The All-Empire Worker’s League and its Member Organizations call on all Communists, all local Marxist cells, and all those who love the people and yearn for liberation, to engage in immediate efforts to unify and solidify their local allegiances. We urge any and all Marxist-Leninist cells within the US empire or its junior partners Canada and Mexico to contact the League directly to begin the process of integration into a country-wide network capable of opposing the imperialist war machine.

Fight, fail, fight again!

On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, the Great Satan and its vassal in occupied Palestine launched a cluster of missiles at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just in the opening salvo, the settler-terrorist regime has bombed a school and killed over a hundred school-aged children, decisively bringing the devastation of the children’s holocaust in Gaza to the heartlands of another nation. As thus proven, the imperialists will stop at nothing to reassert their hegemony, to rescue the “Pax Americana,” because they cannot stop. The abyss of financial collapse and imperial decline looms wide in the imaginations of the yankee elites, as well it should. To preserve the empire and their place in it, no crime is too criminal, however grotesque, and no atrocity is too atrocious, however vast. No destruction is too devastating, however permanent and disfiguring for the shared future for humanity. Anything and everything is on the table, no matter the consequences.

Today the Third World War is being fought on every continent. The genocides waged by the imperialists in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue unabated. The Alliance of Sahel States continues its open rebellion against the neo-colonial system. The battle with Revolutionary Yemen over control of the Red Sea reignites. Missiles launched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rain down across the empire’s “middle east.” Sirens blare once again in the heart of the forward base colony in occupied Palestine. Resistance forces in occupied Iraq launch a new offensive against the imperialists. The decade-long struggle by the Russian Federation to wrest Ukraine from the clutches of the neo-nazi NATO coup regime continues to grind at the unity of the US-NATO-EU imperialist cartel. The people’s struggle for control of the state in Bolivia carries on despite setbacks, and besieged Venezuela and Cuba persist and develop national autonomy with the assistance of the multipolar powers. Soldiers of the Korean People’s Army march triumphant in Pyongyang on their return from the Kursk front, bringing home valuable modern combat experience against imperial troops for use in the defense of their homeland. The Taiwan question looms at the forefront of east Asian politics.

The Palestinian people of Gaza, silenced and forgotten by the West, still struggle for their lives against floods, cold, disease, and starvation, as the colony’s encirclement and genocidal siege continues unabated in its third year. With every passing hour the disfigurement and trauma of colonial genocide is laid ever heavier on the lives and minds of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

At every turn for the past five centuries, the settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our beautiful continent by imperialist Europe and its “United States” has revealed itself to operate according to raw violence and self-interest alone — and today more people than ever before in all of world history stand witness to the unremittent and unabashed savagery of the euro-amerikan imperial system and are asking themselves, “what is to be done?”

Inside the borders of the US empire, the ICE secret police continue to kidnap innocents and doom untold thousands to die in concentration camps. Migrant workers, refugees, and Indigenous people are targeted for ethnic cleansing, and resistance is stamped out by increasingly militarized police forces. The empire’s oppressed wage a daily struggle for survival against a still-rampaging but censored SARS-2 pandemic, eugenicist labor policies, and ever more openly-genocidal ableism and transphobic violence. And yet the “progressives” of the imperial heart of darkness itself are talking about their 2028 electoral candidates, as if this war is merely a matter of legislative policy. Many “socialists” insist that revolution is impossible, and the Four Opportunist Parties continue their strategies of co-opting spontaneous organizing and demobilizing radical movements. For those of us in the imperial core, the question of how to respond, how to organize, and how to start winning, weighs more heavily and more urgently than ever.

Take stock of the international situation, of how ever more of the world is drawn into conflict with the empire. Then take stock of your local situation, of how ever more people around you are drawn into antagonism with the system. Settlers splinter into fragmentary interest groups as the solution to the crisis of imperialism becomes a more contentious and pressing issue, or they simply “check out” of political engagement altogether, preferring to numb themselves with the bread and circuses of our age. At the same time, the oppressed are drawn to co-operate and resist together, or die alone. As the international situation shifts, it is reflected in the local conditions we experience. Just as the settlers here are more and more at each others’ throats, the member states of the NATO imperialist cartel descend into infighting as their position worsens and continues to destabilize. The experience of the first two world wars of the capitalist-imperialist era taught us that global war is the standard modus operandi of how the global capitalist system resolves its internal crises. Furthermore, the experience of the first two world wars taught us that only revolutionary war can put an end to these conflicts. The first world war was ended by revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, and the second by the united efforts of the revolutionary peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. No such revolutionary force directly threatens the heartlands of the imperialist forces today as the Soviet Union and its allies once did, and so this third world war will only end as the first did: when the revolutionary masses within the empire unite and put an end to it. These masses are the millions in occupied New Afrika and the occupied First Nations, and the millions of settlers oppressed by their state on the basis of their ability, gender, sexuality, and age.

In fighting all of these wars the empire is running out of ammunition; its production simply can’t keep up. Where it can’t control us with naked force, it seeks to intimidate us with pervasive surveillance. But always remember that the empire doesn’t have the manpower to surveil all of us. This is why it pours its finances into AI to do the work for it (as well as to create venues for speculation and parasitism). The empire aims to have the repression infrastructure it needs built before the AI bubble bursts, but rampant corruption and insufficient electrical infrastructure call even that goal into question. It has taken the combined efforts of billions of people in struggle over the last century to bring the empire to its knees, and our task is paltry by comparison: organize a few million more to at last tear out the empire’s heart on behalf of all humanity. We have to turn the third world war into the second US civil war, and carry this war to vanquish the settler empire once and for all. Only a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the pursuit of the empire’s defeat and complete capitulation to its enemies from within, can provide us the concrete foundation for building revolutionary unity among our organizations. All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

In terms of its size, dynamism, and degree of global integration, China’s market economy is extraordinary. Though it’s known officially as a “socialist market with Chinese characteristics,” its market features far predate the 1978 decision on “reform and opening.” The reformist Chinese growth model has always been characterized by a distinct pragmatism. This involves integrating macro programming and regulations, a mix of public and private ownership and control, market allocation to various degrees of resources and distribution, bureaucratic cronyism in productive and business organizations, and international “free trade.”

This model is the outcome of decades of adaptation and innovation. While much has been written on pre-nineteenth century Chinese economic strategy, far less attention has been paid to the wartime fiscal and monetary experiments undertaken during the Communist Revolution. In an effort to rectify this oversight, I review revolutionary economic policy from the 1920s until the 1940s, reflecting on its theoretical and institutional implications. 

The pacified empire

The unified Qin–Han state originated from an amalgam of the annals of Warring States around the same time as the rise of Rome in the Western Hemisphere. While the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, imperial China outlived it and subsequent empires. This longevity was in part rooted in its socioeconomic arrangements. Trade had flourished early with extensive internal and external networks across continental and maritime expanses, encompassing numerous silk roads and transportation routes to reach many societies and cultures. 

Prior to 1800, the Chinese, Indian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, and Arab economies were weightier producers than their counterparts elsewhere.¹ In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith recognized that “China is a much richer country than any part of Europe,” despite signs of stagnation.² Instead of an industrial revolution, the Chinese accomplished an “industrious revolution,” argued Giovanni Arrighi, consistent with a Smithian path of “natural progress of opulence” rather than the “unnatural and retrograde” European path of interstate rivalries over power and colonial extraction.³ China at its splendor was so wealthy, thanks to regions like the Yangzi Delta, that while Europe was compelled to adopt machines to cut labor costs, “China didn’t ‘miss’ the industrial revolution—it didn’t need it.”⁴

By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, China had become the largest trader on the silver standard, contributing to the emergence of global capitalism but without transforming into a colonial empire. In a review of Chen Huan-chang’s 1911 The Economic Principles of Confucius and his School, John Maynard Keynes noted China’s trimetallic system dating back to “the remotest times,” observing that in the use of paper money, the Chinese “long anticipated other peoples.”⁵

Accordingly, “cooperative banks” were invented around 220 AD, and, in subsequent centuries, developed into government and shadow banking of coins, notes, bills, bonds, and “flying money”—money certificates to “control the price of all commodities.”⁶ In place of the liberal legal institutions, credit systems, and public budgeting that characterized early modern Europe, the Chinese economy operated through informal arrangements of properties and contracts, claims and debts, rights and liabilities, which relied on personal and family ties, townsmen associations, and other private partnerships.⁷ Ingenious transactions and lending in China’s commercial centers notwithstanding, underdeveloped financial infrastructure and stimuli of the economy came to be a competitive disadvantage. The “pacified empire,” Max Weber remarked, was a contrast to war-financed “varieties of booty capitalism” in Europe, where states enriched themselves “through war loans and commissions for war purposes.”⁸

Economic difficulties and political turmoil around the transition from Ming to Qing were an instance of the financial weakness of the Chinese imperial monetary system. Under Europe’s financial hegemony, major inflation in China was directly caused by the depletion of silver inflow in the seventeenth-century world crisis.⁹ En route, European ocean vessels linked American cotton and mining products derived from slave labor and trade from Africa with the Chinese-Indian-Arab markets. Gunder Frank recounts this gigantic trading triangle in which the Europeans took out American silver to “buy themselves tickets on the Asian train.”¹⁰ Finding itself a “bottomless pit” for the influx of American silver and its monetization, China became dependent on foreign currency supplies and offshore exchange rates. This was not only economically but also politically costly, as the monetary arbitrage from the externally forged silver standard undermined the Chinese state. Foreign banks and other financial institutions had also come to China since the late-nineteenth century, hence the formation of a Chinese comprador class of financiers and financial brokers who locally facilitated imperialist super profits and rents.

Lacking the capitalist mechanisms of creative destruction and limitless accumulation, the premodern Chinese economy followed its own patterns of evolution—or involution, as some economic historians prefer to characterize it. Examples of its working methods are many: state depots of an “ever normal granary” (changpingcang) to balance seasonally fluctuated grain prices and regional price differentials; periodic government procurement of other essential goods in preparation for disaster relief and the easing of lean time market pressure; and recurrent reforms to unify taxation, regulate commerce, and calibrate competition. These ideas and institutions, refined over successive dynastic regimes, have been studied by economists, historians and sociologists in a growing scholarship of comparative economic history. 

Among the most well known classics is the Guanzi (seventh century BC). Two millennia before the advent of classical and neoclassical economics, this economic-philosophical text, believed to be a reflective record of the economic principles discussed between the Duke of Qi and his prime minister Guan Zhong in the Chun-Qiu period, can be read contemporarily. The core argument is a “heavy-light” distinction in the hierarchy of importance attached to goods in their production and trade, which determines the need for, and techniques of, official pricing. To ensure adequate supply of the “heaviest” items, for example, the government must “stabilize the price of grain in order to stabilize the overall price level and the value of money.”¹¹ On Salt and Iron is another famous classic, a collection of documents on the salt and iron debate between the realist Guanzians and the moralistic Confucian literati. At a West Han conference (81 BC), the former group as policy advocates promoted state intervention as an obligation for economic prosperity and price stability. The latter group, on behalf of aggrieved producers and merchants suffering predatory officials, lamented a foregone age of pliable governments.¹²

Following the Wu emperor (141-87 BC) who endorsed rounds of monetary reform, central monopolies of salt and iron developed, and became a staying policy. The state reined in fierce competition among the large landed and mercenary interests. These events were analytically narrated in such writings as “treatise on foodstuffs” and “usurers.”¹³ Ban had incorporated what was earlier documented in the “biographies of usurers” (book 129) and “a treatise of leveling” (pingzhun shu, book 30) by Si Maqian in the Records of the Grand Historian. The pingzhun officials were assigned to the balancing act of market stabilization by organizing “selling [crops etc.] where and when they are scarce and dear, and buying them where and when they are bountiful and cheap.” This particular conception and measure of pingzhun, together with the heavy-light differentiation based priorities, are perhaps the most outstanding of the ancient economic wisdoms in laying the policy foundation of China’s future economic performance.¹⁴

Power and adaption

In contrast to China’s pre-communist economic history and thought, wartime communist economic management has been largely neglected outside of China. The fusion of old wisdoms and novelties in this unique experience, however, deserves greater attention. 

The story begins with the first tide of the labor movement in the early 1920s. The Communist Party of China (CPC) and its Trade Union Secretariat resolved to amalgamate political and economic class struggles. Its earliest experiment with shareholding cooperation was a self-managed cooperative for the coalminers and railway workers in Anyuan, Hunan, in 1923. This effort initiated the use of membership “red shares” and coupons. Mao Zemin, a younger brother of Mao Zedong’s, was twice its general manager. After the Guomindang (GMD) right wing slaughtered tens of thousands of communists and sympathizers in 1927, the CPC retreated from urban agitation and recruited at the rural margins. In these areas, cooperative farms, workshops, credit, trading and remittance networks developed widely, with voluntary participants as shareholders of specialized or multifunctioning cooperatives.¹⁵

The cooperatives were also a vehicle of mutual aid and political education. Yu Shude, a party veteran since 1922, recognized that “creating collective power through cooperation” was a means for the vulnerable majority of the Chinese population to forge political ties. The ultimate aim was to replace private property, but “before the new social organization can be established, cooperation is the rescue for petty producers.”¹⁶ This idea was popular, and it echoed in the non-communist reform movements for Rural Reconstruction and Popular Education.¹⁷ It later accented the national rural cooperative campaign of the 1950s and was revived through the “Marxist theory of cooperation” to legitimize collectivization in the early 1980s.    

The uneven nature of Chinese development and the temporal-spatial specificities of the Chinese revolution bore significant implications for the revolution’s economic orientation. State building in the People’s Republic thus began in the rural peripheries decades before the CPC came to national power, with the strategy of “encircling the cities from the countryside.” The revolutionary bases were created and expanded in discrete territories to break the weak links of counterrevolution. This was possible because imperialist powers and their local pillars in China were divided, and conflicts among the warlords were pervasive. In his analysis of how the small, separatist red regimes could survive privation and isolation, Mao highlighted semi-coloniality and the indirect nature of imperialist rule. 

In the absence of an integrated national market, the red forces could carve out their own territories around the borders of several provinces away from the counterrevolutionary strongholds. However slim, the opportunity gave rise to the daring endeavor to build the “armed independent power of workers and peasants” as a “movable counter power.” Ultimately, the revolutionaries sought to aggregate a historical bloc out of this “state within the state.”¹⁸ During the next waves of revolution, they were vindicated, as a single spark did start a prairie fire.

Mao was writing in the mountainous provincial edges where the first Chinese red army regiments battled to win a primitive home as the cradle of an armed revolution. The Jinggang base was the first among communist local regimes to survive attacks by extreme adversaries. For the base, economic viability meant life or death. 

Central to the party’s minimum program was land revolution. This revolution was of epochal significance in overturning China’s thousands of years old “feudal” (a borrowed term in the communist vocabulary) order, which entailed the polarity of land concentration and landlessness, the collusion of landlords and bureaucrats, widespread miseries and stalled modernization. The communists sought to alter the division between capital accumulation and productive investment which resulted from land purchases and usury. By the same token, as the landed, money-owning, and power-holding classes were jointly destroying the agricultural base of Chinese society, the country’s legendary but stifled productive forces were invigorated thanks to the redistribution of land.

In the following two decades, the CPC carried out this effort while remaining sensitive to changing political circumstances. Policies on land redistribution or rent reduction engaged the regional communist governments, the red army, the trade unions, peasant associations, women’s federations, and other mass organizations. Without the economic conventions directed by a landed and patriarchal gentry, the party prioritized productive self-sufficiency, popular livelihood and military provision.

Trade was a predominant priority for impoverished red regions. Tungsten mining in the Jinggang mountains, for instance, was an indispensable source of income, hence the trading of ore with non-local merchants in return for certain daily necessities and badly needed medicines for injured soldiers. Over a series of military victories, the Chinese Soviet Republic was declared in the town of Ruijin in Jiangxi from 1931 to 1934, which commanded dozens of border region soviets nationally. This was a turning point in communist state crafting. 

But these enclaved regimes had to quickly develop commercial and financial ties. The joint-stock Zhicheng Bank in Shenyang is a good example of efforts to accomplish this. The bank was a vital asset of the party struggling to provide the isolated Northeastern Anti-Japanese Aggression Volunteers with medical and arms supplies.¹⁹ Just as remarkably, the party ran a commercial station in Hong Kong as a mission facility in the lifeline of its base areas and guerrillas. Qin Bangli, a banker in training and brother of Bo Gu, politburo general secretary from 1931 to 1935, was a “capitalist in practice but communist by conviction” who “scrimped every Hong Kong dollar he could” from business for the revolution while his family lived in a bare rented apartment.²⁰

Despite a battle for self defense, the red regimes were repeatedly overrun, cut off from one another, and economically strained. The central soviet experienced dramatic shortages and inflation, and consequently its authority had to resort to barter borrowing in 1934. Losing Ruijin to the GMD military extermination campaigns in the same year, the communists embarked on the epic long march and relocated their counter-state headquarters in Yan’an in northern Shaanxi (Shanbei). A special troop of the long marchers shouldered the soviet treasury in gold, silver, banknotes, and minting machines trekked a perilous 6000-mile journey. 

The relaunch of the soviet central bank in 1935 was based on these capital funds and the reserves of the existing local soviet bank. Soon after the three red field armies joined forces in Shanbei in 1936, they were restructured under the second CPC-GMD united front of the national resistance war and fought the Japanese and their puppet army in the most arduous conditions. By the end of 1945, the communists were in control of vastly enlarged “liberated areas” of ninety million people, or one fifth of the national population behind the enemy lines. Gathering momentum during the civil war, the now renamed People’s Liberation Army (PLA) took offensives to liberate north China and by the early summer of 1949 crossed the Yangzi river to seize the south. The US-backed GMD forces crumbled and fled to Taiwan. 

The communist managers strove to foster subsistence and commercial agriculture as well as rudimentary industries with a facilitating ownership structure, schemes of subsidies, tax breaks, and other incentives. The red army depended mainly on resources from the battleground but also ran military clothing and munition factories. The “campaign for mass production” in the Shan-Gan-Ning border region from 1940 to 1946 engaged all the government and army units; party and army leaders were each assigned quotas of labor or products to fulfill. This movement ensured that the main communist regional powers would be economically viable. It also initiated a proud tradition of self-reliance and the army’s productive and constructive roles in peacetime. 

The huge Huaihai campaign in the winter of 1948–49 also demonstrated how the sweeping land reform and related socioeconomic policies decisively changed the outcomes of the war. Thanks to the enrollment of recently landed peasants, the PLA was able to defeat the far better equipped GMD army. Division after division of the GMD army defected to the PLA on the spot, choosing to fight for their own land. 

Undoubtedly, the fact that the communist local blocs had sustained themselves since the Yan’an era, with some even growing into economic strongholds, helps explain their success. They selectively re-appropriated methods from a splendid civilizational tradition and invented their own. A most salient example was the purchasing of harvest in times of abundance and its distribution during lean times. Salt monopoly had also been adapted to manage the market and secure revenue. Though they lack a systematic economic ideology, these policies captured and nurtured market opportunities for common economic life, especially in trade within and beyond their borders.

Regional communist fiscal and monetary policies

The communists initially used portable mining machinery to strike coins as the circulating subsidiaries to silver dollars. These became the standard national currency. Although the images appeared crude (see the portraits meant to be of Lenin below), “what these coins may have lacked in appearance, they made up for in integrity.” That is, the communists were honest in their dealings with the peasants, and ensured that their coinage maintained good weight and fineness—in contrast to alternatives which had varied weights and qualities.²¹

This applied to the earliest red paper notes as well, which, despite a ragged surface, were promised at full value. Mao Zemin, now the Governor of the Chinese Soviet State Bank founded in 1931, together with Lin Boqu and Deng Zihui, Ministers of Economy and of Finance respectively, devised an independent regional money called guobi in July 1932. With the aim of creating a unified financial system, the guobi was declared the only acceptable currency for taxpaying and other formal payments. 

The bank issued public bonds and opened a range of banking businesses of deposit, mortgage, loan, credit funds, bill discount, and remittance in support of the local economy. To strengthen the newly instituted central treasury and secure a source of revenue for fiscal and military expenditures, the financial authority directly operated a state mining company. Most impressively, it also pioneered special trade zones to bypass the anticommunist embargo half a century before China’s reform-era special economic zones. Encouraging the export of cheap local products like grain, timber, paper, and ore, while importing locally wanted goods, the “state bureau of foreign trade” set up multiple offices and warehouses alongside the borders between red and white jurisdictions. 

The market logic and contradictions within the white regimes thus combined to generate a commercial boom in such places. The neighboring Min-Zhe-Gan soviet also used secret transportation routes with armed protection and invited outside merchants into its internal markets to boost trade. Its regional bank successfully made government offerings and was able to financially assist the central soviet.²²

In January 1935, the long marchers entered the small city of Zunyi in Guizhou and were stationed there for merely two weeks. They injected guobi brought from Ruijin into the market right away, pegging it to salt, the scarcest local commodity. Backed by the salt reserve seized from the warlords, the “red army notes,” as they were then dubbed, were received as “salt notes.” The purchasing power of the notes for salt and other basic goods was instantly stronger than any other currencies in the local market. Meanwhile, the exchange of red army notes with silver dollars was guaranteed by the soviet bank. 

The result was immediate and by any account a miracle. With its evident credibility, the new currency stimulated the market, aided the poor, and replenished supplies for an exhausted army. Before leaving the city, the bank opened a number of emergency stores for people to quickly use up their red army notes on materials or silver dollars, achieving almost complete withdrawal of the currency.²³ Unsurprisingly, the red banks which already existed in Shanbei had also pegged their currencies to salt. The shared tactic of salt monopoly continued after the arrival of the central soviet.  

In 1937, the communists formally launched their Shan-Gan-Ning Regional Bank under Cao Jvru’s governorship as the new soviet state bank replacing the Northwestern Branch under Lin Boqu since 1935. Confronted with critical economic and fiscal challenges in a poverty ridden region, and upon the issuing of the new border region banknotes or bianbi in various denominations on paper or cloth, Mao telegrammed the party’s policy leaders on August 17, 1938. He underscored monetary policy principles in the prolonged war against Japanese invasion: local base currency stability, avoidance of  oversupply and hence depreciation; sufficient bank reserves in kind as well as in Japanese puppet notes or weibi and the GMD national fabi; efficient external trade; and sustained army supply. The key was to “keep the value of our regional notes equivalent to or above the exchange rate of Japanese money.” Minor and less dependable currencies were also to be cleared out.²⁴

The “foreign” currency of weibi was held as the secondary reserve because “foreign trade” with the Japanese occupied areas was unavoidable for both importing essential industrial and consumer goods and shielding the bianbi against too much fluctuation. As for the fabi, given its domination in the national market as a relatively strong currency backed by the dollar and the pound (after the silver standard belatedly elapsed in China in 1935), it was also a necessary reserve for trade across red-white boundaries.²⁵ After the January 1941 Wannan Incident in which the communist New Fourth Army was unexpectedly attacked and nearly annihilated by the GMD, and with the Japanese occupiers pouring billions of weibi into the market to devalue the fabi, the communists had to alter their monetary policies.    

Each border region administered its own banking and taxation systems to promote local businesses while countering hostile market manipulations. The regional banks and tax regimes were relatively autonomous in their relationship with Yan’an, due to sheerly uneven economic conditions across regions and individually specific situations in the midst of war and revolution. As the institutions of the state within the state, they constituted a system separate from the national economic and financial jurisdiction. These institutions served as the guardians and facilitators of local economic resilience and hence the viability of the revolutionary bases. 

In the Shan-Gan-Ning region, government trading companies, such as the mainstay Guanghua Store²⁶ and many cooperative traders, participated in the “financial warfare” waged to defend the bianbi. They furnished vouchers or cash coupons tied to the red money. To strike fair distribution between revenue and tax burdens, the Jin-Cha-Ji border region introduced and amended its cumulative tax rules in the early 1940s. Party leaders and dispatched offices worked painstakingly to design a system of enhancing state fiscal capacity without overburdening common taxpayers.²⁷ To uphold the value of jinanbi issued by the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu region’s Jinan Bank, the regional government designated “foreign trade” denominated in it as the standard currency, and price control was instrumental for weibi holders to pay more for the same goods.²⁸

The odds, however, were enormous, and the bianbi did devalue on occasion. Shanbei had been hit by inflation from time to time due to a war racked economy and an adverse balance of payments. The export of salt, oil and other commodities was far from sufficient to offset importing locally unavailable manufactured goods.²⁹ The Jinan Bank was forced to inject extra notes and coins into the market to compete with the fabi and weibi which had been both banned but only ineffectively. They lingered as the bianbi was volatile. To contain the damage, the regional government kept the window of currency exchange legitimately open, while implementing ‘gradient’ rating differentials between the region’s central and peripheral areas. This move at least protected the value of the jinanbi in the core market of the red region and its assets and stocks.³⁰ A more effective way developed only later in the Shandong revolutionary base where the established monetary standards were resolutely abandoned.     

The Shandong regional Bank of Beihai, established in 1938, had since developed a cluster of divisions alongside the communist military advances in East China. The bank treated commerce as a weapon in the communist hands to integrate production, trade, and finance under a sustainable money and pricing regime.³¹ Xue Muqiao, chief financial advisor to the regional government in 1943–47, led an expert team to end the constant inflationary threats. The diagnosis was of a persistent inflow of weibi and a collapsing fabi. The Beihai Bank’s beihaibi or beipiao had already been declared the sole base currency in 1942, along with the financial authority’s stated mission of “issuing the kangbi, supplanting the fabi, and prohibiting the weibi.” (Kangbi or “money for resisting Japan” was another name for bianbi and here Beipiao.) This objective, however, did not materialize until nearly two years later, when the government achieved two preparatory objectives: possession of a sufficient stock of essential commodities to back beipiao, and parity of beipiao’s exchange rate for external trade. Steadily earning popular confidence and positive convertibility, this regional currency was consolidated to witness “good money driving out bad money.” As public and private traders and fabi holders either spent the money elsewhere or redeemed it for beipiao, the latter’s credibility accelerated. It became the most stable and favorable currency not only locally but also in the surrounding areas. 

Shandong was a model of communist regional economic governance, where farms, factories, shops, and other market actors came to flourish. Enemy currencies were expelled and trade thrived. The Shandong liberated areas became a resourceful base for the communist victory in the impending civil war. Xue explained this success through a strict limit on the quantity of circulating currencies and the red money’s overpowering market capture. “The law of ‘bad money driving out good ones’ discovered by the bourgeois economists’ could be reversed.”³² The fabi must be locally de-legitimized because its ongoing co-circulation would weaken beipiao’s self-defense and material reserves. 

Xue’s theory focused on the “material standard” (wuzi benwei) for paper money as opposed to the “universal gold standard.”³³ As mentioned, it was decided that the primary reserve for the bianbi was to be “goods, especially industrial goods.”³⁴ Only with such a material backing could the independently issued local currency hold on value and market confidence. Quoting Marx’s concept of money as commodities’ “general equivalent,” Xue argued that seeing the kangbi (bianbi) as “a castle in the air” without a metal foundation was mistaken. A currency could be pegged to precious metals or any hard currency as much as material goods. What mattered to the locals in the base areas was the worth of money materialized in physical rather than nominal forms. In Shandong, aside from producer goods, grain, peanuts, cooking oil, sea salt, cotton and other livelihood products were “the best guarantee” behind kangbi.

Responding to an American journalist who asked how beipiao had triumphed, Xue specified that “our material standard meant that we must monitor money supply according to the market demand. For every 10,000 yuan we issued . . . we would use at least 5,000 yuan to procure material goods.” With sufficient material reserves in place, the regional government could be a market regulator and price stabilizer by reflowing money from sales against inflation or increasing money to augment purchases and thereby neutralize deflation.³⁵

Towards the national planning and market

The protection and development of independent markets in communist territories required the designation of local base currencies supplied in the right amount at the right times. The red banks functioned as central banks while playing a range of microeconomic roles as commercial banks as well. The Northeast Bank followed this pattern to issue and solidify its dongbeibi after Japan surrendered. The revolution took the whole region in the next few years and turned the northeast into its own gigantic industrial and financial powerhouse. Both Dongbei and Beihai banks had thrived until the end of 1948 when the People’s Bank of China came into being in Shijiazhuang, Hebei, where the CPC leadership was getting ready to enter Beiping (Beijing). Formed through the merger of red Huabei, Beihai and Northwest Farmers’ banks, the communist national bank began to issue the first set of renminbi or “people’s dollars” on the eve of the founding of the PRC. 

The new state was confronted with economic chaos—acute hyperinflation, urban food shortages, and violent sabotage were symptomatic of a long mismanaged, deeply corrupt, and failing old regime. The crisis intensified with the 1948 GMD reform that introduced Golden Yuan Notes (jinyuanquan) to replace the severely depreciated fabi. Without minimal assurance in fiscal preparation and quantum of issuance, the note depreciated much faster than its predecessor and soon became nearly worthless. Relentlessly and soaring inflation directly contributed to the downfall of the GMD regime. 

A famous case of communist resolve was displayed in Shanghai upon the communist takeover. In early 1949, the municipal government transported a large quantity of cereals and other basic supplies into the city, bulk buying through government retailers to hasten price increases and then flooding the market with released stocks to bankrupt hoarding speculators. Differentiating between essential or heavy and non-essential or light commodities, the former were protected through a cost-plus formula for the latter. Skillfully utilizing market instruments to simultaneously depress both inflated prices and excess cashflow, the new authority swiftly restored the value of money and economic order.³⁶ Stabilizing the price of grain followed by intermediate consumer goods, the communists seemed to pick up on a traditional practice of purchasing the plenty to be sold in scant times. 

Winning economic battles nationally allowed coordinated state actions across regions. The wartime experiences proved handily valuable for the new state to manage economic recovery (while sustaining the war effort in Korea). In the process, the communist economic strategists also flouted the logic of a neoclassical postulate by stabilizing the price level before fixing the budget deficit.³⁷

Overcoming hyperinflation, financial breakdown, and speedy price stabilization also granted the rural powerholders a firm foothold in urban China. The enraged international ruling class had predicted that the rustic reds would not be able to manage large cities and the national economy, but this was soon disproven. 

A treasure trove

The demise of the old state and society paved the way for socialist industrialization without conventional market incentives or financial disciplines. Despite policy blunders and serious setbacks, the communist undertaking of “internal accumulation” was spectacularly developmental, both in physical infrastructure and in human development. 

Today, the importance of fiscal and monetary sovereignty and market stability remain crucial points of contention for developing and transitional economies around the world. Government reserves of essential goods, a public system of regional development banks, and the maintenance of a stable money supply are just some of the communist wartime policy experiments which bear contemporary resonance.

In reflecting on how the legal tender of bianbi was locally requisite forty years down the line, Xue Muqiao stressed its status as the only circulating currency vigilantly guarded in size and value. “The basic policy of monetary struggle” was to defend and consolidate the autonomy and security of the beihaibi market.³⁸ He contemplated that this understanding should be useful for those postcolonial nations still lacking the means to counteract imperialist money printing machinery, short-term bonds, and contagious inflation. Financial integration at the expense of autonomy in a speculative and crisis-ridden global market can be perilous.³⁹

Relatedly, the regulation of money supply continues to be debated. The provisional charter of the Chinese Soviet State Bank stipulated in 1932 that “money must be supplied in line with market demand” and “extremely cautiously” in an orderly manner, as again asserted at the second soviet national congress in 1934.⁴⁰ In addition to capping the size of currency circulation as an intricate artwork adjusted to changing demands, the rates of currency exchange were also closely monitored. In the 1940s, Zhu Lizhi, one time governor of the Shan-Gan-Ning regional bank had recourse to fiscal flexibility. Reacting to a hazardous budget deficit, Zhu elevated the bar on bianbi supply and encouraged business lending and mortgage loans to both monetize the deficit and provide for entrepreneurial cashflow.⁴¹ The one-sided austere methods, as he saw it, could harm liquidity and in turn worsen inflation.⁴²

State reserves also functioned as a price control mechanism. The material reserves behind bianbi balanced abundance and scarcity in the market and stabilized the currency through enabling government intervention. The financial authority could thus use its discretion to increase goods supply to lower prices against inflation or increase money circulation and buy in goods to hold prices against deflation. This “material standard,” set to constrain money supply and preserve the worth of unit money, was a token of communist financial governance banked on the regional political-legal power. An implication of this novelty in an age of unbridled financial capitalism could be the advantage of a strong real economy, for which the optimal fiscal and monetary means are yet to be worked out.

1. Frank, Andre Gunder, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), ch. 4.  ︎
2. Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1776]1976), 30, 70–71, 210.  ︎
3. Arrighi, Giovanni, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007), 69. ︎
4. van Zanden, J.L., “Before the Great Divergence: The Modernity of China at the Onset of the Industrial Revolution,” Jan 26, 2011; Pomeranz, Kenneth,The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).  ︎
5. Keynes, J.M., “The Economic Principles of Confucius and his School,” by Chen Huan-chang, The Economic Journal 22:88, December (1912) : 585.  ︎
6. Keynes, 585-86.  ︎
7. Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and Bin Wong, “Another Look at Credit Markets and Investment in China and Europe before the Industrial Revolution,” Yale University Economic History Workshop (2005), 14-18; Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), ch. 5; Rawski, Evelyn and Thomas Rawski, “Economic Change around the Indian Ocean in the Very Long Run,” paper presented at the Harvard-Hitotsubashi-Warwick Conference, Venice, July 2008.  ︎
8. Weber, Max, The Religion of China (1915), trans. by Hans Gerth (New York: Free Press, 1965), 26, 103–104, 61-62; Ertman, Thomas, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 74–87; Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), ch. 3.  ︎
9. Wakeman, Frederic, Telling Chinese History: A Selection of Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 27–35.  ︎
10. Frank.  ︎
11. Weber, Isabella, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 24–5; Wu, Baosan, A Study of Guanzi Economic Thought (Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Publisher, 1989).   ︎
12. Nolan, Peter, China at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), ch. 3; Weber, Isabella  ︎
13. Volumes 24 and 91 respectively, of the Book of Han, by Ban Gu (32-92 AD).  ︎
14. Sima, Qian, Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty, trans by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 89–100; Ban, Gu, Food and Money in Ancient China: The Earliest Economic History of China to A.D. 25, trans by N.L. Swann, Nancy Lee (Princeton, 1950) (New York: Octagon Books, 1974).  ︎
15. Chinese Cooperation Times, “The First ‘Red’ Stock of Anyuan Railroad and Mine Workers’ Consumer Cooperative,” March 25, 2021; Hu, Deping, “In Response to the Question Concerning Supply and Marketing Cooperatives,” China Green Development Society, November 10, 2022,   https://mbd.baidu.com/newspage/data/landingsuper?sShare=1&context=%7B%22nid%22%3A%22news_8738844951950484093%22,%22sourceFrom%22%3A%22bjh%22%7D.  ︎
16. Yu, Shude, “Lecture Notes on Cooperation at the First Training Class by the Chinese Disaster Relief and Charity Association,” 1925: http://www.coopunion.cn/news/zhuanjiaguandian/25bb209bcc4bc2160abc193f5a277db4.html; Yu, Shude, Lectures on Cooperation, (Nanjing: China Cooperation Study Society, 1934).  ︎
17. Hayford, Charles,To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).; Lv, Xinyu, “Rural Reconstruction, the Nation-State. and China’s Modernity Problem: Reflections on Liang Shuming’s Rural Reconstruction Theory and Practice,” in Tian Yu Cao, et al. eds. Culture and Social Transformations in Reform Era China (London: Brill, 2010), 235-56.  ︎
18. Mao, “Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?” October 5, 1928, Selected Works vol.1 (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, [1928] 1991); Mao, “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” 5 January 1930, Selected Works, vol.1,(Beijing: People’s Publishing House, [1930]1991).  ︎
19. Xiang, Guolan, “Red Finance,” Kunlunce Research Academy, October 3, 2021.  ︎
20. Kelly, Jason, Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 26–29.  ︎
21. Kann, Eduard, “Paper Money in Modern China 1900-1956: Chinese Communists as Issuers of Notes,” Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong (1957): part 25; O’Neill, E. F, “The Copper Cash and Silver Dollar Notes of the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Workers’ and Peasants’ Bank,” in John Sandrock, The Money of Communist China (1927-1949) (Hong Kong: Shing Lee Company, 1989) part I; Sandrock, John (?), The Money of Communist China 1927-1949, part II: Money of the Base Areas during the War of Resistance against Japan 1936-1945.  ︎
22. Cao, Hong and Zhou Yan, “Mao Zemin: From a Peasant in Shaoshan to the Governor of State Bank,”Party History Review 6 (in Chinese) (2007); Xu, Shuxin, An Outline of the Development of Money in China’s Revolutionary Bases, (Beinging: China Financial Publishing House, 2008); Xiang, Guolan.  ︎
23. Wang, Zhongxin, “The Contemporary Relevance of ‘Salt Currency’ Created by Mao,” Kunlunce Research Academy, November 16, 2022.  ︎
24. Mao, “Fiscal Policy of the Border Region,”Collected Works of Mao, vol. 2, (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, [1938]1993).  ︎
25. Sandrock, part II.  ︎
26. Cui, Qimin, “An Analysis of the Guanghua Store’s Cash Coupons,” Modern Communication 17 (2019).  ︎
27. Li, Jinzheng, “Background: the Introduction and Revision of the Unified and Accumulated Tax Rules in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region During the Anti-Japanese War,” Studies of the Soviet Areas: 4 (2022).  ︎
28. Liu, Haibo, “An Analysis of the Revelation of Monetary Work in China’s Revolutionary Bases,” Global Finance no.6 (2013).  ︎
29. 29. Zhu, Lizhi, Zhu Lizhi on Financial Governance, (Beijing: The CCP History Publisher, 2017).  ︎
30. 30. Liu, Mohan, “Fiscal Wisdom of 土八路,” Huarun Magazine 7 (2022): 258.  ︎
31. 31. Weber, Isabella.  ︎
32. Xue, Muqiao, “The Battle of Currency in the Shandong Base Area,” in Selected Economic Essays, Ch.6, Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, et al (1984): 64–71.  ︎
33. Xue, Muqiao (1996), Memoirs. Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Publishing House.  ︎
34. Mao “Fiscal Policy of the Border Region.”  ︎
35. Xue, 65–67.  ︎
36. Weber, Isabella, 84, 102–03.  ︎
37. Weber, Isabella, 80.  ︎
38. Xue, 67.  ︎
39. Xue, 70–71.  ︎
40. Yu and Zhang. ︎
41. Zhu, 5, 44.  ︎
42. Yu, 9.  ︎

However, white supremacists face an immediate contradiction due to the essential role of undocumented labor in the U.S. Some capitalists have already begun to beg the president to scale down the raids, complaining that ICE is taking all their best workers and hurting their profit margins. Every fascist accusation against the Global South is an admission², whether directed at Black people in South Afrika for “white genocide” or undocumented people in the imperial core for bringing violence to a society that seeks to exploit and assault them. 

30 years after apartheid, the 7% minority of white settlers continue to occupy 72% of South Afrika’s farmland. Legalistic mechanisms for land reforms have failed to address the problem; only 9% of the land has been returned to the Black people it was stolen from. Before it can return land, the government needs to provide compensation to the white settler. In other words, the law requires the government to pay thieves to return stolen land. Black South Afrikans can’t get their land back because doing so would bankrupt the country. The result? In 2025, South Afrika has the highest wealth inequality of any country in the world. The average Black household owns 5% of the wealth of the average white household. These statistics alone explain why South Afrikan white lobbying groups — who project false claims of supposed “racial persecution” throughout the world  — have spoken out against relocation to the U.S. Relocating white settlers would only hamper domestic settler efforts towards retaking full political power and overturning the basic legal rights won by the Black majority in 1994. One white pensioner spelled the situation out clearly: “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go?” 

Trump’s relocation of white settlers appears to be part of a larger U.S. attack on South Afrika’s government. In 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted the “Land Expropriation Act” —  essentially an eminent domain law which allows the government to repurpose private land for the public benefit. According to the law, land can only be expropriated without compensation in limited scenarios, like when property is unused or abandoned. To this day, no land has been seized in South Africa without compensation. This is the law that Trump claims will cause “white genocide” in South Afrika. The U.S. had already cut off nearly all foreign aid to South Afrika back in February, throwing the country’s healthcare system into a new crisis overnight. 

Although Trump and his imperialist collaborators understand the reformist nature of South Afrika’s government, the country is still centered in the U.S.’ crosshairs because of its rejection of outright western colonial rule. South Afrika has been represented by the ANC (African National Congress) — the party of Nelson Mandela — since the end of apartheid. In all likelihood, the U.S. wants to remove the ANC from power and replace it with one of the more imperialist-friendly parties representing white interests. In its 30 years of rule, the ANC has built strong economic relationships with enemies of the U.S. such as China, Russia, and Iran. The South Afrikan lawsuit against so-called “israel” in the International Court of Justice — supposedly the highest court in the world — continues to isolate the zionist entity, which has lost sympathy even in the West. If the U.S. were to succeed in its regime change effort, they would replace the ANC with a party such as the Democratic Alliance. With its bedrock of white support, this party would be quick to submit to the U.S. by signing extortionist trade deals and dismissing the I.C.J. lawsuit. For Trump, the chance to bully an oppressed country like South Afrika while pandering to the white base at home was too convenient to pass up. 

From within the U.S., we can see how the relocation fiasco is in perfect alignment with the current fascist playbook. The illusions of a multi-racial participatory society in a racist settler colony are dissipating in the face of an explicit preference for white immigration, especially those who show loyalty to the imperial project. I.C.E. agents and deputized local police are snatching undocumented people from their homes and workplaces. The most immediate hurdle to the new terror project lies in the capitalist class itself, who keenly appreciate the essential role of undocumented immigrants in the Amerikan economy. Capitalists in both meatpacking and agriculture economic sectors pleaded directly to Trump that the ICE raids are having a bad effect on business. By working the hardest jobs for the least pay, undocumented workers ensure that Amerikans have access to cheap produce while guaranteeing a steady profit for the capitalist. The class collaboration between these capitalists and Amerikans at large is essential to the arrangement. Without undocumented labor, the already small profit margins in agriculture and meatpacking would vanish, which would then trigger skyrocketing food costs. The takeaway from this is that there was already ample reason to be in the streets before the ICE raids began. Instead of waving the Amerikan flag like the recently-arrived South Afrikan settlers, protesters should agitate based on the general conditions of racial hierarchies in labor. Violent ICE raids will of course continue, although the business enterprises of certain capitalists will now be spared by the Trump regime. The federal and municipal pigs will continue to arrest grandparents, parents, and children. 

While fascists balance the contradictions between their rhetoric and reality, they still agitate their base by attacking a sovereign nation with racist dog whistles. On June 2, 9 more settlers from South Afrika arrived in the U.S, and more will be on the way unless South Afrika bows under the pressure. We must never forget that Land Back is as desperately needed here on Turtle Island as it is in South Afrika. Amerikan fascists feign horror at Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of land repossession. Imagine their response to a real campaign for Land Back on what they consider to be their home territory. 

Spend these summer months engaged in social investigation or engaged in study. USU and the All-Empire Workers’ League are here to join you in struggle with materials and assistance as we work on tangible projects in the real world. Whatever you do, don’t let the summer pass you by as white supremacists continue their push to convert the mass fascist state into its final, deadly form. 

1.  The term “global flea market” is borrowed from George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye (page 118)  ︎
2. For further discussion of colonial psychology, see Chapter 2: The Historical Background in Robert Biel’s Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, with special attention paid to page 32 (local page source) ︎

Over the past few days, mainstream news outlets and social media platforms have been flooded with images and videos of large protest demonstrations in the streets of China’s cities, from Shanghai to Chengdu to Ürümqi.

Western imperialist media mouthpieces foretell, in their gleefully bloodthirsty chorus, catastrophic, bloody consequences for the Communist Party of China (CPC), the country’s leading party and the vanguard of China’s socialist revolution. The imperialist media circus is once again attempting to conjure a counter-revolution from nothing.

Fortunately, in this case, the Western world-imperialists are impotent.

The demonstrations are not, for the most part, counter-revolutionary. True, a small minority of the demonstrators are anti-Communists, and the Western imperialist media has made sure to amplify this tiny contingent, to misrepresent it as a popular voice. The vast majority of the demonstrators turned out to express frustration with, and demand changes to, a specific policy — not to stage a coup.

The protests have centered on a policy known as zero-COVID.

Zero-COVID is an approach to the COVID-19 pandemic of systematically preventing transmission and outbreaks of the virus through strict measures, including mass testing, lockdowns, quarantines, and, of course, vaccinations; non-essential businesses, schools, sports venues, transportation services, and other public facilities are temporarily closed down; working and learning from home, inasmuch as possible, temporarily becomes the “new normal.” In China, these measures have been coupled with massive programs of financial, logistical, domestic, and other forms of social support, provided to citizens by the State. The goal of a zero-COVID policy is to virtually eliminate COVID-19, to bring new cases down as close to “zero” as possible. Safeguarding human life — and, in particular, protecting the most vulnerable sections of the population, including the elderly, the disabled, and persons with preexisting health conditions — is prioritized above all other concerns, and some freedoms are sacrificed for this cause.

As one might expect, zero-COVID policies disrupt economic activity. A government that implements zero-COVID does so knowing that some sectors will grind to a halt, while the economy as a whole will stagnate.

From the capitalist’s point of view, this means that zero-COVID is, above all, simply bad for business. Critically, zero-COVID means that the workers will be staying home — staying safe, in other words — when they would otherwise be working. This, in turn, means reduced productivity, less market activity, and, hence, lower profit margins for the capitalist. That’s why nearly every single capitalist, from Jeff Bezos down to Jeff “small business owner,” has fought to end lockdowns and get the U.S. Empire’s “idle” population “back to work” — regardless of the toll on human life, regardless of the mass death that follows. And as for the elderly, the disabled, and persons with preexisting conditions? “If they’re going to die, they’d better do it, and decrease the surplus population,” answer the capitalists; they turn Scrooge’s most infamous line into an explicit call for social mass-murder.

A society organized on the basis of fulfilling the people’s needs, of developing socialism, tells the capitalist to shut up and deal with it, and carries on protecting the population as best it can. This is the case in the People’s Republic of China and other countries carrying forward socialist revolutions, like Cuba and Vietnam.

Unfortunately, these countries are in the global minority.

Most of the world’s countries are not socialist, but capitalist, and many of those under capitalist dictatorships are neo-colonies, dependent on and effectively ruled by foreign imperialists.

The United States and other Western countries are capitalist class-dictatorships. In other words, the property-owning, profiteering classes, especially the monopolists, effectively rule the U.S. and other capitalist countries, because they effectively “own” the government — because they’ve “bought” the ruling parties, down to the last politician, and down to the last county and municipality. Therefore, public policy in the U.S. and other capitalist countries is ultimately decided not by the great majority of the people, but by a small class of monopoly-capitalist rulers.

In line with the will of the capitalists, most of the world’s countries, including the U.S., have adopted, instead of zero-COVID, various policies described as the “living with COVID” approach. This means allowing the disease to spread freely, while also “mitigating” the death toll with vaccinations and various preventative half-measures. The ultimate goal of “living with COVID” approaches is not to eliminate COVID-19, and not to minimize the death toll, but to develop “herd immunity” — which means allowing the population (the “herd”) to get infected en masse, and to thereby develop immunities to the disease. In no uncertain terms, the “herd immunity” approach condemns much of the population — millions, on a global scale — especially the most vulnerable people, to preventable, painful, and pointless deaths. In fact, COVID-19 has proven itself highly adaptable, to such an extent that “herd immunity” is effectively impossible — even if it was desirable.

But talk is cheap, and any windbag can carry on about ideal ethical principles. Let’s get scientific, and compare the real, empirical results: zero-COVID versus living-with-COVID, country by country.

As of November 29, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a country of about 1.412 billion people (currently the most populous country on Earth), has suffered 15,957 reported COVID-19 deaths since the virus was identified. This means that about 1 in every 100,000 Chinese residents, or about 0.001% of the population, have died of COVID-19 — the third-lowest mortality rate by country.

Similarly, in Cuba, a country of about 11.3 million people, has suffered only 8,530 reported COVID-19 deaths; thus, about 1 in every 1,300 Cuban residents, or 0.078% of the population, have died of COVID-19. Cuba has managed to keep mortality rates so low despite the fact that the island is encircled by a U.S. military blockade, which keeps the country in a state of artificial, externally imposed poverty.

Meanwhile, the United States, a country of about 332 million people, has suffered 1,079,477 reported COVID-19 deaths — the most deaths of any country on Earth, by far. This means that about 1 in every 300 U.S. residents, or about 0.3% of the population, have died from COVID-19 — one of the highest mortality rates by country. This is despite the fact that the U.S. is one of the most highly developed countries on Earth, with a very high per capita income and human-development index score.

The situation in the United Kingdom, which has, for the most part, pursued a similarly disastrous “living with COVID” approach, is likewise dire. The U.K., a country of about 67.3 million people, has suffered 212,585 reported COVID-19 deaths; about 1 in every 300 U.K. residents, or, again, about 0.3% of the population, has died of COVID-19. This is despite the fact that the U.K., even more so than the U.S., is a wealthy country with a highly developed economy.

The results are indisputable.

On the one hand, the living-with-COVID approach has been catastrophic, resulting in several million preventable deaths worldwide. The governments of capitalist countries have eagerly sacrificed these millions of lives upon the altar of profit; the political leaders of these countries, from top to bottom, have offered up these millions of human souls to satiate the greed of their monopoly-capitalist masters. The wealthiest billionaires in the world, most of whom are based in the U.S., have more than doubled their net-worth since the beginning of the pandemic, while the vast majority of the world’s population has become poorer — while billions of people around the world continue to sink deeper into manufactured poverty.

On the other hand, the zero-COVID approach, as pursued in the People’s Republic of China and some other countries, has saved millions of lives. The governments of these countries, whatever their flaws, have proactively intervened to sacrifice all other concerns for a single, paramount concern: protecting human life. Drawbacks and legitimate public frustrations notwithstanding, the Communist Party of China’s zero-COVID approach has, by any scientific and humanitarian measure, been an unparalleled success.

The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated, in the most striking colors, the contrast between capitalism, a mode of production centered on the drive for profits, for the accumulation of vast wealth by a few masters of industry and finance, and socialism, the process of developing a new mode of production, centered on the common good of humankind.

Despite the success of zero-COVID, after enduring two years of lockdowns and other measures, much of the Chinese public is understandably frustrated. In the past few months, the Central People’s Government has begun to ease restrictions, but implementation of these decisions at the local level has been slow and, in some cases, improperly handled, and this has heightened public frustrations.

The recent wave of protests were sparked, among other things, by a tragic fire that broke out in a residential building in Ürümqi, the capital of the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, on Thursday, November 24, killing ten people and injuring at least nine more. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, and even as it raged on, false rumors circulated that China’s zero-COVID policy was to blame for the fatalities — namely, it was rumored that barricades set up to enforce lockdowns in the city had prevented residents from escaping the building, and that pandemic-control staff had blocked the way of firefighters. In fact, residents were not prevented from escaping the building; instead, those who died were trapped in the building by fire and smoke, and were unable to escape. In fact, the firefighters were not blocked by medical staff or by barricades; their approach was blocked by cars parked in front of the building; residents who escaped the building desperately attempted to jumpstart stalled cars and move them, but were unable to do so in time for the firefighters to save everyone. Lastly, in fact, the fire was started by a faulty electrical socket, and was unrelated to the lockdown.

These facts notwithstanding, the tragedy heightened tensions in Ürümqi. City residents and people across China blamed the local government of the Tianshan District of Ürümqi for failing to properly implement the directives of the Central People’s Government to ease restrictions, and for maintaining what are widely perceived by the public as unfair and excessive measures.The resulting wave of country-wide protests have been opportunistically infiltrated by small groups of anti-Communist professional activists, who are attempting (so far, unsuccessfully) to foment counter-revolutionary sentiments. There are indications that these agents provocateurs are backed by the U.S. State Department and its web of extra-governmental pro-imperialist organizations. The “job” of these well-paid agents is to destabilize China under a “pro-democracy” guise; their long-term goal is to instigate a “color revolution” that will dismantle an “enemy state” and replace it with a capitalist regime, thereby securing the interests of Western imperialism. This strategy dates back to before the Cold War.

Fortunately, these efforts are already losing steam. The Central People’s Government is responding to popular demands, local governments are correcting their errors, and thus, as of Tuesday, November 29, the protests are already beginning to disperse.

Meanwhile, videos posted to Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, show scenes in which a few anti-Communist demonstrators have been isolated, dwarfed, and rebuked by the many pro-Communist counter-demonstrators; anti-Communist slogans are being ignored or drowned out.

Contrary to the Western imperialist media’s narrative, the people of China broadly and overwhelmingly support their Communist Party.

Why, then, is the Western imperialist media bombarding us with reports of mass enmity among the Chinese public toward their Communist Party? Why do the imperialist mouthpieces foretell of an imminent counter-revolution, of an imminent collapse of the government of China?

Why, moreover, has “our” mainstream media gone to such lengths to demonize China’s zero-COVID approach?

On the one hand, it is standard practice for the Western imperialist media to insistently and falsely foretell of the defeat of its enemies. The Western world-imperialists are threatened by the rise of China to the position of an emerging global superpower, capable of defending itself and forging international alliances on its own terms. South–South cooperation, carried on under Chinese leadership, is a threat to the Western imperialist hegemony — not least because it demonstrates the possibility of a world order based not on imperialism, on military brutality, economic exploitation, and mass impoverishment, but, instead, on internationalist partnerships, on mutual development and prosperity.

On the other hand, moreover, “our” monopoly-capitalist rulers are reeling from repeated, increasingly frequent, and increasingly severe economic and political crises. The imperialists want to divert the attention of the Western public; they want to redirect our outrage, which should be aimed at “our” rulers, to the governments of foreign “enemy” countries. In the U.S., the imperialists encourage xenophobia, jingoism, and “American exceptionalism” in order to keep the masses ignorant and confused, to keep the masses from recognizing their true enemy, and to thereby prolong the capitalist dictatorship.

The imperialists who rule the U.S. Empire — who rule us directly, and who indirectly rule the billions of people in the colonized countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America — have consigned millions of us to die needlessly, all to enrich themselves.

The Western imperialists, “our own” rulers, are our true enemy.

That is why China and its zero-COVID policy absolutely must be demonized in the Western imperialist media, and by Western imperialist politicians.

If the masses of the U.S. Empire and of the other Western countries realized who our true enemy is, if we began to rise up against the capitalist regime that is mass-murdering, by social neglect and cruelty, millions of our loved ones, our friends, and our neighbours, then the dictatorship of the monopoly-capitalists, their iron rule, their despotic regime of terror and brutality, would soon come crashing down.

The People’s Republic of China has once again reaffirmed its solidarity with the peoples of Africa through its continued commitment to mutual cooperation with 53 African countries and the African Union.

On August 18, Wang Yi, State Councilor and Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, addressed a virtual conference of the Forum on China–Africa Coordination (FOCAC), attended by African and Chinese leaders. FM Wang reflected on the progress made in recent years through FOCAC towards shared sustainable development goals, achieving peace and stability, facilitating cultural and academic exchange, ameliorating food crises, and ending the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa, and outlined the Communist Party of China’s vision for “building a China–Africa community with a shared future in the new era.”

FOCAC is the main forum through which China–Africa political, economic, technological, and other multilateral cooperation is facilitated. FOCAC was founded in October 2000, following years of diplomatic coordination efforts between members of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to today’s African Union, and the People’s Republic of China. Last month’s meeting concerned the implementation of follow-up actions of the 8th Ministerial Conference of FOCAC, held in November 2021.

Today, all African countries, with one exception, plus the African Union Commission (the central governing body of the African Union) are members of FOCAC.

The one exception is the Kingdom of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, currently ruled by Africa’s last absolute monarchy. The reactionary, autocratic monarchy has made the country heavily dependent on Taiwan for capital investments and foreign aid; in order to maintain its close ties with Taiwan, Eswatini maintains no diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, and does not recognize the PRC as a legitimate state. In recent years, the struggle of the Swazi people for democracy has grown into a rising revolutionary movement, led in part by the Communist Party of Swaziland, that is threatening to overthrow the autocracy and establish a republic. The People’s Republic of China has been accused by the Taiwanese government and the Western imperialist press of supporting revolutionary-democratic forces in Swaziland, but this is highly unlikely, given the CPC’s commitment to non-interventionist international policy. However, the Communist Party of Swaziland has expressed solidarity with China in the face of heightened U.S. imperialist provocations in Taiwan.

A Vision of China–Africa Cooperation for the “New Era”

At the 2021 FOCAC 8th Ministerial Conference, representatives of the 53 African member countries, the African Union Commission, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) released their joint plan for “mid- to long-term cooperation,” the China–Africa Cooperative Vision 2035. The document ties together the PRC’s own “Vision 2035,” the African Union’s “2063 Agenda,” and the United Nations “Agenda 2030” Sustainable Development Goals. In addition to outlining a plan for multilateral China–Africa fair trade through China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), and for “promoting a new development paradigm featuring transformation and growth to advance industries in China and Africa,” the China–Africa Cooperative Vision 2035 also makes concrete, practical commitments to “developing a new green growth model for common eco-development,” to sharing technological and medical resources, and to “creating a new chapter in people-to-people exchanges for common cultural prosperity in China and Africa.”

Toward these shared aims, at the FOCAC 8th Ministerial Conference, PRC President Xi Jinping announced the launch of nine programs:

1. A medical program. China will donate 600 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to Africa and send 1,500 Chinese medical personnel.
2. A poverty reduction and agricultural development program. China will set up agrotechnology centers across Africa, staffed by 500 Chinese agricultural experts.
3. A trade promotion program. China will work with the African Continental Free Trade Area to expand the BRI and will broadly remove tariffs for underdeveloped countries.
4. An investment promotion program. The Chinese government will encourage businesses to invest in Africa towards African industrialization goals.
5. A digital innovation program. China and Africa will expand cooperation in technological development and promote African businesses through e-commerce.
6. A green development program. China will support eco-development initiatives in Africa, such as the African Union’s “Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel” initiative, which, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, aims to reverse land degradation and desertification, improve food security and livelihoods for the populations of more than 20 Sahelian countries, and contribute to climate change mitigation.
7. A capacity building program. China will help build and upgrade 10 schools in Africa, provide training to 10,000 African professionals, launch vocational programs for African students, and open 800,000 jobs in African countries.
8. A cultural and people-to-people exchange program. China will promote tourism to and from Africa, hold film festivals, and host China–Africa women’s and youth forums.
9. A peace and security program. China will provide military assistance to the African Union in ongoing efforts to combat terrorism across the African continent.

Speaking at the August 2022 Coordinators’ Meeting on the Implementation of Follow-up Actions, 6 months after the FOCAC 8th Ministerial Conference, PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi said,

We are pleased to see that, despite the evolving international situation, rising global challenges and repeated external disturbances, China and Africa have stayed our course in enhancing solidarity and focusing on cooperation. We have made good progress in implementing the outcomes of the conference…

In the face of the various forms of hegemonic and bullying practices, China and Africa have stood with each other shoulder to shoulder. China appreciates the firm commitment of African countries to the one-China principle and your strong support for China’s efforts to safeguard sovereignty, security and territorial integrity. China has also spoken up for our African brothers at the UN and other multilateral settings, upholding justice and opposing unwarranted interference and unilateral sanctions against Africa. In solidarity and coordination, China and Africa have become a pillar force in defending the legitimate rights and interests of developing countries, upholding the purposes of the UN Charter, and advocating multilateralism and international fairness and justice.

The “hegemonic and bullying practices” condemned by FM Wang are a reference to the policies of the Western imperialist powers, led by the United States of America, and can be summed up in one word: Neo-colonialism.

South–South Cooperation versus Neo-Colonialism

FM Wang also promised that China would waive outstanding debts owed by 17 African countries since 2021. The debts arose from 23 interest-free loans issued through China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The promise to waive these loans means that the 17 African countries will not be expected to repay China for its developmental aid.

China has been harshly criticized in the Western press and by Western politicians and economists for its interest-free loans to Africa; some have characterized these loans as “debt-traps,” meant to render Africa dependent on China in the long-term.

The truth, however, is that most African countries are severely indebted not to the People’s Republic of China, but to Western imperialist countries, such as the U.S. and France. For several decades, Western powers have used global financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, to issue predatory loans, with extremely high interest rates, knowing full-well that the loans won’t be repaid and that the borrowing countries will only become further indebted, while remaining badly underdeveloped and impoverished. Moreover, the imperialist loans always come with strings attached — conditions forced on the borrowing countries. These conditions are designed to hinder economic development, worsen wealth inequality, eliminate protections for workers and entrench modern slavery, facilitate unequal trade, and cheaply strip borrowing countries of their natural resources — all for the benefit of the highly-developed imperialist countries. For instance, IMF loans frequently require the governments of borrowing countries to cut public spending (funding for transport, education, healthcare, etc.), privatize their natural resources, and allow Western companies to freely buy up their land and to establish mines, plantations, and factories that pay dollar-per-day wages or use slave-labor. In the process, the world’s least developed regions, including most of Africa, have suffered ecological devastation, causing widespread droughts, famines, and desertification.

This process, by which the imperialist powers keep underdeveloped countries and regions indebted, dependent, and indirectly controlled, is known as neo-colonialism.

Kwame Nkrumah, the Marxist-Leninist and pan-Africanist revolutionary, political leader, and theoretician, who served as the first President of Ghana and led his country’s struggle for independence against Britain, characterized neo-colonialism as “imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage.” According to Nkrumah, in the introduction to his authoritative 1965 book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism,

The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.

Neo-colonialism developed in the decades following the end of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations (1945), during the wave of decolonization that spread across Africa in the 1950s and ‘60s, when most African countries gained their independence from the colonial empires of Europe. Neo-colonialism is an outgrowth of capitalist imperialism, the contemporary world-system, in which a handful of advanced capitalist countries use their superior economic and military might to conquer and exploit colonies, and to bring less developed, economically dependent countries into their spheres of influence. Capitalism grew out of modern colonialism, and so did capitalist imperialism. From the mid-1400s to the late-1800s, the West-European colonial empires exploited Africa as a source of cheap slave-labor for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, developing their European mother countries and their “New World” settler colonies, while leaving Africa in a pre-feudal, slavery-based stage of development. But as capitalism developed in Europe, the old, indirect mode of exploitation was no longer sufficient to continue expanding and accumulating wealth. During the 1880s, the West-European colonial empires began a campaign called the “Scramble for Africa,” directly conquering every pre-colonial African state, with the exception of the Ethiopian Empire, amounting to 90% of the continent’s landmass. This “Scramble for Africa” was at the heart of the emerging world-system of capitalist imperialism. By the end of the 19th Century, the competing capitalist empires of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States of America had divided up most of the rest of the world into directly ruled colonies and indirectly ruled client-states. This competition resulted in a series of devastating inter-imperialist wars, the largest of which were the First and Second World Wars.

Following the Second World War, however, the U.S. Empire emerged as the unrivaled hegemon, beginning an era of unipolar imperialism that is only now, in the 21st Century, coming to a violent end. With the decolonization of most of the world by the 1970s, the imperialist powers shifted from direct control of their former colonies to indirect control through financial institutions. This is the situation suffered by most African countries, as well as most nominally independent, underdeveloped countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Pacific, and southeast Asia.

In stark contrast to the “hegemonic and bullying practices” of the Western imperialist powers and their global financial institutions, the People’s Republic of China issues interest-free loans, meaning that borrowing countries can’t be debt-trapped by high interest rates, and issues loans on a mutual basis, without forcing borrowing countries to bend to conditions imposed by a foreign power. The PRC also frequently waives debts owed by African countries that are unable to repay Chinese loans. FM Wang’s promise to waive the interest-free loan debts owed by 17 African countries to China is not out of the ordinary for the People’s Republic of China; the promise is a typical expression of the Communist Party of China’s cooperative internationalism.

It is true that China, as a politically united and fully sovereign country that has a rapidly developing economy, augmented by some advanced-capitalist centers in its major cities, and maintains a powerful military, is more powerful than the African Union. The African Union, by contrast, has not yet achieved complete political unification, and its member states have not yet achieved true sovereignty, because they remain dominated by the West through neo-colonialism. Moreover, the whole African continent, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, has inherited a far more brutal legacy of colonialism than East Asia, and therefore must overcome far worse underdevelopment. It is also true that, especially since the 2010s, the PRC has taken on a leadership role in global development. However, in contrast to the Western powers, it is clear that the goal of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is not to use its economic and military power to colonize, exploit, underdevelop, and impoverish Africa.

It is also true that there will inevitably arise conflicts between Chinese capital and African labor. Capital and labor are always at odds; we Marxists call this contradiction. However, in those cases where open conflict has arisen from the contradiction between African labor and Chinese capital, the CPC has generally sided with African labor, punishing Chinese businesses that fail to uphold their promises. The contradiction between Chinese capital and African labor will take the form of struggle by the African proletariat against Chinese bosses, and we should always stand in solidarity with the proletariat. But the principal contradiction acting upon the African continent is the contradiction between Africa and Western imperialism.

Finally, it is true that the CPC committed grave injustices during the Cold War, such as invading Vietnam in 1979 and supporting the mujahidin in Afghanistan in the 1980s. These actions stemmed from the Sino-Soviet Split, in which relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China deteriorated and turned hostile. The CPC falsely characterized the Soviet Union as “social imperialist” and the “main enemy” of the world’s revolutions; this was the CPC’s justification for entering into an alliance with the U.S. Empire — against the Soviet Union — during the Cold War. During the Cold War, the PRC actively undermined Soviet-backed revolutions in some Third World countries by providing support to counter-revolutionaries. In siding with the U.S. Empire against the Soviet Union, and by inventing and propagating the fiction of “Soviet social imperialism,” the CPC entered into an alliance with actual imperialism, and did immeasurable harm to liberation movements and socialist revolutions across the Third World.

However, since the end of the Cold War, the Communist Party of China has pursued an international policy guided by its Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, enshrined in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China: (1) mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, (2) mutual non-aggression, (3) mutual non-interference in internal affairs, (4) equality and mutual benefit, and (5) peaceful coexistence. In accordance with these constitutional principles, the CPC has pursued what it calls “South–South cooperation” — a reference to the “Global South,” a broad catch-all for most of the world’s underdeveloped and developing countries.

In sum, the nature of China–Africa cooperation is not neo-colonialism, but mutual development through internationalist South–South cooperation.

The Basis of China–Africa Solidarity

South–South cooperation, as pursued by the People’s Republic of China and partnered countries and intergovernmental bodies through the Belt and Road Initiative, has the effect of weakening the influence of the Western imperialist powers over Global South countries and the world’s markets. This stands to benefit both China and Africa.

The founding mission of the Organization of African Unity, now carried forward by the African Union, was to liberate the African continent from colonialism and to eliminate all surviving vestiges of colonial rule. Pan-Africanists sought to develop a politically united, self-reliant, and prosperous Africa, and to thereby achieve true political and economic independence from the Western imperialist powers that had colonized, exploited, and violently oppressed Africa for centuries. The OAU also sought to end the regimes of white-colonizer minority-rule that then remained in some African countries, such as South Africa and Zimbabwe. Towards these aims, the member-states of the OAU, and now the African Union, have fostered closer cooperation on Africa’s economic development, towards the goals of African self-sufficiency, peace, the elimination of poverty, and the achievement of ecologically sustainable prosperity. Especially during the 1990s, the OAU sought closer cooperation with China. By fostering internationalist China–Africa cooperation, pan-Africanists hoped to free the continent from its dependence on the financial institutions of Western imperialism, and to thereby liberate Africa, once and for all, from neo-colonialism.

The African Union continues to advance the pan-Africanist vision of a sovereign, self-reliant, democratic, pluralistic, and truly United Africa, and therefore objectively represents a progressive force, with immense revolutionary potential. For it is only through pan-African unity that the African continent can self-emancipate, at last throwing off the shackles of imperialism, carry forward sustainable economic development towards the eradication of poverty, secure the right to self-determination for all the indigenous peoples of Africa, repair Africa’s ecology, eliminate war across the continent, and establish a truly democratic African society. It is only by connecting and developing African industry and trade that the continent can break free of its imperialist chains. All the indigenous peoples of Africa have a shared destiny, not because of any “biological” features, but because of a shared history of oppression and a shared future of liberation.

Communists on every continent owe their solidarity to the pan-African struggle and the struggle of all imperialized peoples against neo-colonialism. 

At the same time, South–South cooperation, including China–Africa cooperation, is an integral aspect of the CPC’s mission to develop an advanced socialist economy in China, in accordance with the strategy of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. These efforts have become increasingly unified under the Belt and Road Initiative. The 2018 Beijing Declaration, unanimously adopted by the member-states of FOCAC, explicitly centers the Belt and Road Initiative in the future of China–Africa cooperation.

This process has been termed “alter-globalization” by some economists. In actuality, it is nothing more or less than the inevitable decay of unipolar world imperialism, led by the United States of America, giving way to the formation of a multipolar world. As emerging imperialist powers like the Russian Federation and the monarchies of the Arab Gulf increasingly break with and challenge American hegemony, the power of the American imperialist axis will decline, and world imperialism will again become fractured by inter-imperialist competition and war. The post-Cold War order is finally coming to an end, one crisis at a time.

Capitalist imperialism is now on its last leg. New imperialist powers will emerge, but the whole capitalist-imperialist world-system is already crumbling, and its final demise is inevitable. For five centuries, the development, expansion, and accumulation of capital has depended on the opening of new markets through the conquest of new territories, the establishment of new colonies, and the most brutal exploitation of billions of colonially oppressed people.

But we live in a rapidly decolonizing world. The colonial and formerly colonial peoples of the world are pursuing independence and sovereignty through self-reliance; self-reliance, through development; development, through cooperation — this time, on a mutual and internationalist, rather than an unequal and imperialist, basis. Africa is marching towards unification, and united, will never again be conquered or enslaved. Former strongholds of American imperialism across Asia, Africa, and even Europe are daily undermined by the ascendance of China and its Belt and Road Initiative. The oppressed of Latin America are rebelling against a century and more of Yankee imperialism. Even the U.S. Empire, the world-imperialist behemoth, is not safe: The oppressed of this country demonstrated in 2020 our preparedness to bring the enemy state to its knees. The oppressed masses of the U.S. Empire are consciously realizing that in order to secure our own liberation, we must fight for the liberation of the Third World.

The death knell of imperialism has been sounded. Without a world to carve up among themselves, without colonies to plunder, the capitalist empires will be drawn further into competition with each other, and the era of multipolarity, of inter-imperialist wars, will resume. From our historical vantage-point, we can confidently predict that the next inter-imperialist “World War” will be the last.

Death to imperialism!

Long live African unity!

Long live Chinese socialism!

Long live China–Africa cooperation, friendship, and solidarity!