Why China shakes the imperialist order

China is not imperialist

The claim that China has become an imperialist power is now routine in Washington, the corporate press, and parts of the left influenced by liberal geopolitics. It is repeated so often that it passes for truth. But it collapses under Marxist analysis. Imperialism, as Lenin defined it, is not simply “big-power behavior.” It is a stage of capitalism in which monopoly finance capital dominates, exports capital to oppressed nations, and extracts super-profits through the ownership and control of entire regions and economies.

Judged by this standard, China is not an imperialist power. Its economy is large and its global presence growing, but its actual role bears no resemblance to the historic imperialist centers that built the modern world capitalist system.

Imperialism rests on finance. Its core instruments are global banks, reserve currencies, structural adjustment programs, debt peonage, and the power to reorganize entire economies. This system – built by the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, and Japan – is anchored in the IMF, the World Bank, dollar dominance, and multinational corporations backed by military blocs.

China does not command such a system. Its currency is not a world money. Its banks do not dictate policy to other nations. It does not enforce austerity packages, impose privatization, or conduct economic warfare through sanctions.

When China lends to developing countries, the terms often reflect hard bargaining, uneven benefits, and occasionally dependency – but they do not replicate the debt-peonage system through which Western finance capital governs the periphery. Chinese loans are routinely renegotiated, extended, or forgiven; they do not function as levers to impose privatization, deregulation, and austerity programs on borrowing countries.

China does not extract monopoly super-profits through control of global finance or intellectual property. In reality, it was Western corporations that extracted vast value from China for decades. China’s industrial ascent has altered its role in production, but the commanding heights of global finance remain centered in New York, London, Frankfurt, Paris, and Tokyo.

Military position makes the difference even clearer. Imperialism rests on armed coercion: bases, alliances, interventions, and the global command structure that enforces the capitalist order. The United States maintains roughly 750-800 foreign bases; China has one. The U.S. operates worldwide combatant commands; China does not.

China’s foreign policy emphasizes sovereignty largely because it spent a century as a target of colonial domination, not a beneficiary of it.

China is not a new imperialist center – it is a still-developing country rising in a world order built by others. Its income levels remain far below those of the U.S. and Europe, and many areas still depend on state-led development. The jobs China must do – raising living standards, lifting up poorer regions, and building its own industries – were handled in the rise of the imperialist powers through centuries of colonial plunder. China is doing it without that stolen wealth.

This does not mean China operates abroad as a socialist alternative. Its external activity is shaped by national priorities and the mixed character of its economy. Chinese companies invest overseas to make a profit, sometimes with state backing, and some projects have uneven effects. But this still does not place China in the category of an imperialist power. It is better understood as a post-colonial industrializing country working within a global order long dominated by the imperialist capitalist powers.

China’s foreign policy shift

China’s foreign policy has shifted over time. For decades after 1949, its approach reflected the conditions of a nation emerging from colonial subjugation and civil war. China did not possess overseas corporations or global banks. What it had were political commitments shaped by its own experience of imperialist domination.

In its early decades, China’s foreign policy was explicitly revolutionary. The Communist Party viewed national liberation movements as part of a shared world struggle against colonialism and capitalism. Beijing actively supported communist and anti-imperialist movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, providing material aid, training, and political backing to liberation struggles and insurgencies.

This was not symbolic solidarity. China supplied Korea and Vietnam in their wars against U.S. intervention; sent medical teams, engineers, and military advisers to movements in Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe; and completed the Tanzania–Zambia Railway in 1975 to help newly independent states break free from apartheid-controlled trade routes.

China viewed these efforts as extensions of its own struggle against foreign domination and as support for newly independent states up against the same imperialist system.

This outlook also shaped China’s participation in the Bandung Conference in 1955, which brought together 29 newly independent Asian and African nations, a significant show of anti-imperialist unity among formerly colonized peoples.

China’s foreign policy aligned with the wave of anti-colonial revolutions then sweeping Asia, Africa, and Latin America as nations fought to end imperialist domination.

The Sino-Soviet split disrupted this unity. Differences over strategy, ideology, and how to confront U.S. power hardened into a rupture that divided the socialist camp. During the Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union was portrayed inside China as a warning of what happens when a workers’ state retreats from revolutionary struggle. But despite its bureaucratic contradictions, the USSR was not an imperialist power, and the deepening antagonism between Beijing and Moscow weakened the combined strength of states and movements resisting U.S. imperialism.

The consequences were visible by the 1970s. As the Sino-Soviet conflict intensified, China moved toward a tac tical accommodation with Washington. Nixon’s 1972 trip to Beijing represented a real political shift. In southern Africa and Southeast Asia, liberation movements found themselves navigating conflicting positions from Beijing and Moscow. The coherence of the anti-imperialist front eroded at a moment when U.S. power remained formidable and on the offensive.

After Mao’s death, China’s leadership undertook a major reorientation. Deng Xiaoping argued that the country’s survival required concentrating resources on economic development.

Revolutionary assistance abroad was ended. China sought technology, loans, and investment from the advanced capitalist countries, normalized relations with the West, and entered the world market.

Its foreign policy language shifted accordingly, stressing stability, sovereignty, and the need to operate within a world system still dominated by the imperialist powers led by the United States, alongside Britain, Germany, France, and Japan.

These adjustments reflected the pressures facing any society attempting independent development within a global capitalist order. They did not transform China into an imperialist power, nor did they produce a socialist alternative for other nations. They marked a shift in priorities under difficult conditions – a retreat from earlier international commitments in order to secure national development in an environment shaped by Western finance capital and the military might of the United States.

China’s path – from supporting liberation movements to navigating a hostile world economy – shows the enormous pressures placed on any post-colonial society seeking to develop without plunder or overseas domination. These changes did not turn China into an imperialist power, but they did narrow the space for the kind of revolutionary commitments it once pursued. What followed was shaped by this contradiction: a country that is not imperialist, yet operating inside a world system made by the imperialist powers.

The Global South and the Belt and Road Initiative

China’s expanding role in the Global South is often held up as proof that it has become a new imperialist power. But the reality on the ground tells a different story. Belt and Road – the centerpiece of China’s overseas development activity – does not operate like the IMF, the World Bank, or the great colonial powers whose investments were designed to extract wealth and enforce dependency.

For decades, countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America faced only one model: loans tied to austerity, privatization, and foreign control. China’s approach breaks from that pattern. It finances ports, rail lines, power plants, and industrial zones without demanding that governments sell off public assets or dismantle social programs. When debts become difficult, Beijing typically restructures them, extends maturities, or forgives portions outright. China pursues its own interests, but it does not use debt the way imperialist powers do – as a weapon to force austerity, privatization, or political control.

None of this means China is charitable. Chinese firms seek profit, and China gains strategic influence. But the relationship is not one of domination. Belt and Road projects usually involve infrastructure-for-trade or infrastructure-for-resources arrangements – not the debt-for-privatization model used by Western finance capital. In many countries, these projects are the first major public works built in generations, expanding local capacity rather than hollowing it out.

China’s position as a nation once carved up by foreign powers also shapes its outlook. Its foreign policy stresses sovereignty and non-interference because it still carries the memory of colonial subjugation. Whatever contradictions exist within its system, China does not behave like the imperialist states that rule the world through force, finance, and unequal treaties.

This alternative – a major industrial country offering development without political control – has opened space for the Global South to maneuver in ways that were impossible under U.S. and European domination. It is one of the key reasons “multipolarity” has become such a common theme in international politics today.

Multipolarity: a description, not a destination

“Multipolarity” has become a dominant theme in international discourse. Governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America speak of a world with several major power centers, and China and Russia present it as an alternative to U.S. dominance. Some voices on the left cast it as a step forward, and for people challenging U.S. imperialism, can seem like a hopeful counterweight.

But multipolarity describes relations among states, not social systems. It says nothing about exploitation, ownership, or class power. A multipolar world is still a capitalist world – still an imperialist world. It only indicates that U.S. supremacy is being contested, not that it has been overturned or that the global order has changed in any fundamental way.

For the Global South, the idea that multipolarity creates broad new room to maneuver is often overstated. A more contested world system can offer alternative partners and limited leverage, but the core structures of imperialist power remain in place. Whatever space appears is narrow, unstable, and easily closed. It is not a path to development, nor a substitute for anti-imperialist or socialist struggle.

Marxists begin from class, not geopolitics. Knowing that the world is “multipolar” tells us nothing about who owns the banks, who controls production, or who appropriates the surplus. A world with multiple power centers can still be a world ruled by capital; multipolarity does not resolve the basic contradiction between socialized labor and private appropriation.

China’s position in this landscape is shaped by its own internal contradictions and by the pressures of the existing imperialist system. Whether a more contested world order alters those pressures in any meaningful way is uncertain and uneven, and there is little historical basis to assume it will. What is clear is this: China does not promote multipolarity as a socialist project, but as a national strategy within a capitalist world system. This reflects its dual character – a socialist state with significant capitalist sectors navigating an international order still dominated by the old imperialist powers.

Multipolarity is not an alternative to socialist internationalism. It is not a program for liberation. Treating it as such repeats earlier errors, when alliances with “progressive” capitalist states were mistaken for class struggle. Multipolarity offers a description of shifting state relations, not a path beyond capitalism. The central struggle remains the same: the fight of workers and oppressed peoples against the global imperialist system of exploitation.

When the super-profits run out

What alarms Washington is not the talk of “multipolarity” or the emergence of other powerful centers on the world stage. The real threat is material: as China builds up advanced industry, it closes off the sectors where imperialist monopolies make their biggest profits. That strikes at the economic base of U.S. dominance far more than any shift in alliances or changes in official rhetoric.

Marx explained that capitalism is driven by a relentless pressure to innovate. Each capitalist must cut costs and outcompete rivals, which means adopting new machines, reorganizing labor, and transforming whole industries. This constant upheaval – “revolutionizing the means of production” – is one of the forces that gives capitalism its dynamism and also its instability, pushing the system into continual change and periodic crisis. The imperialist powers turned this pressure into a global system: they seized the new industries first, monopolized them, and drained value from the rest of the world. The super-profits that flowed back home funded selective concessions for certain workers, helping create a labor aristocracy that stabilized political life in the imperialist core.

Today’s situation is not a smooth shift toward a “multipolar” balance. It is the breakdown of the economic pillars that propped up the imperialist order. U.S. dominance rested not only on its military reach but on its grip over the decisive sectors of world production – high technology, advanced manufacturing, finance, and intellectual-property monopolies. These monopolies generated the super-profits that stabilized imperialism both abroad and at home.

Imperialist corporations depend on capturing new industries early, cornering the market, and using that lead to extract super-profits. That brief opening is the “monopoly window.” When China enters these industries early and at scale, it shuts that window. Without monopoly control, the super-profits that sustain imperialist power never fully materialize.

This dynamic is already visible. Policy intellectuals of U.S. imperialism at the Council on Foreign Relations describe it as a “second China shock.” By this, they mean China’s shift from serving as a lowcost export platform for Western capital to becoming a leading producer of advanced, technology-intensive goods – electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries, telecom equipment, robotics, high-speed rail.

What alarms them is not just lower prices or lost market share, but the possibility that Western capital will no longer be able to control these sectors on monopoly terms. China’s massive solar build-out has driven prices down to levels where Western corporations can no longer dominate the industry as before.

In electric vehicles, batteries, energy storage, shipbuilding, and high-speed rail, China is ahead by years, and its telecom companies can build full networks without relying on Western patents. In each of these strategic sectors, imperialist capital now risks more than losing customers – it risks losing the ability to monopolize the industry in the first place.

China isn’t threatening the world with a new empire. It is threatening the old empires by cutting into the monopoly profits they depend on. Enter an industry early, and Western firms can no longer lock it up. Offer loans without IMF conditions, and Western banks lose leverage. Reduce dependence on U.S. technology, and Washington’s global hierarchy begins to crack.

U.S. planners understand this clearly. Their response – sanctions, export controls, chip bans, technology blockades, and a militarized buildup across the Pacific – is aimed at slowing China’s advance long enough for Western capital to regain the initiative. This is not a clash between rival capitals. It is a fight to preserve the monopoly foundations of the imperialist system in the face of an unprecedented challenge. This is not the end of imperialism. It is the crisis of the monopoly-capitalist system that kept it stable. China disrupts that system not by becoming a new empire, but by undermining the monopolies the old empires rely on to survive. Its socialist foundations give it a different potential from earlier rising imperialist powers – a potential which, if deepened by the struggles of the working class and oppressed peoples, could push beyond capitalist relations and reorganize production and social life on a socialist basis.