Part I: The Contradictions of a Chinese “Communist” Manifesto
Part I of a review of The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century
Shortly after taking power, Xi Jinping lavished praise on China’s working class, remarking:
…we must make sure that the working class is our main force. The working class is China’s leading class; it represents China’s advanced productive forces and relations of production; it is our Party’s most steadfast and reliable class foundation; and it is the main force for realizing a moderately prosperous society in all respects.
But do Xi’s words reflect the reality of how China is governed, or even the aspirations of the Communist Party of China (CPC)? That question hovers above virtually all debates about China within leftist politics globally.
A section of communists and revolutionary-adjacent socialists—what we might call an anti-anti-China camp—cling to a belief that Xi’s China is the closest thing on this earth to a worker’s paradise.
This crowd insists that China is socialist because, in effect, the Communist Party of China says it is. Marxist argot permeates how the Chinese government expresses itself rhetorically. And since the ruling regime identifies as a formally communist party, well, why not take them at their word?
That is the position Carlos Martinez takes up in The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century.
Martinez quotes Deng Xiaoping in laying the analytical foundation for his argument: “If markets serve socialism they are socialist; if they serve capitalism they are capitalist.”
But this statement, as well as Martinez’s overall pitch for China as socialism’s global vanguard, are, at best, unconvincing. Martinez’s explicit desire to resist the world’s disturbing drift toward a “new Cold War”—a subject to which he devotes an entire chapter at the end—is understandable. Even laudable. As any reader of this newsletter knows, I am not a fan of geopolitical rivalry.
But his analysis is not an effective way of making that case.
The East is Still Red is convinced that liberation and a better world lay just on the other side of China’s challenge to America’s waning hegemony—in effect, choosing the Chinese “camp” over the Western “camp.” That controversial claim is built out of category errors, unreasonable assumptions, and a failure to ask the right questions. It’s also dangerous.
The CPC under Xi Jinping is a deeply reactionary regime that relies on the alchemy of ethnonationalism, state repression, and capitalist exploitation to stay in power. We can debate how “far right” that makes China’s party-state, but it certainly embodies few of the egalitarian or liberatory commitments we should expect of a regime guided by left-aligned principles.