believe this plan, together with China’s special economic corridor in Pakistan and parts of the BRI, will encircle India, threaten its power projection, trade, and territorial integrity.
However, besides these possible future conflicts, there’s a very real present day war where China has vested, though highly understated, interests—the Russo-Ukrainian War. Sure, China has tried to portray itself as an independent party but essentially no one views it as such besides dogmatic China and Russia supporters. China has been crucial in propping up Moscow’s economy in the face of devastating Western sanctions, buying more oil and gas than ever before and with plans only to increase. The Chinese have also been providing non-lethal aid (armor, tech to field drones, etc.) pretty much since the invasion began. Their “peace plan” also functioned more as a line in the sand than a true peace proposal. It said nothing about the roughly 20% of Ukraine occupied by Russia, only called for a ceasefire and end to Western sanctions (a non-starter as Beijing knows), and had absolutely nothing to say about future security guarantees for Ukraine. Sounds more like “Russian peace.”
Elsewhere that China is seeking to expand is in the Middle East. The major goal being to drive a wedge between the already fragile US-Saudi relationship. Part of the goal here is to weaken (and one day supplant) US dollar (USD) hegemony in global markets. This is part of why China is pursuing an alternative currency with other BRICS members. It’s also why China has been talking to Saudi Arabia about the possibility of trading in Renminbi/Chinese yuan instead of USD and increasingly settling trade with many partners in their own respective currencies rather than America’s as has been standard for decades.
The US-Saudi relationship is the cornerstone of American global dominance, giving real leverage to the USD as the leading energy producers all essentially trade in the US currency. If China can weaken USD dominance and get enough countries trading in theirs or an alternative currency, it would spell disaster for US global hegemony. This is the real “threat” of China that we hear so much about in the US. It’s also the reason China is trying to help mend differences between the Saudi’s and Iranian’s. The Saudi’s need American weapons, troops, and defense in the face of the Iranian empire, a rising power and Riyadh’s biggest historic rival in the region.
If China can mend that relationship, then the supposed need for American security would evaporate. Thus, the Americans would lose control of the region known to be key to global hegemony, paving the way for Chinese expansion, as well as their junior partner in Russia. China wants to expand their relations in the Middle East out of domestic need (largest oil importer in the world) and geopolitical imperatives (Neo-Cold War/US vs China). A major aspect of this is control of global shipping lanes, including the Suez Canal and Strait of Hormuz. Which is why the trajectory of American relations with the Iranian’s and Egyptian’s are of real importance to Chinese planners.
If Egypt continues to drift towards a balanced approach, and if Beijing’s friends in Moscow can establish an ongoing military presence in the strategically important country, it will go a long way towards efforts at controlling the Suez-Red Sea region, a major commercial hub. As will Chinese influence growing, strengthening, and holding in places like Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Although losing Syria to the West has been a setback for China in the Middle East, especially for their allies in Russia and Iran, it’s not as if the Chinese had dramatic interests in the country. Trade between the two was relatively low and although China was eyeing future naval ports in Syria in the Eastern Mediterranean, there had been no investments from Beijing in the country since 2010. China has far greater interests in the region outside Syria and possible Chinese naval forces at Pakistan’s Gwadar Port, as well as ever deepening cooperation with the Iranian’s, would serve to give them significant military presence near Hormuz where so much of global energy traverses.
What’s evident is the Chinese empire has grown vastly more assertive the last decade. They increasingly possess the economic and military capabilities, as well as the ambitions, to challenge the American empires’ global preeminence. What’s not evident is how all the escalating tensions with the US will ultimately unfold. From the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan strait to the South China Sea and Eastern Europe on down to the Middle East and Africa, geopolitical tensions are coming to a head in ways we’ve not seen in 80+ years. It’s a rapidly changing geopolitical environment and one the Chinese empire will surely seek to capitalize on.
