Description
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the world entered an unprecedented, more exploitative stage of imperialism, in which the United States faced no rivals and no organized resistance to its agenda. The lesser titans of global capitalism—France, the UK, Germany, Japan—have united under its leadership. While the US portrays itself as a noble example of freedom and democracy, it has in fact led the world to greater inequality than ever before. This is no accident; western capitalists reap colossal profits every year at the expense of everyone else through unequal international trade. This global capitalist class controls the US and other allied governments, and through them the militaries, financial institutions, and other organizations that coerce its victims into perpetual underdevelopment.
The West’s grip on the world, however, is now becoming more tenuous. For the first time in decades, its victims have a real path toward progress. Chinese finance is building badly-needed infrastructure where the West would not, Chinese commerce is providing a lifeline to countries the US has targeted for destruction, and Chinese industry is producing new sources of renewable and transition energy at an unparalleled rate. Though it has yet to fully step into this role, the People’s Republic of China has become the de facto leader of the free world.
As this reality becomes increasingly obvious, the United States is impeding China’s rise though threats, coercion, and a massive media smear campaign; the western capitalists have recognized that China’s existence is making global resistance feasible again and are thus preparing a new Cold War to destroy it once and for all.
Has China abandoned socialism? Many claim that it has, but the remarkable social and economic changes in 21st-century China tell a different story. While western social-democratic movements continue to fail, the Communist Party is delivering greater prosperity, wealth redistribution, multicultural development, and the aggressive elimination of rural poverty. A close analysis reveals that despite Western hopes that capitalism might subvert and unravel China’s socialist construction, it is the poorer classes, the Chinese workers and peasantry, who wield the greatest influence over their country’s destiny, and are building the best model for positive change in the world.
Why does the world need China? Inter alia, and addressed at length:
- China is now one of the largest investors in peripheral countries, yet Chinese loans are distinguished from Western loans by having substantially lower interest, being focused on infrastructure construction rather than the extraction of rents, and never being used as political leverage to make its partners adopt harmful “structural adjustment” policies as Western loans are.
- From 2000 to 2020, the PRC has helped African countries build 13,000 kilometers of railways and 100,000 kilometers of highways. Chinese-financed development is so ubiquitous on the African continent that any large building or road longer than 3 kilometers are most likely built and engineered by Chinese firms. Most of these have been constructed as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, which began in 2013 and is still making increasing investments throughout the world. Yet according to trade statistics tracked by the World Bank, the value of exports from the Sub-Saharan Africa region to China as a share of the total have not risen since then; instead, the region of the world that has seen the largest increase in export share from SSA has been SSA itself. This means that greater regional connectivity, commerce, and intermediate manufacturing being done in Africa is having the long-term effect of industrializing the continent and making it more difficult for the Western-led empire to extract wealth from it.
- Numerous analyses by both Western and African institutions of Chinese development projects to concluded that they have measurable net positive effects in peripheral countries. Case studies of BRI projects in Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and many other African countries have shown they have positive social and economic effects.
- The China Export-Import Bank has also lent over $100 billion to Latin American countries within the past few decades, to build highways, railways, ports, and develop renewable energy throughout the region. In 2023, China signed an agreement to provide the technical expertise to develop Bolivia’s domestic lithium industry, which will give Bolivia the opportunity to profit from its natural resources while retaining ownership of them and climbing the economic value chain.
- China’s unconditional “bailout loans” to its peripheral partners is having a disruptive effect on the International Monetary Fund’s cycle of “structural adjustment” lending, which uses debt as leverage to force peripheral countries to neoliberalize their economies and submit to perpetual underdevelopment. In each case, the PRC negotiates debt relief bilaterally, rather than participating in the IMF programs, unless or until its partners decide otherwise.
- Chinese investment and trade is providing a lifeline to countries that have been targeted by Western sanctions, particularly Iran and Venezuela. For example, China’s $400 billion long-term investment deal in Iran is vital to Iran’s economic future; its diplomatic efforts in the region are also starting to undermine Western influence (e.g. the Iran-Saudi reconciliation, which is facilitating peace in Yemen). This will make resistance to Western neocolonialism more viable in the future, since movements that take a strong stance against Western hegemony will not be isolated from the global economy.
Here’s but a taste:
In 2018, a typical year for the decade, the PRC’s net primary income stood at negative $61 billion; in contrast, in the same year France had almost $65 billion in positive primary income, and the United States—which has never had a negative net primary income from abroad in any year recorded by the World Bank—had nearly $300 billion.[1] China, it seems, is home to some of the richest finance capitalists the world has ever seen—but also either the most patient or the most blundering. They have made enormous and increasing investments in the rest of the world, but so far turn only an abysmally low profit from them. Whether in their strategy or their objectives, it is clear Chinese investments qualitatively differ from those of other major capital exporters.
In terms of social and economic development, there is a large and growing body of scholarship indicating that Chinese capital exports have had net positive effects on the periphery. Despite a loud chorus of Western NGOs and newspapers alleging that Chinese infrastructure projects harm partner countries’ economies by importing Chinese workers rather than giving jobs to locals, the data often inconveniently disagree; a 2017 study of such projects in eight African countries by global management consultant McKinsey & Company found that Chinese enterprises “overwhelmingly” employ and train local workers.[2] According to a 2018 paper from a research lab at the College of William & Mary, Chinese development projects reduced economic inequality in their respective regions;[3] a 2021 special report by the South African Institute of International Affairs based on case studies in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria concluded that the PRC’s Belt and Road projects, despite their expense and unevenness, had both direct and indirect net positive effects;[4] a long-term case study in Ethiopia conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Science found that Chinese foreign direct investment had “significant and persistently positive effects after 6-12 years.”[5] A 2022 study published in Social Sciences & Humanities Open found that the PRC’s FDI had a positive effect on African countries’ economic and social development;[6] even a recent study by researchers at Jiangsu University in Zhenjiang, while criticizing negative aspects of PRC-Africa trade relations, nevertheless found that Chinese FDI had improved economic growth in middle- and low-income African countries.[7]
[1] World Bank, “Net Primary Income (Net Income from Abroad) (Current US$) – China, United States, France.”
[2] Kartik Jayaram, Omid Kassiri, and Irene Yuan Sun, “Dance of the Lions and Dragons: How Are Africa and China Engaging, and How Will the Partnership Evolve?,” 40.
[3] Richard Bluhm et al., “Connective Financing: Chinese Infrastructure Projects and the Diffusion of Economic Activity in Developing Countries,” 30.
[4] Adedeji Adeniran et al., “Estimating the Economic Impact of Chinese BRI Investment in Africa.”
[5] Riccardo Crescenzi and Nicola Limodio, “The Impact of Chinese FDI in Africa: Evidence from Ethiopia.”
[6] Debongo Devincy Yanne Sylvaire et al., “The Impact of China’s Foreign Direct Investment on Africa’s Inclusive Development.”
[7] Emma Serwaa Obobisa et al., “The Causal Relationship Between China-Africa Trade, China OFDI, and Economic Growth of African Countries.”
JUSTIN PUDOR –
“Millions of people in the Global North are worried about war, austerity, environmental destruction, and climate change, but see nothing but more of the same coming from Western leaders. Most progressive writers of the Global North remain trapped in an updated version ‘Yellow Peril’ Sinophobia, thinking of China as some kind of ‘techno-dystopia’, an imperial power in its own right, or an adjunct of US power. Kyle Ferrana’s book is a methodical analysis of the unequal global economy led by the US, and of China’s post-colonial struggle against this system and for sovereign economic development. Because only economic planning on a sovereign basis can save our planet, understanding recent Chinese history through Why the World Needs China is an antidote to both Sinophobia and to despair.” JUSTIN PUDOR, host of the Anti-Empire Project, Associate Professor at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, and co-author of Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media, and 20 Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela
DANIEL KOVALIK –
“As the drumbeat for war with China is growing, Ferrana has written an incredible book showing why it is China that is the indispensable nation in the world. As Ferrana demonstrates, far from being an inevitable enemy, China is a country which should be courted as a friend and partner in building a better and more equitable world in which sustainable development is offered for all countries, and especially those of the Global South that the West has exploited for so long and is now intent on keeping down. Surely, this book is a much-welcome and much-needed antidote to the endless anti-China rhetoric being pumped out by the White House and regurgitated by the compliant mainstream press.”
DANIEL KOVALIK is a lawyer, educator, author and peace activist
RICHARD WESTRA –
“Ferrana treats China’s place in the world within a sweeping exploration of the shifting contours of global imperialism from which the 20th century super-imperialism of United States springs. As China opened to the world during its post-1978 reform period, its global wealth grew as did its global power and influence. Yet, though China’s global footprint manifested superficial similarities with that of neoliberal economic transformation and Western imperialism led by United States super-imperialism, Ferrana reveals China’s often subtle, distinct differences in its relation with the world. Further, Ferrana debunks simple narratives of China’s ruling class as capitalist. Notwithstanding really existing wealth disparities within China, the role of the state and the policy directions supported by the Communist Party continue to demonstrate ties of the latter to the socialist project of working class power, Ferrana argues. Indeed, it is precisely China’s distinguishing itself from US super-imperialism in terms of its approaches to ecosustainability, international multipolarity, opposition to settler colonialism and so forth, concludes Ferrana, that has seen it become the object of relentless Western propaganda and misinformation.” RICHARD WESTRA is University Professor at the University of Opole, Poland, Adjunct Professor in the Center for Macau Studies, University of Macau, and co-editor of Journal of Contemporary Asia. His most recent authored book is: The Political Economy of Post-Capitalism: Financialization, Globalization and Neofeudalism (2024)