Part III of a review of The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century. Read Part I here, Part II here.
Reactionary Socialism?
The misplaced belief that China is a socialist great power leads The East is Still Red to a double standard: American exceptionalism and imperialism are depicted as menacing (not necessarily wrong), but its counterpart in Chinese exceptionalism at home and imperialistic conduct abroad go unacknowledged.
The danger here is that China’s ethnonationalist authoritarianism is not only a tool used to maintain an unbalanced capitalist system; it lends itself to spilling over into expressions of domination at home and jingoism abroad.
The majority of workers lack political power and are unable to afford a living—by the CPC’s own admission. But their compensation is ethnonationalist grievance; a psychic wage for those lucky enough to be Han Chinese and unlucky enough to be part of China’s precarious working class. Han nationalism sometimes harbors a discriminatory view of ethnic minorities, but its strangest enemy fixation is the baizuo (“white left”), a straw-man category of subversive they associate with the geopolitical and cultural threat of “Western hegemony.”
Just as the MAGA right in the United States opposes political and economic democracy by way of both mocking and fearing all expressions of “woke” politics, so too do China’s reactionaries simultaneously ridicule and claim to fear baizuo to justify their civilizational superiority contra the barbarism of others.
Xi Jinping has mastered tapping into these sentiments as a post-growth alternative source of regime legitimacy, exploiting the politics of ethnonationalism to an extent that his predecessors did not. Remarkably though, The East is Still Red has nothing critical to say about Xi. Such an omission is glaring enough considering the despotism he has been charged with overseeing since 2012. But the larger problem is that Martinez offers no account for how Xi Jinping was even possible.
In the years leading up to December 2012, when Xi Jinping came to power, there was an internal Party dispute between reformers and what politically were the forces of reaction. In Chongqing, a province in China’s Southwest, municipal secretary of the CPC Bo Xilai oversaw political experiments dubbed the “Chongqing model.” These experiments were people-centered reforms aimed at redistribution and “common, shared prosperity”—for some, a glimmer of hope that China would live up to anticapitalist aspirations.
But Xi’s selection—and the ongoing war on “corruption” that he promoted and benefited from, ultimately purged Bo Xilai. Both were a rebuff to those seeking to reform the Chinese system. Xi would co-opt popular rhetoric like “common prosperity,” sometimes talking like a socialist, but Xi was the preferred choice of the nationalist oligarchs for a reason.
His consolidation of power in the years to follow had not been based on charisma; it had been based on the reality that he represents sectional interests within the party that fear reform, benefit from the status quo, and only seek to change China in the direction of making it a more cohesive, unified, dissent-free nation—which is why the building up of China’s national security state is a useful political project for Xi even apart from whether it usefully counters the US.
None of this political context features in The East is Still Red. Without it, expressions of Chinese ethnonationalism in its periphery are inexplicable.
In 2019, for instance, China quashed a militant pro-democracy movement as part of effectively recolonizing Hong Kong. Its incessant threat-making toward Taiwan is framed not as an issue of an empire-nation seeking the takeover of an adjacent nation but rather as an issue of national unification—a narrative that erases self-determination for what is an already existing vibrant social democracy.
And as Darren Byler has written, China’s persecution of Uyghurs is part of its “colonial-capitalist frontier making”—the convergence of authoritarian techno-surveillance, racial hierarchy, and labor repression. Internment camps are exploited for corporate profit and fulfill ethno-political ideas about “living space” and Han identity. Even nominally free Uyghurs are subjected to “non-internment, state-imposed forced labor” at scale in support of national economic growth targets.1
Added to this is the growing evidence of Chinese “assertiveness” abroad—most acutely its comical wolf-warrior diplomacy and the frequency of its incursions into the Exclusive Economic Zones of Japan and Taiwan.2 These are expressions of the jingoist currents that are entwined with ethnonationalism, which Xi rides as he seeks to use blood-and-soil rhetoric to champion the primacy of national security in all things.
China under Xi has also shown excessive comfort with far-right regimes. It’s not just China’s “no limits” partnership with Russia in spite of its invasion of Ukraine. China also favored recently ousted fascist-adjacent president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Xi Jinping maintains close ties to Bibi Netanyahu in Israel. Xi also counts as a “friend” Victor Orban in Hungary, who has defended China’s crackdown on protestors in Hong Kong and blocked the European Union from issuing statements that would have rebuked China for the National Security Law that facilitated Beijing’s re-conquest of Hong Kong.
In Germany, meanwhile, the CPC spent years courting the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Not only that, Chinese intelligence actively cultivated at least one far-right politician in Germany as an agent meant to shift Germany’s foreign policy in China’s favor, and ran a similar operation seeking out far-right politicians in Belgium.
China is far closer to being the vanguard of the global far right in Asia than it is a champion of world socialism.
Any leftist who opposes the US national security state must see the same types of problems in China’s national security state. Any antifascist who worries about the rise of the global far right—sometimes called the “nationalist international” or “reactionary international”—must worry about China’s share in that too.
In the end, buying into the claim that Chinese power is a liberatory force in the world commits the same romantic error that American exceptionalists make—the other is the real threat and our power is a force for good in the world.
That’s the kind of flag-draped nonsense that gave us the very Cold War that the anti-anti-China camp (rightly) wishes to avoid.
One of the things that bothers me is that hysterical anticommunist reactionaries from the West have been among those most charged up about Chinese labor abuses, especially in Xinjiang. Some of their evidence is quite good, and the problem of labor repression is real, but it’s not lost on me that their political project is not about the thing they’re hysterical about.
Taiwan’s proximity to mainland China makes “incursions” into its EEZ inevitable, but the PLA has been increasing their frequency and crossing the median line in the Taiwan Strait too. So if someone tries to apologize for China’s massive uptick in air/maritime incursions, they’re full of shit. The good argument does not deny what’s happening; it explains what’s happening.
It's interesting that you (rightly) question the coherence between the rhetoric that claims to be "socialist" and the real world, but you do not apply that approach to the purported "no limits" partnership between Russia and China, taking it for granted. I think it is also the case that China-Russia relations are limited by certain boundaries and mistrust, don't you think? To begin with, if it was a real partnership without limits we would have seen Chinese military support to Russia and Chinese business would not be stopped by Western sanctions on Russia ("There is evidence that some Chinese banks are already dumping Russian business" https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/03/18/how-china-russia-and-iran-are-forging-closer-ties)