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Showing posts with label China. Show all posts
Showing posts with label China. Show all posts
People And Nature ☭ A vigil was held in Manchester’s Chinatown on Friday, to remember the victims of the fire in a block of flats in the Xinjiang province of China, Bob Myers writes.


A friend of ours, who is active in the Hong Kong solidarity movement, had let us know about the vigil. I went there with a friend.

About 30 young Chinese gathered – all overseas students I would say, not Manchester resident Chinese.

It was very moving, as the demonstrators were clearly very worried about protesting in public and wary of us – the only non Chinese there – and of each other. (Manchester has a big Chinese embassy and lots of security agents.)

Clearly most of the people didn’t know each other and didn’t talk to each other. (There are tens of thousands of Chinese students in Manchester). But one guy put down the posters you can see in the photos.

So it was more than just a memorial vigil. There was a list of four demands:

1 Allow public mourning

2 End brutal lockdown

3. Release arrested people

4. Defend people’s constitutional rights.

Another poster says: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

No-one said anything, people just stood there looking at the candles. Many passing Chinese people stopped to take photos.

My friend talked with one young woman, and she said: “We don’t know how to organise a protest. You know how to do it but we don’t.”

After we left we spotted the posters in the final picture, with the poem, stuck on a wall. Urumqi Road is where the fire took place. 5 December 2022.

Some links about China

➤The Chuang blog

➤ China Labour Bulletin

➤Xi Jinping’s coal stokes the climate fire – from People & Nature, January 2021


Close up of the poem


⏩ People & Nature is now on mastodon, as well as twitter, whatsapp and telegram. Please follow!

A Vigil For China Fire Victims

Tommy McKearney ☭ The despicable treatment of Clare Daly and Mick Wallace by the Irish Times in its Easter Saturday edition is more than simply evidence of the wretched state of the Irish mainstream media: it is also a reflection of concerns gripping the 26-County establishment.


The sanctimonious piece by Naomi O’Leary was titled, without any obvious irony, “Stars of state media” by a newspaper based in a state that ruthlessly enforced its Section 31 legislation for decades.

The article in question was printed over a two-page centre spread claiming that the two are “popular figures in media controlled by authoritarian regimes.” The message the reader was expected to take from this was that the pair are tools, knowingly or otherwise, of governments deemed undemocratic by both the Irish Times and Western powers.


Had this article appeared in one of the tabloids pandering to a sensation-seeking readership it would be possible to dismiss it as just another nasty piece of journalism to be binned with the rest of the rubbish. However, this was no run-of-the-mill scribbling hoping to beat the editorial deadline: by the writer’s own admission, the article had entailed ten months of research—considerable time devoted, therefore, to establishing the entirely unremarkable fact that Daly and Wallace are frequently interviewed favourably by Russian, Chinese and Arab broadcasting networks.

Such is the degree of anti-Russian hostility being generated at present that merely reporting that politicians are being interviewed by Moscow media is deemed sufficient to undermine their credibility. Yet this in itself does not explain why this research began months before Russia invaded Ukraine, nor does it explain why China and the Arabic-speaking world are also in the mix.

Whether conscious or not, the underlying rationale for this article lies in the changing dynamic in the global order and in this case the response by the Irish establishment to what is happening. Having spent decades ingratiating and submitting itself to and within the Western capitalist model, Ireland’s ruling caste has no appetite for having its privileged position disrupted or challenged.

Nevertheless, to paraphrase a former British prime minister, the winds of change are blowing, whether they like it or not. The axis of global economic power is shifting, away from the United States and western Europe towards China, Russia, and their allies in the Middle East. For decades the United States has been the leading global economy. Now, however, the latest statistics from the World Bank in Washington show that China’s GDP is—depending on which of two calculations is used—either the largest or second-largest in the world.¹

Worth keeping in mind when reading these reports is that GDP calculations are more than a little subjective, as they measure services as well as manufactured goods. This is more than a matter of semantics. Services, including the financial sector, are often transitory and always vulnerable to erosion, and make up a much greater portion of the American economy than that of China. Consequently, the long-term prospect is that, all else being equal, Beijing will displace Washington as capital of the world’s wealthiest and most industrially productive great power. And all that under the direction of a vibrant Communist Party.

Compounding the capitalist world’s anxiety about losing out economically is China’s foreign policy, exemplified by its “belt and road” project. Described as constructing a 21st-century Silk Road, China is investing abroad in infrastructure that is proving as beneficial to host countries as it is to the benefactor. Implemented for the most part in less-well-off regions, this initiative has, not surprisingly, won support among countries weary of and damaged by the heavy-handed, violent and rapacious exploitation of US-led capitalism.²

Consequently, it is no exaggeration to say that the free-market economic system as defined by the United States, Britain and the EU has not faced such a fundamental challenge to its hegemony since the immediate post-war era, a time when Soviet-style communism was gaining support among working people everywhere. The difference now is that the new kids on the block, namely China, Russia, and their Middle Eastern allies, are not exhausted and depleted by a savage war necessitating decades of basic internal reconstruction rather than high-tech export-led development.

What will not be different, though, is the response from capital to the challenge. As in the past, imperialism will employ the twin strategy of fifth-columnists and open military engagements, coupled with aggressive McCarthy-style propaganda. It is this latter tactic that we are now experiencing, and not just with this latest attempt to vilify Daly and Wallace.

Ireland’s mainstream media are owned or controlled by the ruling establishment and invariably serve the interests of their patrons. As mentioned above, there is nothing new in this assertion. The tendentiously censored coverage of the Northern conflict was a perfect example of this in practice, a situation where the modus operandi was to control and indeed create the narrative in order to control the response. So, rather than identifying the conflict as the result of a failed and repressive state, the Provisionals were deemed the sole culprits, thereby facilitating a selfish “do-nothing” response from Dublin governments.

In the latest manifestation of this narrative-controlling strategy, we can expect more of the same type of treatment inflicted on the two Irish politicians. The stakes are high for the ruling class, and the outlook is uncertain. In common with most free-market economies, Ireland, north and south, is experiencing the damaging impact of inflation, a situation that will last for many months and possibly several years and, as always, inflicting most harm on working-class communities.

Under such circumstances and conditions there is the real possibility that the spectre of a Connolly-inspired solution reinforced by developments in the East will become attractive among a majority of our citizens. In fact as we go to press there are those organising a festival in Dublin to celebrate the life and work of the said James Connolly. Not only that, the organisers have invited Daly and Wallace to speak.

What can one say? Well, it’s simple: a plague on the mainstream media’s McCarthyism, and on to the Workers’ Republic!

1. Caleb Silver, “The top 25 economies in the world,” Investopedia, 3 February 2022 (https://bit.ly/3ELtqLm).

2. See, for example, Ian Neubauer, “In Solomon Islands, Australia’s largesse faces China challenge,” Al Jazeera, 4 April 2022 (tinyurl.com/2hsef22v).

Tommy McKearney is a left wing and trade union activist. 
Follow on Twitter @Tommymckearney 

The Wretched State Of The Irish Media

Matt Treacy ✒ While the western media – including even the red tops which are going large on boiling lava today – has temporarily replaced Covid scares with Climate Change, the Chinese official press is surely taking the pee out of us.

While our own Climate Change Commissar Eamon Ryan is calling on the world to follow the example being set by little old Ireland, the Chinese Communist Party, which presides over the biggest single one state source of CO2 emissions, is promising that it will get around to this someday. When its exemptions end, if they adhere to that.

As Gillian Welch might put it, they “wanna do right, but not right now.” They will, however, according to today’s People’s Daily reach peak pollution by 2030, and thereafter proceed to “achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.” Now, according to our own Cassandras that would surely be too late?

Loveable old Comrade Xi Jinping was too busy washing his hair or opening a new labour camp or something to be able to turn up to save the planet and all yesterday, but he did text them. It contained the fortune cookie advice that “Visions will only come true when we act upon them.” If Woke Hollywood is ever going to do a remake of It’s a Wonderful Life, the Jimmy Stewart character part is sorted.

The Party has also let everyone know that is unselfishly prepared to share its experience and expertise in not meeting the goals expected of the “imperialist running dogs” of Walsh Island and Ferbane whose peat racket was threatening imminent global catastrophe, with the rest of the planet.

One of the ways it is doing this is by taking an increasing role in the economies of Africa. Much of the trillions of dollars being invested through the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is targeted at sub–Saharan Africa which is regularly cited as the greatest and most vulnerable victim of climate change. Indeed, it is the example most often used to tug at the heart strings of western consumers.

And with good reason, when one considers that much of western phone technology, for example, depends on raw material inputs like cobalt. It is these raw materials that are the apple of the Chinese industrial Behemoth’s fossil fuel guzzling eye – to the extent that some observers are highly sceptical about how Chinese involvement in Africa is going to help in attaining that continent’s modest energy targets.

Jennifer Turner of the Woodrow Wilson Center has said:

What China is selling is the China development model, which was energy-intense, so no holds barred … China’s not taking their war on pollution on the road even though that could be an opportunity.

China has also increased coal production, and announced as much in the midst of all this week’s brow-beating.

One of the reasons for this is that some observers see the increase in Chinese coal exports to their economic partners as a means to mitigate the impact of a slowdown in the Chinese domestic economy.

China increases coal production as climate warming talks begin bangkokpost.com

There are differing assessments of the health of the Chinese economy, but the announcement in recent days that Beijing is advising households to stock up on essential items over the Winter is pretty alarming. Some of China’s nervous neighbours, including India, are connecting this to growing fears that the recent aggression towards Taiwan might proceed further.

China urges people to stock up on essentials ahead of winter,
prompts worries online | Deccan Herald

It may also be a pre-emptive move ahead of an intensified lockdown over rising Covid cases, preparation for a severe spell of cold weather, or even just as part of a correction to steeply increased food prices.

Who knows. Winston Churchill’s reference to the Soviet Union as a “mystery wrapped in an enigma” goes nowhere near to capturing the paucity of real knowledge of Chinese realities and plans. Which most in the west pay no heed to anyway, unless it is comprised of sycophantic infantilisms that take no account of the utter cynicism of the regime they effect to condescend to.

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of 
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. 

China Sends Best Wishes To Climate Meet-Up

Steven Are ✒ discusses the rise of China and the somewhat tense relationship it has with Australia.

“There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes, he will shake the world.” - 
Napoleon Bonaparte.

Has got me digging a little into what drives the Australian economy, and in particular what role it plays in setting policy regards to China.

It’s no secret that Australia like’s to punch above its weight. For a nation of around 26 million perched just about as far away as you can get from Europe or the US, she exerts enough clout to get the attention of the Western world. There are a few reasons for this.

For the past 20 years, Australia has been the main supplier to China of raw materials so essential to Beijing’s push to modernise their society. The “Big Mining” owners have never been backwards about greasing the wheels of the political party in Government, to ensure this state of affairs continues at a minimal tax bracket, and despite the litany of questionable Human Rights actions China has undertaken against it’s own citizens from Tiananmen to the Uyghurs.

She also exported until recently large quantities of wine, barley and beef. In a fit of pique, Beijing has decided to place large duties on them in an attempt at punishment for Australia’s questioning over the origins of the pandemic. They studiously avoided banning raw iron ore though, because Australia has perhaps the world’s biggest reserve of good quality, secure and reasonably priced supply of this commodity that is require for the massive steel production China needs.

The wine, barley and beef suppliers also diverted into other markets such as India and South America, so the effect was minimal much to China’s fury. Not only did the ban not work, Australian produce is of such quality the demand did not drop within China. This led to shell companies being formed in Hong Kong with a mysterious rebranding of wine, barley and beef products suddenly available for Chinese import at inflated prices! No points for guessing their point of origin!

The other essential export that China is hatefully dependent on Australia for is coal. Again, Australia has vast reserves of very good quality coal best suited for energy production. Beijing tried to halt all imports just recently, but had to bitterly back down and allow Australian coal in when the lights started to go out across China. Beijing is desperately scrambling to find alternative sources, such as in Africa, but geopolitical instability in these regions coupled with the inferior product make it a less appealing proposition. This tends to exacerbate China’s fury also. Talk of ‘net zero’ emissions in relation to the climate is nothing but just that, talk. Modernization of China will not be held back by notions of planetary concern, and the sheer output of carbon that would be created during the construction of the “One Belt and Road” initiative will make a mockery of Western attempts at constraint.

Due to this, it pays to keep in mind that the CCP has been described by various Intelligence sources as a collection of gangs. One only needs a brief use of the Google machine to come across many instances were former party faithful, or media darlings and business cronies have either disappeared from the face of the earth, and have all mentions of them removed from the heavily policed internal internet of China.

A few of these individuals make it back into the public eye, singing very clearly from Xi Jinping’s song sheet, and extoling the virtues of his “ Xi Thought” on everything from foreign policy to the manliness required of China’s male youth.

Other individuals appear to suffering from an apparent window defect crisis in China, a crisis that appears to facilitate unfortunates to fall through them to their deaths…

But China’s indignation toward Australia is compounded by the encouragement of Canberra of investment within the real estate sector, Big Agriculture and Educational tourism (this, the UK & Ireland should pay particular attention to).

Housing affordability has remained a pipe dream for many young Australians due to the suddenly wealthy Chinese buying property in the relatively safe market within Australia, which pushed house prices ever North. The wealthy middle class of the Red Empire apparently do not share the same faith in Xi’s dream as he would like, and in particular to the CCP’s handling of the financial system. The Long March of Mao still haunts them, and the memory of starvation has pushed the purchase of vast farming tracts some the size of small European nations.

Beijing has leased the busy Port of Darwin on our North Coast to facilitate shipping from Chinese controlled mines and these farms. A move that has angered many within Australia as its strategic position may be questioned if the frosty war turns noisy. To combat this Australia has agreed to host many thousands of US Marines in Darwin for training exercises, a move not lost on Beijing.

Universities within the island have a good reputation, and it was no surprise to see many Chinese students being sent over here to study by wealthy parents, especially when the financial incentives for the Unis themselves became significant. Anecdotal stories of Universities becoming degree mills abound, with questions asked how they manage to achieve degrees within Australia with barely passable English language skills. With the huge influx of Chinese students came upward pressure on affordable housing.

The same will happen elsewhere so, be warned.

Bundled all together you can see why the Australian public have got fed up with China swinging it’s weight around. Daily cyber-attacks, our spy agency ASIO concerned by spying by Chinese agents and corrupting politicians thrown into the mix make animosity a given.

When the dust settled after the outbreak of Covid-19 Australia found much to it’s chagrin that Beijing had been buying all the PPE stocks they could from Australia Before Beijing admitted there was an issue with community transmission. This left our own Healthcare system short of vital stocks. The message became clear. Australia was not viewed as a partner in Asia but as a client state.

A line in the sand was drawn and Canberra had to act. Most of the Western world’s spook agencies were well aware that the outbreak very likely started from the lab in Wuhan but due to political ideology in the US this was shouted down in the US at least until Trump was ejected, by using the old tactic of screaming “Racism” to stifle questioning of narratives.

As Australia looked North she saw China create new military outposts in vital shipping supply lanes in the South China Sea. As this threatened trade with the rest of the world the Defence Department made a convincing case that the current order for diesel electric submarines was a waste of money. An alliance between the US, UK and Australia to develop nuclear powered subs was worked out in secret. France was not amused at the loss of a contract worth 90 billion dollars but can hardly complain. They won a contract to supply the diesel subs but gave nothing but delays and cost blowouts, so much so that Australia exercised the gate clause in the contract whereby she could exit the legal obligation due to France not meeting the targets. Funny how Paris never mentions this!

Beijing saw this new pact (AUKUS) quite rightly for what it is, a warning that military expansion and trade bullying will not go unpunished. For all Australia’s faults, from lobbying the IPCC behind closed doors on behalf of their Big Mining corporations to the ruling party not really believing in Climate Change anyway (the current PM brought a lump of coal into parliament and said not to be afraid of it), the ethos of a “Fair Go” is sacred to it’s people.

China would do well to remember this, and threatening behaviour is no way for a nation to conduct it’s business in modern times.

⏩Steven Are is a Belfast quiller living in Australia.

Rise Of The Red Emperor

Matt Treacy ⏩ In reaction to the growing controversy regarding the origin of Covid 19, the Chinese scientist who was in charge of the Wuhan virology lab has given an interview to the New York Times. 


The report was syndicated across much of the western media late last night in what might be regarded as a co-ordinated attempt to pre-empt the inquiry announced recently by the Biden administration.


Shi Zhengli’s denial of any possibility of a Wuhan lab leak merely repeats what she has said for more than a year, which is that while the lab was engaged in researching hybrid bat coronaviruses, as detailed in her 2017 paper, Wuhan was not part of any gain of function research to investigate whether they might have been made more virulent.

Most importantly, she strenuously denies any possibility of the virus having escaped accidentally. Despite initial speculation about this in early 2020, and claims that Shi had been muzzled, the Fauci emails and the renewed focus on the papers published by Li Meng Yan and others have meant that the origin of Covid 19 is by no means a settled question.

Shi, the Chinese and others persist in claiming that there is nothing to hide, but even the Biden administration and the WHO are now admitting that the WHO’s own investigation which involved scientist Peter Daszak, who is at the heart of the current controversy, was not extensive enough.

Most importantly – and this is worth bearing in mind given what has been the official position in the west for more than a year –the possibility of a lab leak can not in fact be ruled out. The Director General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, admitted as much several months ago.

Given the origin, if one pardons the pun, of this latest story in the NYT, and Shi’s accompanying messaging, one cannot escape the impression that some degree of damage limitation and possible pre-empting of the report ordered by Biden is being gamed.

It is important to realise that Biden’s directive to the American intelligence services came about after an initial report he ordered in March did not provide the basis for a definitive assessment. The very fact that it did not as predicted rubbish the leak theory is most significant. Biden’s own press statement on May 26 stated:

while two elements in the IC (Intelligence Community) leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.

So why, pending the new report, do the New York Times and others – including the Chinese authorities – seem to be acting to pre-empt that investigation? Presumably, Shi’s evidence will be taken into account as it already, no doubt, has been. It is also notable that in her message reported in the Times, that she personalises the whole matter by referring to people “constantly pouring filth on an innocent scientist.”

Which is exactly of course what has been done to fellow virologist Li Meng Yan and others who have questioned what has been until now a blanket official position regarding the origin of the virus – alongside an uncritical acceptance as to how the crisis has been handled by governments in the west.

The syndicated media reports of Shi’s latest statements almost all fail to refer to the impetus behind the revival of interest in the lab leak theory. Some refer to the “conspiracy theory” about the leaks – but don’t reflect on the fact that this ‘conspiracy’ is now taken so seriously that both the Biden administration and the WHO have been forced to reassess the evidence.

The Irish taxpayer-funded station, RTÉ, maintains its role as a faithful parrot of course. While it dutifully carried Shi’s denials of any leak this morning, there is no mention of Li Meng Yan’s assertions to be found anywhere on the news site, despite the increasing numbers within the global scientific community who are taking her claims seriously.

They do take time to explain to the Irish people that “the leak hypothesis had been floated earlier during the global outbreak, including by Mr Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, but was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory.” Of course, once Trump was seen to be considering a theory as worth investigating the media were always going to fail to do their job of fact-finding or challenging the narrative.

Despite all that, the truth can’t stay hidden forever. The next few weeks might prove very interesting.

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of 
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. 

Covid 19 And The Wuhan Lab Leak ➖ The Evidence Is Building Despite The Media

Gabriel Levy ✒ China’s national and provincial post-Covid recovery packages will put three times as much cash into fossil fuel projects as into renewable energy.



China is “focusing its recovery on high-carbon energy and infrastructure, as it did after the 2008-09 global financial crisis”, says Carbon Brief, who analysed the spending plans. Dozens of new coal-fired power stations and climate-trashing coal-to-chemicals plants are among the key items.

One of China’s vanity projects: a puffer fish statue in Jiangsu province,
which provoked social media outrage when it was unveiled

The plans make a mockery of Chinese premier Xi Jinping’s claim to the United Nations in September to be aiming for “carbon neutrality before 2060”.

This chasm between words and actions makes Xi a “climate arsonist” still more dangerous than Donald Trump, Richard Smith, a US-based China researcher, writes in a recent article. Smith fears that Xi is “abandoning the transition to renewables”.

In a book published last year, China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse, Smith argues that China’s combination of bureaucratic dictatorship and capitalism has exacerbated its climate impact, and that growth-centred economic policies are incompatible with Xi’s claims to want to protect the natural world.

Smith, writing from a Marxist standpoint, suggests ways that China could “grab the emergency brake” to help forestall climate disasters, and considers prospects for revolutionary change.

In this post I offer some thoughts on these issues; in a linked post I compare Smith’s approach with others on the “left”.

Download both posts as a PDF here

1: Xi Jinping’s growth-focused policies are leading China, and the world, towards disaster

Xi, addressing the UN in September last year, said that the 2015 Paris agreement “charts the course for the world to transition to green and low-carbon development”. It should be honoured; China would adopt “more vigorous policies and measures”, aiming to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

The pledge “raised more questions than it answered”, Smith writes. What did “carbon neutrality” mean? How could China keep increasing emissions for another decade, and throw its “immense coal-fired dreadnought into reverse” to force emissions down to zero?

The reality, Smith argues, is that Xi can not meet his own climate targets, because the Chinese elite’s priority since Mao Zedong’s day has been to compete with, and protect itself from, the US and other powers by expanding the economy. Xi therefore “has no choice but to maximise the growth of the very industries that are driving China’s emissions off the charts, including coal-fired electricity generation, even if this accelerates global warming, dooming China and the planet too”.

There are two obvious reasons to take Smith’s warnings seriously.

First, Xi’s doublethink is in line with that of UK, European and US Democratic party politicians who swear by the Paris agreement. As UN officials made clear even before the Paris conference, it would not reach a deal sufficient to stave off dangerous climate change. And it did not. Climate Action Tracker monitors the gulf between deeds and words. Xi is a big part of a bigger problem.

Second, Smith is hardly alone in highlighting the yawning chasm between Xi’s words and the ongoing policy support for coal. Mainstream commentators and NGOs do too.

China’s failure to focus post-Covid investments on low-carbon energy indicates “general agreement among the political elites that policy goals other than the low-carbon transition were more important, notably short-term economic growth, employment and social stability”, Philip Andrews-Speed, a researcher of China’s energy system, wrote.

Researchers at Boston University pointed out that state-owned Chinese banks are now the leading international lenders to coal projects elsewhere.

Even Zou Ji, a former state climate official and now president of Energy Foundation China, an NGO, said: “Don’t add new capacity, as that will lock in emissions and create a vicious circle. Once the capacity is there, it will be used, and prevent reductions in coal-fired power.” Technological advances “are removing the justifications for building new coal power”, he added.

The authorities are not listening. Carbon emissions from both electricity generation and steel-making have bounced back from the Covid lockdown and are hitting new records.

2: The combination of bureaucratic rule and capitalism has exacerbated the problem

However much Xi’s empty promises on climate resemble Angela Merkel’s or Boris Johnson’s, the disconnect between word and deed works differently in China. other states have ceded to the markets. While Johnson’s inadequate climate targets disappear in a cloud of rhetoric and broken “market mechanisms”, Xi’s get caught in the crossfire between his own economic policy priorities on one hand and bureaucratic interests in China’s provinces and industries on the other.


 Take investment in coal production and coal-fired electricity generation. “Distorted incentives favour coal”, Max Dupuy of the Regulatory Incentives Project explains. Provincial and local officials use their authority “to encourage heavy industrial investments in their jurisdictions”.

Under a system that some describe as a “GDP competition” to promote economic growth, officials realise that an easy way to boost their statistics is “to engineer finance for large industrial and infrastructure investment”. This, combined with preferential credit to heavy industry, has “contributed to overinvestment in heavy industry and has been a major part of the story of coal investment in China”.

This dynamic between national and local bureaucrats is discussed in greater detail, and put into international and historical context, in Smith’s book, China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse.

The coal-driven boom was fired up in the first place by exporting manufactured goods to rich countries, following China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001. More recently, government policy has focused on reproducing bloated, western-style consumer markets in China itself, Smith argues.

In other words, the unique relationship between China’s bureaucratic ruling elite and capitalism, both internationally and within China, has driven forward the biggest coal-based industrial expansion drive in world history. And makes it harder to shift away from it.

Smith’s article identifies three “hypergrowth drivers” in the Chinese elite’s approach: (i) determination to “win the economic and arms race with the US”; (ii) the need to maximise employment; and (iii) the need to maximise consumption and consumerism. Smith writes:

As a state-based communist ruling class in a world dominated by more advanced and powerful capitalist powers, Xi, like Mao and Deng before him, understands that China must “catch up and overtake the US”. That’s the only guarantee that it will not be overwhelmed by global capitalist imperialism. The way to do that is to build a relatively self-sufficient high-tech superpower economy shielded from Western takeover.

Analysing the relationship between the Chinese elite and capitalism is not simple. I won’t try it in a blog post, and I don’t think Smith has finished the job either. But by probing the causal role of that relationship in China’s horrifying volume of greenhouse gas emissions, Smith is pointing us in the right direction.

I will add to the conversation the two graphs, showing China’s, and the USA’s, share of global greenhouse gas emissions, and coal production, over the last thirty years. Quantity turns into quality. The sheer scale of China’s coal-fuelled boom has been one of the major factors that has exacerbated the climate crisis.

The Chinese leadership pressed ahead with coal-based expansion, notwithstanding the science of global warming, which was already clear in the late 1980s. Deng Yingtao, an economist and government adviser, explained in a book published in 1991 the vital need to take a different road. (I published an account of his work here.) But China’s elite ignored such advice. This is a factor in the climate and ecological crisis we face now.

3: The Chinese government’s ruinous approach can not be described as a development policy. It prioritised, first, supplying manufactured goods to the world market, and then, creating a market for consumer goods in China.

In the half century since 1970, China’s economic policies have delivered gigantic improvements to the material living standards of its citizens. Levels of nutrition, income, literacy, health provision and electricity supply have risen for hundreds of millions of people.

Anyone who thinks tackling climate change has to go hand-in-hand with fighting for social justice welcomes such changes unequivocally.

But that is not the whole story. As industry grew in the 1990s, and that growth accelerated in the 2000s, as hundreds of millions of people moved to towns and new industrial zones and economic sectors were opened to private capital, much uglier aspects of economic expansion came to the foreground.

In his book, Richard Smith argues that China’s exports to the world market gained competitive advantage by (i) the low cost of “semi-coerced ultra-cheap workers to power light manufacturing”, (ii) “contempt for, and lack of spending on, environmental protection”, and (iii) the state’s capacity to work with investors to build physical infrastructure. The authoritarian political system helped (pages 2-4).
An open-pit coal mine in China

By the time of China’s twelfth five-year plan (2006-2010), Smith writes, the “blind growth” had turned into an orgy of overproduction, fuelled by relatively cheap labour and eco-insanity. He lists the excesses (pages 24-43), such as a car-building (and owning) craze that brought cities to a standstill with traffic jams, and, in the countryside, the construction of roads and rail links that no-one uses.

While in some regions migrant workers are packed in dormitories like sardines, ghost cities of empty skyscrapers have gone up elsewhere in property markets dominated by speculators. One example: Caofeidian on the Bohai Sea (cost $100 billion), which was to have been “the world’s first fully-realised eco-city”; planned for 1 million people, only a few thousand ever moved in. Vanity building projects abound, from mock Versailles palaces to an $11 million, 2300-tonne tower shaped like a puffer fish in Jiangsu province.

To pay for all this: the world’s worst record on industrial safety and environmental standards.

Smith argues (pages 126-153) that, amid this frenzy of scatter-gun investment, the command system of management and constraints on markets combine to incentivise corruption among the 90 million members of the Communist Party. The leadership’s constant anti-corruption campaigns have been no more successful than those in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

There is a causal link between all this and China’s frightful level of greenhouse gas emissions. Smith explains in his article the key role of so-called “hard to abate” industrial sectors – that is, processes that with current or anticipated technology can not easily be decarbonised. “Steel, aluminium, cement, aviation, shipping, chemicals, plastics, textiles and electronics stand out”, he writes.

Smith makes a strong case that these activities, which feed export markets and many of the waste-strewn domestic sectors, would have to be drastically curtailed under any effective climate policy. The “hard to abate” sectors account for 47% of China’s greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 32% from electricity generation, which dominates discussions on decarbonisation.

One analytical question that flows from Smith’s work is: where does useful production that improves people’s lives end, and wasteful production driven by twisted relationships of power and wealth, and mis-labelled “growth”, begin? No easy answer, either in China or globally.


4: China is the world’s number one investor in renewable energy, but will not come near to meeting climate targets unless it slashes fossil fuel use

On 12 December, Xi Jinping announced new 2030 climate targets at an on-line UN summit. The highlights were plans to raise wind and solar power generating capacity to 1200 gigawatts (GW), nearly three times the current 414 GW, and for fossil fuels’ share of the primary energy balance to go down to 75% from the current level of 88%. Environmental NGOs said that building wind and solar would not be enough to hit China’s own targets, leave alone targets that would forestall dangerous climate change. They estimate that 330 GW of China’s nearly 1100 GW of coal-fired capacity would have to be shut down too.

Smith, writing before this announcement, argued that, while China’s government is still building solar and wind, “it has effectively abandoned transitioning to renewables”. He points to still-rising emissions, ongoing investment in coal, expansion of coal-to-gas facilities and the gigantic infrastructure building programme announced in March. (Part of that is a carbon-heavy high-speed rail plan slammed by transport researchers as senseless.)

In his book (pages 76-79), Smith compares the bureaucratic regulation of Chinese electricity networks unfavourably with market-based systems. He points to the outrageous level of “curtailment” of wind and solar power (i.e. the deliberate reduction of available renewable power, keeping it behind coal-fired power in the queue for space on the grid).

Smith is overstating his case on renewables in two ways, I think. First: if the Chinese ruling elite put its mind to it, I have little doubt that it could expand wind and solar capacity rapidly. It has already accomplished some of the most astonishing infrastructure projects in history, including near-total electrification on one hand, and the boondoggles that Smith denounces on the other.

Protesters against the new national security law gesture with five fingers,
signifying the “Five demands – not one less” on 1 July 2020

Second: to build renewables infrastructure, state direction as opposed to market mechanisms might be an advantage. Throughout the history of capitalism it has almost always been state-directed investment that built railroads or electrified the countryside. Moreover, western electricity markets don’t work as well for renewables expansion as Smith implies. Once renewables capacity is built, the running costs are close to zero, prices fall on windy and sunny days, and that plays havoc with electricity companies’ revenues, which the markets prioritise.

For these reasons, I think massive expansion of wind and solar is possible in China. From the point of view of tackling dangerous climate change, though, this will be completely useless if such capacity is used not to replace coal but to give a new lease of life to blind, reckless and ecologically damaging expansion. Smith is right about that.

In a nightmare scenario, renewables capacity could be added to the world’s biggest coal-fired power system, to churn out more stuff of dubious use value, and at great human and natural cost. Smith writes:

Even if Xi were able to entirely replace fossil fuels with solar and wind, if he were to simply waste renewable energy producing more disposable products, needless consumerism, pointless overproduction and overconstruction, ‘blingfrastructure’ to glorify the Chinese Communist Party, ghost cities, damned-up rivers and paved-over forests, then the result would be the same: runaway global warming to climate collapse. There is just no way that Xi can ‘peak China’s emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060’ while also maximising growth.

There is some hyperbole in there, I think, but the last sentence is 100% right. That’s the nub of the issue. Renewables construction doesn’t take away the unsustainable character of capitalist expansion, in China or anywhere else.

5: It is the people of China, not its government, in whom we should put our hopes for change

In the last chapter of his book, Richard Smith surveys the democracy movement in Hong Kong. In contrast to those on the “left” who see the protests only through a geopolitical frame (of which more in a linked post), he welcomes the movement unequivocally, and hopes it will spread across China.

Xi’s “thuggish crackdown” on the protests have had the opposite of their intended effect, Smith argues (page 188); they have “deepened, broadened and empowered democratic forces”. It’s the worst set of outcomes for the CCP. While many in China “yearn for a transition to a capitalist democracy”, he writes (page 193):

[C]apitalism, democratic capitalism, or even ‘green capitalism’ is no solution for China’s environmental crisis, because around the world democratic capitalism and green capitalism are racing China off the cliff to extinction. […]

If humanity is to save itself, we have no choice but to cashier both Western capitalism and China’s communist capitalism and replace them both with some form of mostly publicly owned, and democratically planned and managed ecosocialist economy.

Smith doesn’t pretend to know how such changes will be achieved, or even which way things will turn out in China. But his starting point is the right one: what matters most is what people do, not what the state does.

In my view, one of the most important consequences of the Chinese boom is that, in the space of a few decades, it has brought into being a body of urban working-class people that numerically dwarfs the working class in Europe of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Social and labour movements are emerging in that vast class of people in ways about which we in Europe know little. Why should we expect those movements will be any less powerful, and any less decisive in shaping history, than the European workers’ movement of the 20th century to whose history we look?

Hopefully, Richard Smith’s book, and his article, will lead to wider discussion of the complex relationship between China and world capitalism, the causal connection between that and the climate and ecological crisis … and what we can all do about it. GL, 15 January 2021.

■ A linked post. China and the “left”: what planet are you people on?

Download both posts as a PDF here

■ China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse by Richard Smith: publisher’s information and a webinar.

■ The Chuang blog (in English) analysing Chinese capitalism and workers’ movements

■ Howey Ou, organiser of student climate strikes in China, on twitter.

On People & Nature:

■ China’s coal-fuelled boom: the man who cried stop

■ China: collective resistance against i-Slavery

⏭ Keep up with People And Nature.  Follow People & Nature on twitter … instagram … telegram … or whatsapp. Or email peoplenature[at]yahoo.com, and you will be sent updates. 

China ➖ Xi Jinping’s Coal Stokes The Climate Fire

Matt Treacy ✒ The controversial – some would say deeply suspicious – World Economic Forum which readers may be familiar with as the promoter of the “Great Reset” which would entail the radical overhauling of the global economic system, continues to pump up the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. 


The BRI is a massive programme of investment which was estimated by the Institute of International Finance to have been worth $690 billion in projects in 105 different countries by the middle of 2020.
 

Ireland, as we have seen, is one of those targeted states. Supporters of the BRI like the Ireland China Institute wax lyrically about “Mr. Xi Jinping’s great $7 trillion achievement.”

Likewise, Sinn Féin seems to have a soft spot for the Communist Party of China. One wonders why. On January 16, MEP Matt Carthy released a statement calling on the Irish government to heed the latest warnings from the World Economic Forum on climate change. In it he refers to the “scale of the [economic] slowdown in China.”

Yes, in relative terms the Chinese economy experienced lower growth in 2020, but it grew by 6.3% in the last quarter of the year, compared to negative growth for the year across the vast majority of the world. Indeed, far from being in crisis as some of its more duplicitous allies would like to spin, Oxford Economics is forecasting “robust investment growth” going forward.

Which begs the question why Carthy, a member of the most pro-Beijing political group in the European Parliament, is so anxious to portray the deal agreed with the EU – which the left have been pushing for since 2012 – as a sort of a favour to the poor Chinese billionaire Marxists, rather than what it is; another chance to strengthen and advance their foothold in the EU.

One suspects that the expansion of the Chinese state overseas and the “Great Reset” are not unconnected. This is not normal foreign investment. It is either directly funded, by over half, through Chinese state enterprises with the remainder being from public private partnerships or individual enterprises. Exactly how the WEF mission to “improve the state of the world” is enhanced by furthering the interests of the most perfectly totalitarian state in history is unclear.


The World Economic Forum is regarded by China as a key to building influence among western political and economic elites and there are a myriad of connections between it and the Communist Party of China as documented by researchers such as Hamilton and Ohlberg. The founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab was awarded the China Reform Friendship Medal by the CCP in 2018 for assisting in “China’s efforts to re-engineer the global economic order.”

The WEF public approach to China is eerily reminiscent of people like Lord Darlington in Kazou Ishiguzo’s Remains of the Day who will declaim that “Oh, Hitler/Xi is a devilish old chap in some ways, but he is no threat to anyone, and his achievements must be admired.”

Thus on the one hand, the WEF publications have stated that China has been impacted greatly by the virus, but on the other cannot help itself in extolling at great length the future prospects of what it forecasts and clearly hopes will be the main global economic force of the century.

There are still some critics, who manage to sneak past the gate keepers. Among them are the signatories of an impressive document sent to the intelligence services of the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, dated January 11. The document is signed by among others retired United States General Robert Spalding who was forced out of the National Security Council, Attorney Michael Senger, and Sanjeev Sabhlok who resigned from the Victorian state treasury in September over what he described as the creation of a “police state” in Australia to enforce virus restrictions.

The document, entitled ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Lockdown Fraud’, is available online. It’s basic contention is that the entire notion of national lockdowns “was brought into human history on the order of General Secretary Xi,” and that “the imposition of lockdowns in Wuhan and other areas of China — a nation unconstrained by concern for civil liberties and constitutional norms — started a domino effect where one country, and state, after another imposed draconian and hitherto untried measures on their citizens”.

Whatever the health rationale, and the authors like many question the official view, its consequences are apparent.

Among them potentially are economic and geopolitical changes that may be the most profound since the Black Death of the 1340s which reduced the population of Europe to the same level it had been 250 years previously. While the scale of death is nowhere near to being on that scale, there are those who regard the “Pandemic” as a lever to promote just as radical a “reset” as followed on the devastation of the Plagues, except this time that reset will be engineered not organic.

And who will benefit from that? Qui Bono? According to the authors of the report and other observers it will first and foremost be the Chinese Communist Party, and secondly its collaborators among the economic and political elites across the globe.

To put it crudely, it has clearly been in China’s interests to encourage the lockdown consensus, even to the sinister extent, as evidenced in the report, of supplying drones to 22 American states to monitor its citizens. The company concerned, DJI, was later blacklisted by the Trump administration for being complicit in Communist use of its technology for the collection of genetic information and the electronic surveillance of Chinese citizens and their overseas client states.

The report also examines the large loss of life which occurred among patients given mechanical respiration at the start of the panic.

In early March 2020, the WHO released COVID-19 provider guidance documents to healthcare workers. The guidance recommended escalating quickly to mechanical ventilation as an early intervention for treating COVID-19 patients, a departure from past experience during respiratory-virus epidemics. In doing so, they cited the guidance being presented by Chinese journal articles, which published papers in January and February claiming that “Chinese expert consensus” called for “invasive mechanical ventilation” as the “first choice” for people with moderate to severe respiratory distress, in part to protect medical staff,” the report notes.

“By May 2020, it was common knowledge in the medical community that early ventilator use was hurting, not helping, COVID-19 patients, and that less invasive measures were in fact very effective in assisting recoveries. A New York City study found a 97.2% mortality rate among those over age 65 who received mechanical ventilation. The “early action” ventilator guidance that the WHO distributed to the world killed thousands of innocent patients; the WHO obtained that guidance from China,” it states.

It is astonishing to see the extent of the links between those who dominate American media; Warner Brothers who own CNN, Amazon, NBC, the New York Times, Washington Post and others, and the Chinese state through shareholdings and investment. These of course were the main promoters of the lockdown in the US, and the vanguard of the four year campaign to depose Trump.

The intent of the Chinese manipulation of the virus is clear: It is to utilise the mechanisms supplied by modern technology “to control every aspect of citizens’ lives, binding them to the state by breaking all pre-existing social bonds.”

You only have to listen to our own deracinated Woke to understand the commonality of interest between them and the monster in Beijing. It is no coincidence that the serial protesters of the far left are among the most avid supporters of state restrictions. Their only quarrel with The Man is that they want to be him. Well, they are if it’s any comfort to them.

The report concludes not with some dystopian Cormac McCarthy vision of the future but with a snapshot of the horrific devastation that has already been wrought across the planet in the past year. Not by Covid deaths, but by the lockdown. And from the rubble of the destruction if all this continues will crawl the cockroaches and whatever parasites those ultimate feeders of human misery host.

Including those in Ireland who are happy to be the smiley face of Chinese gangland capitalism and the social media leftist advocates of closing down Epoch Times and other exposers of the reality of Chinese Communism.

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland.
He is currently working on a number of other books; His latest one is a novel entitled Houses of Pain. It is based on real events in the Dublin underworld. Houses of Pain is published by MTP and is currently available online as paperback and kindle while book shops remain closed.

New Report Claims China’s Lockdown Was ‘Fraud’ We All Fell For

Gabriel Levy ✒ As China’s ruling elite connives with European and American politicians to promote false climate “solutions” via the international talks, its defenders on the “left” claim it is aiming for an “ecological civilisation”.


A common approach is to foreground geopolitics: to present the trade war between the USA and China as part of the battle between capitalism and “socialism” and to sideline the class struggle in China.

The Chinese elite’s role in driving forward unsustainable capitalist expansion, so obscured and downplayed by its defenders on the “left”, is analysed by Richard Smith in his book China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse, which I discussed in a linked post, that you could read first.

In this post I contrast Smith’s approach to that of John Bellamy Foster, a writer on “ecological Marxism” and editor of Monthly Review, and comment on a review of Smith’s book by Andrew Burgin, a UK-based socialist activist. It’s in the form of five questions.

1 〰 Does the Chinese elite’s support for renewable electricity generation show that it is leading the way to an “ecological civilisation”?

The Chinese coal-fired boom of the last 20 years has made a substantial contribution to the climate and ecological emergency – and yet prominent “ecosocialists”, without reference to that boom and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s responsibility for it, accept at face value that party’s claims to be moving to “ecological civilisation”.

The role of China remains “crucial and contradictory”, the “ecological Marxist” John Bellamy Foster said in a recent keynote speech.

It is one of the most polluted and resource-hungry countries in the world, while its carbon emissions are so massive as to themselves constitute a global-scale problem. Nevertheless, China has done more than any other country thus far to develop alternative-energy technologies geared to the creation of what is officially [i.e. in China] referred to as an ecological civilisation.

At least, this time round, Foster made passing mention of those carbon emissions – although I haven’t found any other references to them in his writings. More often, he stresses that the renewables investment confirms that Chinese policy is moving the right way.

Foster starts a key 2015 article: “China’s leadership has called in recent years for the creation of a new ‘ecological civilisation’.” After reviewing CCP resolutions on this subject, Foster concludes: “There is no doubt that Chinese leadership has made significant steps toward a more sustainable development.”

As evidence he points to “the massive promotion of solar and wind technology”, “a growing share of non-fossil-fuel energy consumption”, as well as reductions in economic growth targets, new targets for carbon intensity of GDP, farmland protection and anti-pollution measures.

In 2017, in an article presenting “a Marxian view” of “the earth system crisis and ecological civilisation”, Foster pointed to China as a possible site for the launch of a “world ecological revolution”. China stood at a turning point, he argued: while “promoting very high rates of growth with the attendant horrendous economic problems”, it had also “raised the issue of ‘ecological civilisation’ and taken huge steps at shifting resources and technology towards environmental amelioration”. And:

[China] is known for some of the most serious forms of environmental damage on earth, while at the same time no country seems to be accelerating so rapidly into the new world of alternative energy.

“The massive promotion of wind and solar technology.” “Huge steps at shifting resources and technology.” “Seems to be accelerating […] into the new world of alternative energy.”

It is difficult to capture the hollowness of these statements, made in the shadow of the greatest expansion of coal burning in world history. 

In 2010 at the end of China’s first decade of accelerated growth, coal production was 3428 million tonnes, compared to 1384 million tonnes in 2000. The incremental output in 2010 – 2044 million tonnes – was more than the entire world’s coal output in 1960, at the height of the post-war boom.


Each year in the decade 2001-2010, China added to its coal output almost twice as much as Great Britain produced in total in 1870 (100 million tonnes), when it was a coal-driven hegemon. Between 2010 and 2015, China’s annual coal output rose by a further 318 million tonnes (about twice Poland’s total) to 3746 million tonnes.

Talk of “the massive promotion of wind and solar technology”, without discussing it in this context, is a monstrous delusion.

And what does “massive” mean, anyway? In 2016, energy supply from renewables in China was one-thirtieth of the supply from coal – a big improvement on 2000, when it was one-thousandth, but in volume terms dwarfed by coal’s expansion. (Those are my calculations from IEA energy statistics.)

Certainly, there have been substantial investments in wind and solar – but as in western countries that have done the same (e.g. Germany, Spain and the UK) these are puny compared to the ongoing support for fossil fuels. Even today, fossil fuels account for more than 85% of China’s primary energy supply.

The graph shows the increase in renewable energy use in China, compared to the increase in fossil fuel use.

The huge ramp-up of coal use in China this century is a factor in the climate and ecological crisis into which international capitalism has plunged the world. Discussion of the CCP’s pretensions to “ecological civilisation”, without taking this into account, plays into a false narrative. It strips words of their meaning. It obstructs discussion about how to resist the effects of that crisis and those who are exacerbating it.

2 〰 Is the relationship of the Chinese bureaucratic system and capitalism a key factor in the global climate emergency?

The strength of Richard Smith’s book, China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse, is that – in contrast to those who take the CCP’s talk of “ecological civilisation” at face value – he interrogates the way that, in its relationship with capitalism, the CCP has fed into the climate and ecological crisis. (I described some of his arguments in the linked post.)

It’s a great shame, then, that the first substantial review of Smith’s book from the “left” caricatures his attitude to capitalism and avoids serious discussion of the causes and consequences of the coal-fired boom.

The review, by Andrew Burgin on the Public Reading Rooms web site, attributes to Smith the view that a move from bureaucratically-directed capitalism (or whatever you want to call it – I’m agnostic about the labels) to “normal” capitalism is essential:

For Smith, China’s inability to protect its environment lies with state central planning and the absence of the profit motive. Under ‘normal’ capitalism a decline in profits will lead to a decline in production and a limit to growth. For Smith this is a necessary and essential step [from planning to ‘normal’ capitalism] to save the planet.

This parody of Smith’s view might give the impression that he favours “normal” capitalism against China’s bureaucratic-capitalist mashup. But that’s not true.

Smith does indeed point to ways in which bureaucratic, rather than market, incentives, exacerbate the frightful environmental damage done by the Chinese economy. The investment incentives for coal-fired power, and big unnecessary infrastructure projects, are two cases in point.

But while Smith, in his attempts to understand and explain the Chinese mashup, repeatedly compares it to “normal” capitalism, in the political part of the book (chapters 6 and 7) he keeps repeating that he has no faith in any type of capitalism to confront the ecological crisis. For example, on page 194:

One way or another, the CCP is headed for the dustbin of history. […] Yet however it falls, my contention here is that transitioning to capitalist democracy is not enough to save China or the world from climate collapse because no capitalism, green or otherwise, can accept the drastic changes we need to make to save ourselves.

There are other similar quotes in the linked post.

Burgin’s readers, left with the impression that Smith is some sort of advocate of capitalism, may well turn away from the vital questions he raises. Not a good outcome.

The issue Smith points to is that – despite, and/or because of, the elements of state direction of the economy – China has given a massive push to the climate and ecological crisis. Any meaningful description of China’s relationship with world capitalism has to explain this fact.

3 〰 Is “economic growth” in China a good thing?

Andrew Burgin writes:

Smith appears to be arguing that it is economic growth in itself which poses the central problem for humanity and that the protection of the planet and our future on it requires us to produce and consume less. This may be a possible strategy for sections of the population in the more advanced capitalist economies but it will not work for the impoverished billions in the Global South who understandably seek a better standard of living.

The first sentence sounds right: Smith thinks – and so do I – that humanity, through the medium of the global economy, needs to produce and consume less. But this is obviously a general statement about the world. It does not imply that I think that billions of people in the global south should not seek a better standard of living. Smith is big enough to talk up for himself, but there is nothing in his book to suggest that he thinks that, either.

Chinese factory workers

Now here are some questions for Burgin.

Is our collective imagination really so barren that we can not envisage a world where the economy produces less (and therefore, in total, less is “consumed” (a word that itself needs to be broken down)), and, at the same time, the living standards of people in the global south – and large numbers of people in the global north, too – improve?

Is our imagination so empty that we can not understand the idea of living better, without that necessarily meaning more stuff (and by stuff I don’t mean food, clothing, shelter or any of the beautiful things in life, I mean the carbon-intensive commodities churned out by the capitalist economy)?

This is not a new conversation in social and labour movements. Hasn’t Andrew Burgin heard of it before?

I recall an incident at the Climate Camp in London in 2009, at a discussion session on capitalism and global warming attended by about 1000 people.

The Marxist writer David Harvie, responding to environmental “minimalists” who advocated restraining consumption, said: “I am not going to go and say to a billion Chinese people, ‘you have to make do with less’. I am going to tell them: ‘you should have more’. [Shocked outrage from a quarter of the audience.] The question is: more of what?”

When I started writing this blog in 2011, I commented on this (here, see section 6):

My answer to “more of what?”, which I think is close to Harvie’s own answer, would be along these lines: 1. The basic means of subsistence (far from guaranteed to all Chinese families in 2011) must be secured for people in China and everywhere else, which can be done more than adequately with the existing level of technology. 2. People will become truly wealthy – i.e. they will lead full, fruitful and creative lives – as consumption is freed from the constraints of necessity and from the deformities of commodification. Abundance will come to be considered as the ability both to produce and consume through unalienated social relationships. Once embarking on a movement towards such an end, people in China and elsewhere will think very differently about what abundance is – in ways that it is hard for us, living under capitalism, to visualise.

4 〰 Has the Chinese state “developed the productive forces” in a way that weakens capitalism?

Western leftist enthusiasts for China are fond of pointing to the “development of productive forces” achieved under the CCP. Burgin writes:

Despite repressive and authoritarian elements within the political system in China, the CCP maintains support because of the development of the productive forces and the consequent improvements in people’s cultural and material life.

Burgin writes that Marxists who consider China to be a capitalist social formation need to explain “how under capitalism has such a massive development of the productive forces taken place?”

I would suggest we go back a step, and ask what we mean by “development of the productive forces” in the first place. For Marx, the productive forces comprised humanity’s natural surroundings, the instruments of labour used by humans to take what they need from those surroundings, and the people using those instruments of labour (in capitalist society, the working class). Marx envisaged that the more capitalist social relations shaped, mis-shaped and constrained these forces of production, the sharper would grow the tension between them.

Throughout the twentieth century, these meanings were almost lost to Marxists witnessing the travails of the Soviet Union and China. Those countries’ leaders subordinated everything to industrialisation, and to increasing labour productivity, By reducing the idea of “the development of productive forces” to these goals, many western Marxists lost sight of its broader meaning.

It was as though Marx had never written chapter 15 of Capital volume 1, where he explains how capital turns dead labour, in the form of machines, into tyranny over living labour; as though he had never railed against that tyranny and written, “the instrument of labour strikes down the labourer”.

To understand modern China, I think we need to recover this understanding of the way that capitalist social relations corrode, control and pervert the productive forces, in the very process of production turning them against humanity. If this is not what is happening on building sites erecting ghost cities, in prison-like factories producing i-Phones for the international market, and in mines (with the world’s worst safety record) ripping out climate-trashing coal to be wastefully burned, I don’t know what is.

In other words, we need to distinguish between the “development of the productive forces”, and the vastly more complex process of change in China. There has been breakneck industrialisation and breakneck urbanisation. While labour has been cheap enough to flood the world market with Chinese products, the fear of workers’ action – even under an authoritarian, anti-union government – has, as far as I understand, driven up wage levels in many sectors, to the extent that labour in other Asian countries is in some cases far cheaper.

But this economic expansion is two sided. The benefit of Richard Smith’s research is that he examines its destructive, anti-human side: the super-exploitation of tens of millions of newly-urbanised workers; the environmental havoc, on a scale that dwarfs what Marx observed in 19th-century England; and the consequences in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, which was fully understood by the CCP as they ordered the sinking of countless coal mines … but is only now becoming visible to most Chinese people in the form of storms, rising sea level and the desertification of parts of the interior.

It would be a bad mistake to mis-identify China’s economic growth as “the development of the productive forces”. And an even worse mistake to mis-use that Marxist label to justify policies that contribute so much to intensifying exploitation and exacerbating the climate danger.

5 〰 Does the Chinese state embody something revolutionary or anti-capitalist, to be protected from capitalism? If so, what?

John Foster, writing in October last year (in the introduction to a special issue of Monthly Review on China), claimed that Xi Jinping is “reviving the role of Marxian political economy”, and:

All the signs are that China is seeking to defend the strategic noncapitalist elements of its system as a response to the growing hostility of imperial capital at the centre of the world economy.

These elements were socialist, he suggested in his 2017 article: in contrast to the “capitalist road” taken by former Soviet states, China, while “clearly taking the ‘capitalist road’ to socialism, never completely renounced its socialist goals, nor gave up on the planning system entirely”.

What he does not explain or discuss is how the state control and direction of the economy – which is presumably what he means by “strategic noncapitalist elements” – has not reduced, and, as Smith has shown, is in many respects intensifying, the exploitation of Chinese working people and the natural world in which all people live.

Andrew Burgin contrasts China to the former Soviet states:

China has managed to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union; it has navigated a different course by integrating within the global economy in a way that the Soviet Union never was. It is an economic peer of the US and by 2040 its economy is projected to be twice the size of the US economy.

The first point here is that the frightful prospect of unmitigated economic growth, in the context of the world capitalist economy – with the associated human and ecological damage – does not seem to scare Burgin as much as it scares me.

The second point is that comparisons of China and the former USSR can be facile. Meaningful analysis would consider both the differences and the similarities.

Clearly the horrendous slump and hyperinflation of the early 1990s in Russia and Ukraine, as Soviet industries collapsed, and the exacerbation of the demographic and health crises that began in late Soviet times, were in many ways outcomes of the collapse of the USSR. But the economic stagnation that prepared the ground for them was a Soviet phenomenon.

At that time the Chinese government, having repressed the Tiananmen square generation of protesters in a way the Soviet authorities were unable to do, was preparing for its own opening to the market. Urban workers were always protected from unemployment by the state firms. But that protection persisted in parts of Russia too – not to mention Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, where state institutions were not turned upside down in the way they were in European former Soviet states.

A comparative study of employment, underemployment and precarious employment in the former USSR and China would probably reveal as many similarities and differences. This was two very different versions of opening up to the market – but opening up it was, in both cases.

The comparisons would anyway be limited by the ways in which the Chinese and former Soviet labour forces are worlds apart: the one many times larger, cheaper and less urbanised than the other.

As for the state: the Soviet state collapsed and the Chinese state did not. Even as it opened up to capitalism, the Chinese state retained control of the banking system and some key branches of the economy. But as of 2021, while the manner of its integration into world capitalism is very different from Russia’s, the fact of integration is not.

Richard Smith’s book examines the manner of this integration, in the context of the severe rupture of the relationship between humans and nature of which China’s coal-fired boom is part. The developmental achievements of the Chinese state (gains in health, literacy, electrification, poverty reduction and so on) do not cancel out the harsh reality of this integration, or the Chinese elite’s role in it.

That is what Smith is trying to start a discussion about, and some people are not listening. GL, 15 January 2021.

■ If you have got this far and you have not read the linked post, “China: Xi Jinping’s coal stokes the climate fire”, I recommend it.

Download both posts as a PDF here

On People & Nature:

■ China’s coal-fuelled boom: the man who cried stop

■ China: collective resistance against i-Slavery

⏭ Keep up with People And Nature.  Follow People & Nature on twitter … instagram … telegram … or whatsapp. Or email peoplenature[at]yahoo.com, and you will be sent updates. 

China And The “Left” ➖ What Planet Are These People On?

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