PDF – China: A Modern Social-Imperialist Power

In May of 2017, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) initiated a study posing the question of whether China had or had not become a new imperialist power. The resulting report answers in the affirmative: In the view of the CPI(Maoist), the People’s Republic of China has become a social-imperialist power. Further, the Chinese Communist Party, and its ideology of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics deceives and misleads socialists the world over, rejecting internationalism and revolution for a suite of revisionist justifications upholding and furthering the bourgeois dictatorship in China. The CPI(Maoist) calls on the CCP to abandon its current capitalist-imperialist trajectory, and for progressive comrades within the party to initiate struggle against the imperialist and monopoly capitalist ruling clique.

Among the hallmarks of Chinese social-imperialism, the CPI(Maoist) identifies capital export, financialization, deployment of troops and advisors, rapid armament and weapon sales, interference in the affairs of small nations and national liberation struggles, big-power chauvinism, support for free trade and globalization, and inter-imperialist rivalry. This last threatens to bloom into all-out wars of redivision as the western imperialists attempt to retain their flagging positions and expand their spheres of domination.

We do not take this question lightly. On the one hand, China is a nation whose working class is oppressed and parasitized by western imperialism, and the western powers would give anything to reverse its development and neutralize the threat it poses to their current and former spheres of influence. However, we cannot ignore the principled criticism of long-established and inspirational parties like the CPP-NPA-NDF, or the CPI(Maoist) when they decry Chinese social-imperialism. We do not ignore revolts by Papuan villagers who storm Chinese-owned nickel-mines, or when Zambian workers rise up and murder their Chinese bosses, or when said bosses shoot and kill their striking Zambian workers. Nor can one easily ignore targeted killings in Balochistan by insurgents who purport to fight “the colonization of Balochistan” by Chinese corporations. No one could have missed the stunning turnaround experienced by the Sri Lankan government, from near-defeat to victory, in the war to suppress the Tamil national liberation movement. This turnaround was largely due to China’s military and financial aid. For the sake of its oil supply and future access to the Indian Ocean, the PRC joins the reactionary and expansionist Modi government in India in its support for former western puppet Aung San Suu Kyi and the Myanmar military’s ethnic cleansing of Rohingya.

Wars of redivision are just over the horizon, and at least in that regard the tasks of the small anti-imperialist movement based in the core countries has not and will not change. But as for the advent of rising imperialisms, we gain nothing by lying about the way the world truly is, and on that note we thank the CPI(Maoist) for providing this report as a starting point for an investigation of the nature of Chinese social-imperialism, that a greater understanding of the balance of powers and the coming crisis might be reached.

We would also like to thank the comrades who translated the document, MIM comrades for giving feedback, and especially LOOP comrades for important edits. We hope the present piece is put to good use.

The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement has undertaken this translation to better understand the position of one of the world’s foremost communist parties and to make it available to other comrades in English. It is unofficial and imperfect. Its quotations and data are, with a few very minor exceptions, checked against easily available sources. The footnotes in the original were for a non-western audience (clarifying what Wall Street is etc.) and were removed for brevity. All sums and statistics are rendered in western units from the Indian numbering system and may contain errors, e.g. one or two extra zeros when converting from lakhs and crores. Previously phonetically spelled names have been rendered in their common English variants, and the entire document has been edited for length while retaining the meaning of the text.

We have been made aware of a purported English translation appearing in the days preceding publication of this version. We welcome many eyes on this question, and if the purported translation is official, we defer to it.