I found this article last night after googling “is China imperialist.” It took about ninety minutes to read and I didn’t understand everything. I’ll list the author’s main points if anyone wants to discuss.
According to world systems theory, China occupies a space between the core and the periphery called the “semi-periphery” because it exploits poor countries even though at the same time rich countries like the USA exploit it. I really know nothing about world systems theory except that it kind of seems like “soft Marx”—not so different from Max Weber or Gramsci—a sort of defanged Marxism which western academics can use without threatening their jobs (since it basically allows for the existence of idealistic concepts like “culture” which undermine materialism and act as a kind of logical escape hatch—"capitalism can't be destroyed because of [insert semi-divine idealistic concept here]").
Anyway, I think we all know that the average Chinese person works way harder than the average American, although obviously this varies depending on one’s class. According to this article, China has massively improved the amount of surplus value it’s able to keep inside its own borders but it’s still losing a shitload of labor power to America since America basically pays for Chinese goods by printing money—as a result of China investing a lot of its own surpluses in American treasuries or bonds or whatever to keep the dollar from becoming worthless. At the moment the Chinese are basically keeping the American economy afloat and seemingly working on ways of disconnecting from us—they've been buying up a shitload of gold in order to back their own currency for instance.
The next major point the author makes is that China’s economic growth basically cannot continue. With current technology there just isn’t enough oil, natural gas, or lithium in the world to power the Chinese economy. (Anyone 30 years or older reading this may recall hearing the exact same thing about peak oil in the early 2000s. Shale oil has kicked that can a bit further down the road for the time being.) On top of that, if China managed to raise its standard of living to the American level, the author claims that the amount of surplus labor it would have to extract from the Global South would be intolerable. This is coupled with the fact that we need to be reducing rather than increasing greenhouse gasses at the moment if we’re going to have any hope of saving civilization from climate change.
Regardless of what you think about this prediction, it partly explains China’s Belt and Road Initiative. To continue growing, China has to export capital to the global south—via its massive banks, some of which are among the most profitable companies on Earth—and extract surplus labor. (You may recall that Lenin more or less defines imperialism as monopoly + huge ass banks.) That’s why the Chinese are building dams, ports, and highways all over the place. If China’s economic growth stalls the people are going to throw the CPC’s asses out of power. But even with the BRI, it doesn’t seem like China will be able to maintain its amazing growth rates.
I wasn’t totally convinced by the author that China is exploiting the global south. There are isolated cases of Chinese involvement in things like the DRC’s rare earth metals, but as far as I can tell some of these BRI projects at least (like Sri Lanka’s new port) are actually costing China money and operating at a loss, at least at the moment (we all know what happens to Chinese ghost cities).
I’m also enough of a Dengist to believe that the BRI is a genuine attempt on the part of China to build up the world’s productive forces and that the Chinese are nothing like the Americans or the IMF. The way the BRI seems to work is: Chinese banks loan a country like Ethiopia a shitload of money, Ethiopia asks a Chinese company to build something like a dam with that money, then once the dam is built the Chinese and the Ethiopians basically share the dam, and then sometimes the Chinese cancel the debt. For a deal like this from the IMF, you would have to privatize everything in the Ethiopian economy and use death squads to crush whatever unions they have there. So far as I know China doesn’t pull that shit. One thing they definitely need to work on, however, is increasing their soft power, which Xi has already mentioned.
It seems like, once capitalism builds up the productive forces to a certain point, society basically has a choice. Either you use imperialism to extract surplus labor from the global south (since labor has become too expensive inside your borders), or you abolish the value form. The first option allows you to kind of limp along for awhile like the USA is doing now; the second option has never been tried before as far as I know (except maybe when Stalin got rid of the NEP and collectivized). Basically, in order to make more shit, so-called “developed” countries need to stop focusing on profits. I keep thinking about how in a place like California, migrant laborers work on farms like slaves because it’s cheaper than building machines to do the work instead, due to the expense of building and maintaining these machines and the overall decline in profit in capitalist political economy, although at the same time America throws away a shitload of food and we could probably reduce the amount of farmland and labor we utilize if we just worked better on conserving food (via worker canteens and abolition of restaurants and grocery stores, for instance).
If you go beyond the profit motive, you might be able to basically build a socialist paradise, a Star Trek economy, something pretty much beyond the imaginations of all western economists and most westerners themselves. Once you do that, maybe you can find a way to safely disable America’s nuclear arsenal before it’s too late.
Regardless, it seems like the BRI won’t be enough to rescue China, at least according to this article. But I think there’s a few ways out of this shitty scenario which don’t necessarily require a socialist paradise. In this article (IIRC) the author doesn’t mention the Marxist notion of improving the productive forces—basically finding new ways to increase the surplus you can extract from workers. In the near-future it’s possible that the Chinese will take the lead in technological development and start building the machines they need in order to really pull ahead, whatever those machines may be.
Although fusion technology is always just a few years over the horizon, and although I sound like a technological determinist r*dditor when I say this, it’s possible that fusion energy could save China as well as human civilization if it ever becomes viable. I looked through a few recent science news articles and it seems possible that we could have a few viable fusion reactors within the next few years, but people have been saying that for decades. I also want to mention that I’m not one of those weirdos who believes in nuclear fission energy. You will never get me within a thousand miles of one of those fucking things, at least not by choice. I was only a few hundred miles away from Fukushima when it happened.
Last point: I googled the author and he was basically a lib who was at Tiananmen Square until he got thrown in prison and re-educated himself into a commie. Now he has a swank professorship at the University of Utah (where he must be surrounded by Mormon academics, some of whom occasionally publish scientific articles proving via genetics that the 13th Tribe of Israel really did migrate to America and become the Native Americans) and is publishing interesting though debatable and lengthy articles about world systems theory and critiquing China from the left.
I’m not sure what to think about any of this so whoever wants to school me, please jump in.
Putting this in c/askchapo because it seems more popular than c/chapotraphouse and we don't have a c/economics. Also, nobody respond with with "sir this is a arby's" or :jesse-wtf: or else :owl-pissed:
Gyude Moore: “China in Africa: An African Perspective”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5uzxV8ub9k
A great talk, I highly recommend