China: Rise, Repression & Resistance By Adrian Budd (Bookmarks, 2024)
Adrian Budd’s new book China: Rise, Repression & Resistance wrestles with the contradictions of China’s place in the world economy and tries to outline a Marxist understanding of China and its importance to the international left. After all, China is supposed to be a socialist state. It is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. Yet, that party has transformed China’s economy in a capitalist juggernaut while presiding over a massive increase in inequality over the last four decades. China is now one of the most unequal countries in the world.
It has a state-planned economy, yet its own internal documents describe the party as inspired by neoliberalism and it presides over a vast system of class exploitation. Xi Jinping, the current President of China, sounding like Reagan and Thatcherm, even recently derided the “idleness-breeding trap of welfarism.” Budd’s book is centred on the argument that China is not a socialist state. Instead, he describes it as a “State Capitalist” society, in which the economic logic is determined by the state’s need to continuously engage in capital accumulation due to China’s position within a global neoliberal capitalist system.
The rise of capitalism in China
To trace this development, Budd looks at the experience of the USSR and Eastern Europe over the 70s and 80s which drove most of China’s leaders to conclude that the Maoist model of a statized economy largely sealed-off from the world economy had run its course and required reforms to the economic system. By 1992, President Deng Xiaoping proclaimed a new wave of economic liberalization. This included the creation of new Special Economic Zones (designated areas with economic policies and regulations designed to attract foreign business) to accelerate the links to the world economy. The Maoist period meant that China entered more fully into the world’s economy without the burden of foreign debts and with a vast pool of literate, educated and healthy workers. This laid the foundations for China to develop rapidly as a world economic power, with highly concentrated economic power, a rural surplus of labour, a strong autonomous state and the drive to build modern infrastructure with state-owned heavy industries.
This new era (roughly beginning in 1978, but presaged by Mao’s alliance with American imperialism in 1972 and really ramping since the fall of the Soviet Union) transformed the state capitalist model developed under Mao as China’s economy opened up to the world. As Budd notes, “Private capital contributed almost nothing in 1978, but today it accounts for 60 percent of GDP and 90 percent of exports. The contribution of SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) to GDP has fallen below 30 percent.”
Internationally, the US has painted China’s rise to global prominence as a threat to the capitalist order, but for the last forty years, it has played a major role in sustaining it. For example, as David Harvey noted, China provided a “spatial fix” as a new space of accumulation, surplus and profit for a West that was bettered by economic crises between 1973 and 1993. China’s stimulus package after the 2008 financial crisis allowed the system to return to growth (albeit weak and debt-fuelled growth). The US claims that China’s growth is a threat to US hegemony is grossly overstated, but the two global superpowers (however asymmetrical) are locked into an inter-imperialist rivalry. For Budd, this means reckoning with the capitalist nature of China, even if it looks quite different from Capitalism in the West.
The contradictions of capitalist development
This understanding can better help us analyze the last few decades of China’s history and politics. For example, when looking at the internal pressure on workers and other oppressed groups, Budd notes, “the inequalities and oppressions of capitalist society generate permanent discontent, but it is frequently internalized as mute acceptance and fatalistic resignation. It occasionally finds expression in individual acts of defiance, especially where people feel isolated and lack confidence in solidarity with others.” The recent wave of protest due to the collapse of the housing market in China shows how the global pressures of capitalist accumulation create the conditions for political and economic instability.
The response to events like the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 forced the state to respond with violent coercion but also towards winning mass consent. The repression unleashed on movements and activists since 2015 demonstrates the ruling class’ fear of social anger. Discontent among workers, the unemployed, women, national minorities, students and others is amplified by higher youth unemployment and as the Covid lockdown protests of 2022 show, protests can emerge out of nowhere.
Budd argues, “Capitalists are caught in a profound contradiction. They have an interest in destroying the working class organization but also must bring workers together and thereby create the basis of that organization… socialists must recognize that the concentration of Chinese workers in giant workplaces and mega-cities, their anger, courage and creativity do not automatically supply the tools needed to build the sort of organization required to mount a successful assault on the party-state.”
While the state is presiding over deepening problems and “the partial recovery of activism in 2023 marks a small step towards recreating the solidarity and networks that enable the passing of lessons and ideas between strikes and factories in the 2007-2016 strike wave…the history of the world’s labour movements shows that if the lessons are not embodies in a revolutionary organization, and kept alive in revolutionary publications, then the raw material for change provided by the strikes and resilience of workers will be lost.”
The potential for workers’ collective power
This is the heart of Budd’s argument. At this moment, workers’ insurgent consciousness exceeds their insurgent capacity, making the struggle localized and fragmented. Building that capacity and beginning the process of forging independent regional and national workers’ organizations are urgent tasks for China’s workers.
While not discounting the incredible development of the Chinese state and its Communist Party, Budd recognizes that the forces of global capitalism have shaped the country. It is impossible to develop socialism in an island of capitalism and these global pressures have helped shape the development of China’s state-capitalist model of development. While in some ways being a bulwark against US dominance, China is riven with its own domestic and international contradictions. The drive for accumulation and growth exploits China’s workers and shapes its international interventions.
Only the collective power of the working class can create a society based not on the appropriation of labour-power of billions of workers for profit (whether by private or public firms) but on the satisfaction of their needs. The potential of this collective power is revealed in every strike and in every protest and movement of the oppressed.” This exploitation and oppression bring resistance and struggle, but Budd calls for new forms of national coordination and organization to be the memory of the struggle and to help take it forward for real change for billions of workers.
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