Rev Left Radio - China's Green Development: Anti-Imperialist and Socialist

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

In this episode, Breht sits down with Ashwin Shantha to discuss the argument that China's green development is not only an environmental achievement, but also a profoundly political one. Drawing on Ashwin's essay "China's Green Development is Both Anti-Imperialist and Socialist," the conversation explores how China became the global leader in solar, wind, and electric vehicles through long-term planning, industrial policy, state capacity, and the disciplining of capital to broader social goals. Together, they examine the relationship between green development, national sovereignty, and anti-imperialism, asking why China has been able to carry out a large-scale green industrial transition while Western capitalist states have largely failed. The discussion also takes up the deeper theoretical question at the heart of the essay: whether China's model is best understood not as "state capitalism," but as a socialist market economy in which capital is subordinated to national development, ecological sustainability, and public need. Read more essays at Journal of International Solidarity HERE Follow Ashwin's International Solidarity on IG HERE Check out Breht's appearance on International Solidarity podcast HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Check out our NEW REV LEFT MERCH with Goods For The People HERE Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right. On today's episode, we have on the show, Ashwin Shanta from the Journal of International Solidarity, as well as the host of the International Solidarity podcast, a show that I've been on before. I've collaborated with Ashwin before, and I'm having them on today to discuss their latest article put out by the Journal of International Solidarity, titled China's Green Development is both anti-imperialist and socialist. In this essay that we're going to discuss, he talks about China's green revolution, their development of renewable technologies, their energy and technology, sovereignty, the details of their ability to subordinate capital to the interests of the state and the long-term planning of the Communist Party and so much more. It's a really fascinating discussion on how China in particular is leading the world, really, in renewable green technologies, the material reasons for it, the relationship of China with the rest of the global South. We discussed the war in Iran and the implications not only for China, but for the global South, for the end of Western imperial dominance more broadly. And just a wide-ranging, fascinating conversation that I'm really excited to share with you today.

All right, without further ado, here is my conversation with Ashwin, China's green development, and an argument for it being anti-imperialist and socialist. Enjoy. I'm Ashwin. I wrote this essay, China's green development is both anti-imperialist and socialist. As part of my ongoing research as a doctoral student, I studied the political economy of development in the global south, looking particularly at China and South Asia. My background is I'm Indian, but I grew up in Hong Kong. I'm based in Canada now. So, you know, some of those research interests align with my background. The essay, like I said, is based on ongoing academic research, but I concentrated it and, you know, somewhat shortened it in order to be able to

speak to the left more broadly in the global north about some of the developments that have been taking place in China that are kind of under research and under kind of theorize. I also host the International Solidarity Podcast, which is part of the broader Journal of International Solidarity Initiative, which you can find on Substack, YouTube, all the audio podcast platforms. Yeah, well, welcome. I highly recommend International Solidarity Podcasts. You've been doing some wonderful work on that front. Highly recommend it to people. I've been on, I think, at least once, maybe twice, and we've had wonderful discussions. So it's a pleasure and an honor to have you on Rev. Left to talk about it.

But again, this essay that you wrote entitled China's green development is both anti-imperialist and socialist. And the subheading is China has become the global vanguard of green industrial development. National sovereignty has been a major consideration in this green push. And it wouldn't be possible without governing capital. So before we get into the conversation itself, you know, I assuming many listeners haven't been able to read it, although I'll link to it in the show notes. And I encourage people to read it. But for those who haven't, can you kind of just give like,

a 30,000 foot view of what you're trying to do in this essay and what the thrust of this essay is? Sure. Like I said, you know, I think if we're looking at the global north and the West, climate consciousness kind of, in hindsight, kind of peaked in 2019 with, you know, Greta Thunberg and, you know, the mass protests of which a lot of politicians themselves took part in, in spite of these protests, kind of being against, you know, the existing system of power. but with COVID and things like that, I think. And, you know, there are bouts of returning consciousness when there are force fires, etc., but consciousness of ecological crisis, climate crisis, has sort of been, it's one of the crises that we're all facing

that exist alongside other crises like war, you know, imperialism, et cetera, but it has kind of taken a back seat and I think particularly on the left. There's also, I think, a little bit of an oversight on the left and the west regarding China and China's development where there's sort of kind of a tendency to project the way we understand the West and Western capitalism and the state in the West onto China. You know, China's just capitalist, et cetera. But, you know, these things are disparate on the left, but what I'm trying to do with this essay is kind of bring it together and say, hey, you know, ecological crisis has been, is

a concern for all of humanity and particularly on the left. it's interesting that China has made such remarkable progress on this front. And, you know, we ought to be paying a little bit more attention to how exactly that's being done. What is the political economy of China that is enabling such kinds of development? Why haven't, you know, Western capitalist powers and states been able to make such innovations? There are, you know, so that was kind of the starting point of the essay. And in this essay, you know, I look particularly at, you know, there's a whole lot of aspects of China's green development. It's a, you know, it's a long process as it is in China.

You know, most things are, you know, well planned and are bigger processes. But green development more broadly is a big process, of which part I'm looking specifically in this essay at their innovation in green vehicles. You know, in China, they're known as new energy vehicles, NEVs. So, you know, refer to it like that. and the renewable sector, particularly wind and solar power. We can go deeper from there, but that's kind of an overarching view of who I was addressing this essay at and for what purpose. Wonderful. Yeah, and there's so much to get into here. And of course, we have all these questions and we're going to work through the details of this. I think it's incredibly important. And I echo the basic sentiment that this essay is getting at and what you just articulated there.

But maybe a good question to start off with kind of, you know, another big question from like a global perspective. You know, this essay is about the relationship in China between ecology, sovereignty, socialism, etc. What can or should, in your opinion, socialist in the West, kind of learn from China's experience and continue in continuing development on those fronts and so many more? Yeah. So the first thing is, you know, those of us on the left and the West, we are understanding. and naturally in a defensive mode, right, where we're constantly reacting to the powers that be, you know, the capitalist state and the imperialist state is on the offensive, and we have to kind of react to that,

and we've been in kind of reactive mode. At some point, you know, hopefully when we're in offensive mode, as opposed to defensive mode, it really helps to look at China, to look at China's green development, to have an understanding of, okay, what does a socialist political economy look like? And how do we shape our vision of what a socialist economy looks like? And, you know, this is important for having a vision to bring people along that speaks not only to, you know, things are bad right now, but things can actually be better, right?

What does that actually look like? But, you know, beyond that, right, I think something that motivated this work for me is that, you know, particularly with the, genocide in Gaza, the imperialist war on Iran since then, right? The Tophon-A-Laksa Operation Alexa Flood since October 2023 has opened kind of a new era in history. It's kind of given history a push, you know. In that era we've seen, you know, a lot of destruction, imperialist violence. We're seeing the Epstein class kind of naked and in its in its true form what capitalism actually looks like, what the West actually represents, what, you know, so-called Western modernity actually looks like. And this can be kind of, you know, a very despairing time for a lot of us. And shocking,

especially if we're, you know, raised with, you know, the myths of liberalism and progress and the myths of Western modernity, really. So I think what I'm, you know, what's important for us to take away from this is, and, you know, there's the concept of, you know, capitalist realism, right? In the West where, We can't think beyond capitalism. You know, the West and capitalism and capitalist, capitalist state power, it's too powerful. You know, it is all powerful and we must be conscripted into it and there's very little place to resist it. And we're kind of so helpless.

You know, this is not true. Not only is this being disproved in West Asia where fighters on three days' worth of empty stomach, you know, is resisting the Israeli occupation. And, you know, the Iranian revolution continues. to live on and is strengthened and is weakening Western imperialism, but also a new political economy is being built in China. A new world, in other words, a new world is already being built in the global south. And it's incumbent on us to kind of get over this methodological nationalism at best, where we kind of focus on the West and how things are bad in our countries, in the US, and Canada, et cetera. And at worst, the racism that comes with kind of confining ourselves to our

world, but also see ourselves as part of a broader movement across the global south. Like I said, a new world is already being built in the global south. The ecological crisis that we are so concerned about and gripped with is actually being dealt with in a meaningful and substantive way. You know, I say in the essay that China has essentially poured so much resources into green innovation, green development, that it is essentially innovated the technologies that can help us at bring us out of ecological crisis and, you know, otherwise help us, you know, mediate some of the worst effects of ecological crisis. It is essentially subsidized humanity's future in being able to do that, right? These resources being invested in green development are not, not being

invested in by the West, right? It's being invested in by China. So I think there's a broader point there about revolutionary optimism, right? If we confine ourselves to looking inward at the West, all the while in a latently racist kind of way discounting the socialist projects and the anti-imperialist projects that are being built in the global south, sure, then we can

despair, but that would be ignoring what's happening in the rest of the world in the global south. Yeah, I mean, incredibly well said, and anybody that has any sort of grasp on the global situation understands that to clear the way for a genuinely different, better future for the entirety of our species,

no matter where you live on the planet, U.S.-led Western imperialism, which, after all, is an extension of Western capitalism and deeper than that, Western 500 years of Western colonialism, has to be defeated. How does that happen? It happens, I mean, inevitably through crises, through war, through tragic aspects like we're seeing all over the world right now, specifically in Iran and Palestine. We're seeing the lashing out of a declining hegemon that is being humiliated is in the process of being defeated and in fact must be humiliated and defeated must be exposed to the entire world for what it really is and Trump is great at that right not even the pretense of liberal niceties but just the raw naked disgusting face of American imperial violence and aggression

that is a process that has to occur in order for the pathways for a better future to open up And so we're unfortunately, we're seeing that. That doesn't negate the tragedy and the lives lost by any means, but it's what we should expect. And so, you know, a sort of Western core, imperial core, nihilism or despair is just another extension of Western narcissism and myopia. So, you know, disabuse yourself of that. You mentioned the Epstein class, which is, of course, this pejorative that we put on what would more properly be called the Western bourgeoisie. and I always think, you know, it doesn't get too much attention, but, you know, using this Epstein class pejorative, the first act in the war against Iran, more or less, was the bombing of a little girl's school. And there's something so tragic about that. There's something so metaphorical about that, that the Epstein class, as it were, the first thing it does is harm a bunch murder, slaughter, a bunch of innocent, precious little children trying to go to educate, you know, trying to go to, trying to go to,

to school and get educated. And that really is what Israel and America are all about at the end of the day. And everybody just moves on. Western media barely talks about it. If you talk with your coworkers or anybody in your normal life about it, they probably won't even have heard about it or know anything about it. Just a disgusting act of violent brutality, kind of revealing the true face of this entire system. And in these wars so far, I will move on. I don't want to linger too long on this, but, you know, it's worth mentioning. I'll give you a chance to talk about it before we move on to the first question, really. But Israel has carried out air strikes on the railway running from China to Iran, right? Part of the broader China's Belt and Road initiative.

And I haven't confirmed this yet. In fact, I should have done this before the show. People can look this up themselves, but I think Iran immediately goes out and fixes it and rebuilds it. So there's this interesting dynamic where China isn't by any means directly involved in this conflict. But because we're so globalized in the 21st century, there's reverberations, obviously, throughout the entire global economy. There's implications for China all over this war. And, you know, who knows where things go from here. But the fact that that infrastructure is being attacked really, again, reveals some of the core interest of the U.S. and Israel in this war, which is acutely about Iran, but much more than that. It's about global regional dominance,

regional hegemony for Israel and an attempt to maintain an inevitably declining global hegemony by the U.S. Do you have any thoughts on any of that? Yeah, I mean, all definitely well said. I think, I think, yeah, this is the other piece that, you know, is worth paying attention to is what are these South-South connections? I mean, you brought up the rail line, you know, between China and Iran. This is, you know, part of a broader, and, you know, this is also something that I study South-South cooperation. This is, you know, part of the broad new world that's being built, right? China's Belt and Road initiative, which gets disparaged sometimes and erroneously so internalizing bourgeois, or, you know, let's call it what it is,

Epstein-Pstrandt propaganda, which is that, you know, China is doing imperialism and colonization in, you know, the global south. And this is actually what kind of got me started on my serious scholarly inquiry into China, whether China is doing imperialism in the global south. But, you know, not only is it not doing that. And if we want to have that discussion, we can. But the connections, the infrastructural connections, the civilizational connections that are being built through the Belt and road initiative, but otherwise through South-South cooperation in the economic sense, in the developmental sense, but also in the diplomatic sense, are part of this new, you know, as Western capitalism and imperialism continues to decline, it is this that is taking. That is taking

its place and it is it is this that is the face of this new world that's being built up and and these are kind of you know for those of us that might be you know ultra leftists you know who want to see egalitarian relations of production like kind of immediately well you know hopefully we'll get there and we we will but these are these steps are indispensable on the way to that ultimate torquilauzen calls it you know advanced socialism you know advanced stage of socialism yeah i mean i I totally couldn't, you know, and it's a sign how important these South-South connections are that, you know, the Israeli regime and the U.S., you know, the Great Satan is actually targeting this, you know, infrastructure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's go ahead and get into the essay proper because your essay does argue that China's green rise is not just environmental policy, but actually an anti-imperialist project.

And you're kind of alluding in that direction with your last response, but I was hoping that you can maybe go a little deeper and tell us what you mean by that. exactly. Sure. I definitely want to get into that. I think I'm going to cling on to the first thing you said, though, which is that it's not just environmental policy or environmental consciousness. And I want to address this for a bit because even in the mainstream Western press, when they're talking about China's green development, there's, and you know, this can sometimes be taken up on the Western left, which is, you know, part of the broader West, right, which is that actually China doesn't care about, you know, China's green development. is actually not about environmentalism.

These, you know, Aege addicts, they don't care about the environment, unlike us civilized Westerners. This could not be further from the truth. If you look at, you know, China's some of the primary documents on green development coming out of the State Council, you know, of the People's Republic of China, and you look at their, what do they themselves say about green development, which, by the way, as a kind of a side note, is a very important methodological point, right? You have to look at the indigenous sources of knowledge production. What knowledge are they themselves producing? Not just what is the Western media? What is the global north? What kind of knowledge is the West producing about China?

But what is the knowledge being produced about China by the Chinese themselves? And this, you know, same with Iran, right? You know, we've been listening and tuning in a lot more to what the Iranians themselves have to say about their own situation. So this is an important point. and I think through the paper, I made it a point to actually draw on Chinese sources. This is important. But if you look at their primary documents,

you know, in Western government documents, it's rare to see words like, you know, beautiful and, you know, beautiful society and beautiful cities and, you know, that kind of stuff might, you know, come across in the West as like kind of garbage or it doesn't have place in government documents. But if you look at the Chinese Green Development, paper from the state council, this primary government document,

it outlines its vision very clearly and at the center of it, right, because at the center of the people's Republic of China and their societal vision is a pro-people, is a people-centered kind of vision. And if you have a people-centered vision, people want to live clean, healthy lives that rely on a clean and healthy environment.

So this is a myth that, or, you know, it's a racist myth that sometimes gets circulated that, you know, China's green development, it's just about pragmatism. It's just about, you know, development. It's not actually because they care, these people care about the environment. In fact, they do. So, you know, having that established to talk about the anti-imperialist piece, right, how is this anti-imperialist? You know, we can, we can and we will get more into this. I say that it's anti-imperialist. in two ways in that the development of the NEV sector, the new energy vehicle sector, as well as the

renewable sector, is about the two aspects of it are energy sovereignty, right? And technological sovereignty. We can get into that more, but the anti-imperialist piece of this, I'm kind of setting that up and we can take it further, but the anti-imperialist piece of this can actually really be traced back to. the Chinese Revolution in 1949, where this dual concern with sovereignty and with industrialization

or building industrial capacity have always been intertwined as part of the Chinese Revolution then and ongoing, right? And this ties back to the nature of imperialism. So if we want to understand why this development is anti-imperialist, let's actually understand. Let's actually understand what imperialism is and what it does to societies, right, which is that it drains wealth, right? It drains wealth from a society outward to the imperial core. And this is, this is a process that we saw through, you know, the height of industrial capitalism with the UK and the British Empire at the helm of capitalist development through the 1800s and 1900s where, you know, after colonizing India and extracting its blood, sweat, and tears, it's, you know, its labor and natural resources

and redirecting them through to the metropolitan core, which, you know, included, you know, the settler colonies as well of Canada and Australia and, you know, even the U.S. After laying its roots in India and sucking that society dry of its resources, which had never seen, you know, throughout its thousands of years. of civilizational history. From India, it launches its imperialist offensive to China via Hong Kong. This is, you know, a history that I'm familiar with. Trafficking drugs into China to get these people addicted to drugs to begin a drain of wealth

out of China to the core, right? This is actually what imperialism is about. It's about extracting wealth and resources from these otherwise self-reliant, autonomous, societies and economies to redirect those resources toward the core. And the impact that that had on China is to deindustrialize the country. If it was able to produce for itself and meet the social reproduction needs of its people before, then on encountering the West, on encountering imperialism that began the century of humiliation, which was characterized by the stripping of its productive capacity, right, and deindustrialization, as we saw with India as well.

So after going through the century of humiliation, right, the revolution, yes, it's about socialism and it's about establishing a people's republic where, you know, gradually you build socialism through different stages, even Mao, you know, outlined different stages, new democracy, et cetera. But the revolution was both about reclaiming sovereignty, but sovereignty over its production, right? And, you know, the focus on production is also a very important part of Marxism, right? Marxism, you know, and socialism isn't just about broadly good vibes, you know, and egalitarian relations.

It's also about production. It's about how do our societies build the things that we need, that employ, you know, that engages the widest cross-section of society to then meet our own needs, right? That's what socialism is about. It's about production as well as the relations of production. And so, you know, we can get further into the two aspects of how it is anti-imperiless energy sovereignty and technological sovereignty. But I wanted to establish first that, like, you know, this focus on developing indigenous industry and indigenizing production, etc., this is something that goes back to the Chinese Revolution in 1949, where sovereignty and industrialization were intertwined priorities. No, absolutely. And, you know, in so many ways, Marxism is in some sense about liberating the forces of production from the constraints of capitalist social relations of production, right? So it really is core to the entire political and economic project. With regards to China's rise as a sort of leader in the development of green tech, it has so many reasons for doing so and so many things that make it better at doing that than any country in the world.

West. The ability for long-term thinking and planning, which we'll get into here in a bit, is essential. Also, there's just a way, and it comes up in every global crisis and every time that China emerges as the responsible agent on the world stage. There's just an obvious way in which the Chinese government is tethered to reality in a way that Western societies and specifically the U.S. is increasingly just not. And it made me think when you were talking. I don't know this for sure I haven't looked into this. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I would bet my life, without even looking into this, that there is no serious movement within China that denies the reality of climate change like there is in the West and like there specifically is in the United

States. And I think that's just one example of that untethering from reality within the United States, you know, the fossil fuel company promoting this nonsense, an entire political party within the U.S. picking up this obvious, complete lie that climate change is a hoax and really making it foundational to their entire political project, Trump has rolled back and really weakened. Instead of just being neutral to it, he's actually actively hostile to the development of renewable technologies. And he is also obviously stripped regulations for fossil fuel companies so they can extract

more and produce more, you know, carbon and pump it into the atmosphere. So I'm just throwing that out there and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that and then we can move on. well you know briefly I think this kind of you know it's a good point and in terms of China you know having a movement that denies climate change you know I'm also not sure I would also you know it's it's highly highly highly unlikely and if anything close came to that it would it might be the Falun Gong you know the cult that you know does this Shenyan stuff you know these performances and stuff so and you know they largely are if I'm not

wrong, banned from operating in China. And so, you know, I've seen a lot of them in Hong Kong because, you know, the jurisdiction is different, et cetera. In terms of, yeah, so here, you know, it kind of clarifies the forces of capitalism, a declining more abundant capitalism, if you will, and the forces of socialism, where the forces of capitalism, the global north, the capitalist west, and imperialist west, is hell-bent on, you know, preserving, you know, the fossil fuel industry and not just, you know, fossil fuels, you know, to some extent, will have to still rely on them to, you know, to whatever extent that at some point down the line will determine what the nature of the transition is. But for the West, it's, it's this kind of irrational, religious kind of trying to preserve fossil fuel-based development. And, you know, some of that has to do with the profit margins of oil and the oil industry, etc. But you're seeing a fault line here clearly between, the forces of regression and capitalism, namely the West,

continuing to rely on fossil fuels and to the extent where you would generate a movement across the West that denies climate change just to kind of benefit the oil industry elites. And then the forces of socialism on the other side, you know, that has innovated in green productive technologies and is continuing to do so. So I think, you know, again, that's kind of the point of my article is to kind of clarify these kinds of fault lines, right, you know, for those of us in the West.

Yeah. And a quick historical materialist point, it's kind of interesting to note that obviously using colonialism as the form of primitive accumulation, you know, the birth of liberalism and capitalism kind of emerged for all these structural regions and these exploitative reasons, you know, the shift from feudalism through mercantilism. driven by colonialism into capitalism, you know, liberalism and that was a progressive force at the time coming out of feudalism. And it's really interesting to note that that 500 years of colonialism that produced the Industrial Revolution in Europe and then it produced what we see as modern capitalism today, as capitalism itself, you know, begins to hit its terminal stages. The entire West, which, you know, coming out of feudalism were sort of these projects. of the liberal democratic capitalist world order that we've lived in for for a long time, the West itself is in rapid, serious, terminal decline. Its whole sort of moment as the king of the hill, as it were, was created through brutal colonialism, of course, and was part and parcel

of the historical shift out of feudalism and into liberal capitalism through mercantilism. And so it actually makes perfect sense that as that whole order now begins to reach its terminal stages, it itself becomes regressive. The progressive forces are actually coming from the global south, the areas of the world that were often plundered and exploited through the colonial process. There's like this dialectical response now that the West is falling. Liberalism is incoherent and has been revealed to be hypocritical. Capitalism, imperialism, literally. unsustainable through the rest of the century. There has to be massive changes and the massive changes are not emanating out of Europe or America. They're emanating out of the global South really being

led in this moment by China, by a society ruled by a communist political party leading the way capable of central planning, capable of long-term planning, capable of thinking not just about their narrow nationalist interests, but about how that nationalist interest, but about how that nationalist interest fits into a broader vision of the world's movement forward. I just think that's a, as you were talking, it just kind of that thought sparked in my mind. And it's like, yeah, this is kind of what we should expect from a historical materialist lens. Absolutely. Absolutely. So let's go ahead and move forward because a lot of people would perhaps assume that China's green success is just a matter of subsidies or perhaps just scale, right, a really big country with, you know, a government that

and employ certain subsidies, but it's much more than that. So what role did long-term planning, industrial policy, and state capacity play beyond mere subsidies or scale? Yeah, this is important. And here, you know, let's get into the empirics of it, because I think this is going to kind of, you know, if we've been talking at a more theoretical level so far, then this is going to show us exactly what the Chinese state and all of society, including the private sector in China, what are they doing exactly that is resulting in these outcomes? Okay, yeah. So the first thing I want to actually talk about some of the statistics here, and I'll be reading from the first bit of my article, to really kind of give us a picture of what we're working with. So in 2023, in 2023, China was

responsible for the production of over 80% of the world's solar panels and 60% of the world's electric vehicles. You know, Chinese NEVs, the electric vehicles, they make up more than 90% of sales in China compared to the 50% market share in China held by gas-powered Chinese-branded vehicles. In terms of renewables, you know, solar power in China accounts for 55% of the global increase in solar output. So China's responsible for 55% of the global increase in solar output. And, you know, 82% of the global increase in wind power output is due to wind power generation in China. So these are some of the, you know, empirical facts to look at in terms of the outcomes.

What have been the outcomes of green development in China? Now, as it comes to, you know, the different, pieces in place that allowed that to take shape, the first thing really to talk about is long-term planning. Like you said, Brent, you know, and this is something that, again, shows kind of the fault lines of capitalism versus socialism.

Socialism, you know, even if we don't have the command economy of the kind of Soviet-style economies of before, we still have planning and targets that are being made and revisited every now and then. And, you know, just to, I guess, to begin with, long-term planning in the N.EV sector, in the green vehicle sector, really started in 2001, right? In 2001, they started planning for green vehicles to become a viable industry in China, electric vehicles. And with renewables, the planning around that started in 2006. So we're really seeing the fruits of this 20-year-ish-long process today. And, the other thing I wanted to mention about their long-term planning approach is that it really

relies on a systems-based thinking, right? And this is another fault line between capitalism and socialism, right? Where capitalism, it's all about, you know, the next quarter and there's no planning, you know, for the economy. It's about the main priority is maximizing shareholder value quarter on quarter, and the rest can kind of fall in place after that, right? following that objective. And that's what it means to live in a market-led economy, in a capitalist economy. But here I'm going to read from the primary document, again, on China's green

development from the state council of the People's Republic of China, where they talk about their systems thinking, they call it systems thinking and their coordinated approach. So I'll read here a little bit. I think it'll be kind of insightful for what's behind, what's behind this this planning and this ability to see humans in connection with their broader ecology and nature. So I'm quoting here, quote, green development is an all-around revolutionary change in our values and in how we work, live, and think. China has applied systems thinking to the whole process of economic and social development and eco-environmental conservation and protection. it has taken a sound approach to the relationships between development and protection,

between overall and local interests, and between the present and the future, unquote. So, you know, that itself, you know, probably gives us a lot to discuss, you know, on. But you can see the systems thinking that is reflective of Marxist dialectics, but also a broader, you know, Chinese civilizational approach, right, where even if you look at Chinese medicine, if Western medicine is about like kind of treating the specific symptom, Chinese medicine takes this, you know, holistic all-around approach of, you know, looking at the body as a whole rather than treating symptoms in isolation from other parts of the body.

So, you know, this is kind of just giving us a sense of what is the rationale of long-term planning? It is this, it's both civilizational in some sense, but it's also definitely very much a Marxist dialectical approach in thinking and planning. So that's on the planning piece. Okay, let's look a little more specifically at how the NEV sector and the renewable sector kind of developed empirically. So, and what role the state played in that, right? So like I said, long-term planning started in the beginning of the 2000s.

But the auto industry. in China, you know, it didn't directly jump to, you know, having these really nice Chinese EV brands like BYD and Cherry and etc. It started, you know, in the 1990s where, you know, this was still during the phase of the early phase of reform and opening up where China was opening up to foreign capital. Much of the Chinese car companies at the time and, you know, there wasn't that much car production period in China, right? This was the era of the 90s, 80s and 90s of where basically everyone had and used bicycles. Of course, there were cars still, but like, you know, bicycles are kind of like the primary mode of transport in a lot of ways. You know, so the auto industry at

the time was largely just state-owned Chinese companies. When they opened to foreign companies like Ford and Volkswagen and stuff, they, the state, and here's where, you know, the state played an activist role in the economy is that they said, okay, you know, if Ford and these, you know, big Western multinational car companies want to take advantage of China's massive market, right, to sell their vehicles in here, you can do that, but we're going to make it conditional. And this is a theme that you will see throughout Chinese green development and Chinese development more broadly. So we're going to make it conditional on you forming a joint venture with, a Chinese domestic company, right? So Ford or Volkswagen or, you know, other kind of global

multinationals had to form joint ventures with a Chinese auto company in which the foreign ownership could not be more than 50%. Right. So it's like even. And this was very important. The joint ventures is a very important piece of China's developmental history because these joint ventures essentially allowed for technology transfer, right? When you form a joint venture, that tech and skills know-how gets transfer to domestic counterparts that can then be, you know, taken and, you know, it's about people, right? So these personnel that worked in these joint ventures, you know, perhaps later play some role in a Chinese domestic company with those, you know, expertise and, you know, the technology as well, right, like on that question. So one part

of this was forming these joint ventures. This allowed for the tech to then be kind of, indigenous in China and that's kind of the beginning process of forming this domestic supply chain of you know green vehicles some other policies uh that went along with this were low something called local content policies where basically you know a certain percentage of production of the final output of cars or the cars in this case as well as wind turbines we can get to that but uh these these local content policies applied for both wind turbine production as well as cars, where a certain percentage of the overall content that produces the final product of the car or the wind turbine, a certain percentage, let's say like 50 or 70 percent, has to be domestically sourced.

You can't just import those parts from abroad and assemble it here. It's not just about importing everything and just doing the assembly in China. It's let's build the domestic supply chain. And then they, you know, impose tariffs on importing, you know, parts from abroad. So it's these kind of state policies that come together, right, where you see the active intervention, the activist state, right? Playing a role in shaping, you know, the supply chain domestically. And, you know, like, we can get further into this. I've been going on for a while now.

but subsidies are also very important, right? You mentioned subsidies, but it's not just subsidies in this kind of unstrategic way to benefit the private sector like they do here, right? These, you know, just get doled out to the capitalists for them to help them make their profits. But no, these subsidies, they change over time and they're highly, like I said,

they're highly conditional, and they force technological upgrading. So this, I'll kind of round it off here and we can go further into renewables, you know, if we want to. But the subsidies in the EV sector, they kind of changed. The conditions for those subsidies changed basically like every year or every two years, where if you want to maximize the subsidies, well, these subsidies would be on the consumer side, right? So purchasers of EVs would receive these subsidies.

But as a car company, if you're thinking about maximizing your sale of cars that are subsidized, most, then you're going to adjust accordingly to that, to, to those changing conditions. And, you know, an example of this is EVs with a 200 kilometer range on one EV charge, they got subsidized less than a 400 kilometer range EV car because that 400 kilometer EV is technologically more advanced, right? It can, on one charge, it can go further. And the technology is more sophisticated. It's better for people.

So that's going to get subsidized more. those are signals. Those are signals brought about by the state to the market to encourage these other producers to catch up, catch up to that 400-kilometer range mark. And, you know, these subsidies would change year on year or, you know, every two years, like I said, to encourage this technological upgrading. So that's how, you know, EV driving ranges got higher and higher. It's because of these kinds of strategic, the strategic use of subsidies.

So, you know, there's more to be said in how some of these policies were used in renewables, for example. You see a similar kind of conditionality pattern. But I think I'll stop there. I mean, the bottom line is the conditions change. It's the strategic use of subsidies. The state is embedded in the market as an agent that kind of shapes the market within a broader logic of overall goals and outcomes of producing higher tech. vehicles and the broader goal of de-polluting the air, right? We want to maximize the uptake of green vehicles to kind of clean up the air.

That was a legacy of the polluting, very polluting coal-based, coal-dependent trajectory of China's early development. Yeah, and almost every nation state that goes through the developmental process has this externalization on the environment and high levels of pollution. in industrial England and happened in the United States. I mean, even Nixon had to be this champion of the EPA because American rivers were so toxic. They could be lit on fire. And so it's a, you know, it's sort of grotesque how sometimes that will be pointed to as an example of, you know, China's just environmental recklessness. And it's like, point to me any society that's had to go through modern development and industrialization that haven't had those problems, at least China is fixing them and actually moving now beyond them.

They're beyond that phase pretty clearly. And what we see is just it should be so obvious that this is a government interested in the long-term stability of their society, in the progressing of their society, making logical moves to shape things in a way that makes sense for that future. You know, one of the silliest things about Trump's tariffs is that it's not connected to any industrial policy. It's like terrorists for their own sake. You mentioned, yeah, China has tariffs and any country could reasonably have tariffs built around an industrial policy with a long-term vision for one society. That would make total sense. Of course, that's not what we have here. And you mentioned, you know, the quarterly outlook of capital.

And that's also mixed with the anarchy of the market. It's also mixed with the two-party system and four-year elections where one party of capital will get in and do some things. They'll lose the next election. The other party comes in, strips all those things back. There is no capacity, no ability, no willingness, no interest in trying to develop any sort of long-term plan. And there's really, in the United States, it's increasingly clear there's no interest on behalf of the ruling class of even solving basic problems. Like, imagine if you had a government that would like think about, hey, you know, microplastics are a real problem. Let's try to solve that.

Or, you know, obviously climate change is a real problem. It's going to be a real problem for us and the rest of the world. We should try to do that. Oh, there's a, there's a lowering quality of life for our people. Maybe we should figure out ways to, to address that. It's like they're just not concerned at all with even thinking about that. And meanwhile, China's over there having five, 10, 15 year plans and seeing them through and adjusting as the conditions adjust every year or two.

You said they come in and they might, you know, shift subsidies around. And there's certain conditions that must be met to do it. And all with this vision. of where they want their entire society to go. And that is why their society is organized in a superior fashion to our own and is pulling ahead of ours. And as time goes on, that pulling ahead will only increase. And I think the U.S., because of its entrenched corporate interest, because the state is subordinated to capital as such, I think we have an increasingly difficult road for those of us living inside the belly of the beast, financially, economically, quality of lifewise,

and so much more. But, you know, let's move forward. You were mentioning the EVs. You were mentioning renewables. And you're showing in your essay and in your answer there how the state and China is actively constructing and disciplining markets. And in fact, one of your boldest claims is that China's green development was only possible because capital was subordinated to broader social goals.

So, you know, if you want to talk a little bit about the limits of liberal. market approaches to decarbonization, and then also what you mean exactly by governing capital, what that actually looks like in the Chinese context. Yeah, I guess, you know, to try to keep it brief on the limits of like market approaches or, you know, market liberal approaches to decarbonization is that it's still capital-centered, right? What you were talking about in your kind of previous response was how, you know, the U.S. government is kind of, and Western governments more broadly are kind of, you know, incapable of

of even looking out for the people. And, you know, I think China still has a long way to go in kind of building socialism and building, you know, higher stages of socialism. But at this point where we still live in an imperialist world system where until, I guess, very recently, there was still a very prominent threat of the U.S. or the West aggressing against China to compromise. its sovereign project in the same way that it is right now with Iran, right? In that context, China has to develop. And so at this stage of its socialism, and it calls itself in, you know, the primary stage of socialism, something like that. Its economic orientation is people-centered, right? And it's about the broadest possible people-centered orientation, clean air, you know,

fixing some of these developmental issues that came out of the rapid, reform and opening up, right? So if in the West you see the opposite of a people-centered approach, in China, you see a people-centered approach. And I think, you know, that is still, you know, reflective of its socialist and kind of, you know, its revolutionary orientation, right? A capitalist society would not be capable of doing that. A capitalist society is the rule of capital. So, you know, I'll come back to this when I talk about how is China, you know, how is China socialist and how is China's green development social? list and how is it governing capital? Well, the kind of the short answer is that it's not the rule of

capital. It's not the rule of capital. It's actually the subordination of capital to, you know, nationally planned and nationally set goals, right, that are that are good for people, clean air, etc. But in terms of the limits of, and I think that kind of leads us into this, the limits of these Western market-based oriented or market-oriented approaches to decarbonization. Like in Canada, you know, there's a whole thing over the past decade, really, about the carbon tax. And, you know, Justin Trudeau having introduced the carbon tax, which is really, you know, a liberal, very market-centered way to address, you know, decarbonization. You know, the way it works basically is you put a price on carbonization.

carbon. So people pay more when they consume. They pay a tax, a premium on the things that they consume that are linked to carbon emissions. But then they also get a rebate in the mail of those tax revenues. And the idea is, okay, as an individual, you can change your behavior and consume less carbon, but you'll still receive the same amount of rebate. So isn't this great? Isn't this like, you know, isn't this how we're going to decarbonize by individual behavioral changes? But no, this is a, this is not. This is not a systems approach. If we want to, you know, take China's example, it's not a systems approach. It is a decentralized kind of careless, actually. It's a careless approach that relies on individual goodwill without any kind of campaign, right? A broad of, you know, whole of society, broad mobilization in favor of decarbonization, right? So the bottom line with market-centered approaches to decarbonization is that essentially it looks at, and, you know, you get this as well when you're booking plane tickets and they ask you if you want to pay a premium to offset your your carbon emissions. It's seeing an emerging issue of ecological crisis and it's trying to enclose and commodify that domain.

And it still centers capital, right? It's the capital of saying, hey, how can we begin to capitalize on this domain and begin to commodify it, right? that is not linked to any people-oriented outcomes. And, you know, there's some research coming out saying that basically Canada's carbon tax, and now, you know, all the human crime, the issue of the political football of the carbon tax in Canada, eventually led to it being scrapped entirely, right? So the carbon tax, some studies are finding that it wasn't, it didn't produce significant outcomes, actually. And so that's, you know, that's on kind of the market-based approach,

approaches to decarbonization. What you see with China is very different and it relies on disciplining capital. I think a good example that I didn't get into in my previous response of what does disciplining capital actually look like? So I preface by saying that China's green development is socialist because it is not the rule of capital, unlike how I was talking about with the market liberal approaches to decarbonate. It is not the rule of capital. it is actually the disciplining of capital. One example of this is in the auto industry again, right?

You had state subsidies that were conditional and the conditions were changing year on year or every two years. But eventually they phased out those subsidies from the state and they moved to a different model. What is this model? This model basically said that you now have kind of a credit system where both domestic auto firms and foreign auto firms. and foreign auto firms in China have to have to kind of reduce their or boost their fuel efficiency in the gas-powered cars that they're still selling. The fuel efficiency actually has to increase so that the emission standards are actually better. But also, the ratio, there has to be a certain ratio of electric vehicles being produced to the traditional vehicles, the gas-powered vehicles,

being produced. And if you're not producing that ratio, the necessary ratio of electric vehicles to combustion vehicles, then you get negative credits. There's a credit system. You get positive credits for meeting it and you get negative credits if you fall behind. Now, this is very smart because the Chinese domestic companies, the Chinese domestic auto companies, they actually do better at green vehicles. It's the foreign companies that are kind of at their green vehicle production, right? Like Volkswagen is very popular in China. So this kind of policy seems to, at least to me,

seems to disproportionately target the foreign automakers and say, hey, you know, you have to catch up or risk being punished for this. Now, they can, if they continue to disregard meeting these standards of this credit policy, they can be kicked out of the market. They can, you know, be halted from operating in the market. But if you want to continue operating in the market and you're below this threshold, you can do two things. And there's what I call a good cop approach and a bad cop approach. The bad cop approach is if you're a foreign auto firm that's a laggard in producing green vehicles as a ratio to your combustion vehicles, the bad cop approach is, okay, you're going to have to buy those credits.

You're going to have to buy positive credits from your domestic Chinese counterparts, essentially your competitors, to offset your negative credit. So if the state, remember a moment ago I mentioned that the state wound down its subsidies and basically transferred the burden of subsidizing Chinese domestic companies to the foreign companies. So that's the bad cop approach, okay, which, you know, foreign companies don't want to start subsidizing their domestic competitors, right? the good cop approach then is okay well the other way you can get those positive credits from these domestic auto firms Chinese auto firms is by again forming joint ventures and where gaps still exist in technology and whatnot

that encourages further technological or technology transfer to those domestic counterparts so you see a kind of carrots and sticks approach here so I think that that's kind of just this and this policy is called the dual credit policy. And, you know, listeners can can look it up for more detail. It's a little bit intricate to explain. And I hope I've done a decent enough job. But there you really see what it means to discipline capital and disciplining both domestic capital and foreign capital and maybe doing so differentially. Now, you know, so that's one empirical example. But zooming out more broadly, right, how do the Chinese themselves theorize their socialist market economy? And here, you know, one of the sources that I drew on in this paper was a paper actually released in this journal,

Wunha Tsong, from, you know, the international edition is published by the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. And I'm drawing on these Chinese academics, Meng Jia and Zhang Zibin, and they are talking about how the state governs capital via what they call constructive markets. And they say that construct, and you'll see you, basically a lot of what I've talked about so far, kind of fit into this theoretical framework of constructive markets. These, you know, two scholars, they talk about how constructive markets have two aspects. The first aspect is, you know, as the name can suggest, the state plays a role in constructing markets on both the demand and the supply side of the market, right? You know, a very quick example is, you know, it's not just these auto firms that are producing

green electric vehicles. It's also the local governments in, you know, cities like Sujo and Xinjiang that are playing a role in the market of constructing charging stations, right? Obviously, if you produce cars, you need charging stations as well. And so the state, in this case, the local government, the state at the local level, intervenes in the market to facilitate the rapid construction of charging stations. So that's on the supply side. On the demand side, like I said, or actually I haven't mentioned this yet, but, you know, if you have a green vehicle in China, you have a green license plate, you get perks, you know, you're able to park in certain places. You know, you get preferential treatment in terms of parking, in terms of the lanes you can use at different hours of rush hour, etc. So the state plays an active role in construction.

And, you know, I talked about, you know, some of these other tech transfer policies, local content, etc. the state plays an active role in constructing markets on both the supply side and the demand side. So that's kind of the first point of this constructive markets approach. The second point is, and you know, this is a Marxist approach, is looking at exchange value versus use value, right? You know, each commodity, right, has a use value. If you have a chair, the use value of it is to sit on the chair and to have meetings, et cetera. but you can also sell the chair in the market for a certain price. That's kind of the exchange value.

But the point here with the constructive markets in China's what they call socialist market economy is that the exchange values are subordinated to use value objectives. And so coming back to the national plans, right, the long-term national plans, these long-term national plans, one way to look at it is these are the use-value objectives of China's political economy that they then use. you know, both private companies and state-owned companies to kind of function as engines within that system to produce those use value outcomes. So, you know, companies and private companies, right, and capitalists in China can generate profit. Sure, exchange value objectives, as Meng and Zhang would call it.

But those exchange value objectives are still overall subordinated to use value objectives and use. and use value objectives here more broadly is let's have clean air, right? Let's have green vehicles so we actually don't have to rely on importing oil from the Strait of Hormuz when it can actually be shut off and then, you know, kind of disrupt our whole society. Those are use value objectives. And so here, again, we come back to the point of capitalism versus socialism. Capitalism is the rule of capital, where capital rules, in other words where exchange value objectives dominate society, right? So society is subordinated to exchange value objectives. In China, that's not the case.

Use value objectives are outlined by the party state, are outlined in national plans, are set as goals, under which exchange value objectives, you know, profit making private companies, etc., a very competitive economy, right, with kind of cutthroat competition, is used to fulfill those exchange value objectives. So that's on, you know, that gives us a view of, you know, how China here is, you know, socialist, how it's governing capital. And what is the logic behind this? Yeah, so well said, so many details. I've often said that in the U.S., the state is subordinate to capital and in China, capital

is subordinate to the state, but going even deeper in Marxist terms, the subordination of exchange value to use value. That is quintessential. If you tried to do that in the United States, you would be met with accusations of tyranny and authoritarianism and unfreedom. The moment you say, hey, healthcare, the point of health care is to make sure people live healthy lives and can access medicine and surgeries when they need it. We are going to subordinate the profit incentive, the exchange value that the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical corporations advance. We're subordinating that to the use value. of what health care is really about.

Health care is not about maximizing shareholder value for these private fucking corporations. It is about taking care of human beings and perpetuating human life. And we can look in housing, we can look in education, we can look across the American economy. And in every instance,

the reason things suck, the reason fucking our quality of life is shit is because time and time and time again, the use value of something is subordinated to its exchange value. So I just want to make that point clearly. And I had somebody on recently who was very skeptical of these claims, right? And in fact, I said that exact line.

I said in America, the state is subordinate to capital, while in China, capital is subordinate to the state. And, you know, this person came back. People can go listen. It was Joel Wainwright. And we're talking about his book of the end. Very China skeptical, has visited China. And he basically came back and he was arguing more or less that China isn't in the primary

stage of socialism that it is more or less state capitalists you still have massive inequality you have you know plenty of of sort of class dynamics still very much in play there's a rising upper class in china that has an increasing pension for luxury goods and chanel bags and and a sort of capitalist lifestyle that is more or less being allowed to to flourish there there's corruption at various levels of government um etc and therefore for him that made the idea that capital was subordinated by the state in China, somewhat farcical or maybe perhaps a PR move by China. I know this is not something that you and I talked about discussing.

It just came up, but you've laid out a very good argument. Would you have any shorthand responses to that criticism of China pointing out these internal contradictions within China and what you would respond to somebody saying, that's not social. That's not even a primary stage of socialism. That's just state capitalism. Yeah, I do have responses to that. Because a lot of the things that you mentioned, right, they might be true, right? That there are classes in China.

There are class differentiations. There are class inequalities. There is, you know, an elite class that, you know, has luxury consumption and nice cars and all this kind of stuff. All of those things are true. but I think here's and this is a you might appreciate this Brett I think this is a you know a philosophical kind of issue here where in Western kind of philosophy we we kind of privilege the form of things over kind of the content and in order to and so you know it so just looking at the form in which China is developed

where you have features such as class differences and class inequalities and kind of capitalist values, right, infecting society, that is enough to say that China, by virtue of its form, it's capitalist. But the issue is that it ignores the outcomes of Chinese society, right? And never mind that, you know, Xi Jinping has, you know, kind of been criticizing these kind of capitalist values that have been allowed to proliferate and generate in China, etc. I actually have a lot to say about this. I'll try to keep a brief, but... Make your time.

But yeah, it ignores the outcomes, right? And here, I would say my central methodology in my work, right, and is very much linked to my background being Indian but raised in Hong Kong, China and kind of being able to see both of those societies is compare China to India. You see a difference. you know, very big populations, sizable, comparable populations. You know, they were at the center of the world system before, you know, 1492 or, you know, even before the 1700s, right?

But now after Western modernity and the drain of wealth that was initiated through imperialism, how are these two countries reacting to that and reacting to their historical circumstances in a very different way? If you want to see capitalism, look at India, right? And by the way, it's worth mentioning that at the starting point, India gained independence in 1947. China had its revolution and established the People's Republic in 1949. So a pretty much similar starting point in terms of independence and nominal sovereignty. At that point, India was slightly better developed than, I mean, that's not saying much,

but it had more productive capacity because the British were actually colonized. China was not formally colonized, but because of the United. of British colonial presence and they had to move shit to the imperial cores. They actually had railroads and other kinds of productive capacity in India that China didn't have, right? So given that same starting point, see the difference today. If you want to see capitalism, if you want to see a big elite, a growing elite that is and a growing middle class in India that is increasingly concerned with luxury consumption while being, you know, tended to, you know, tended to to buy their multiple servants and drivers and things like that,

look at India, you know, without any of the outcomes of China, right? In this Strait of Ramos crisis, you know, where the export of oil is kind of has been curtailed, you see the difference between India who has not had a plan and who has a capitalist elite that is quite linked to the West and a Comptor, you know, people might debate the Cumberdoor title, but that essentially sells out the interests of the vast mass of Indian people, basically one billion out of those 1.4 billion people, you know, can't afford non-essential items, right? You see Modi going to, you know, Israel and subordinating himself to the U.S., etc.

None of these outcomes, right? So, sorry, I was supposed to say that India was, you know, a lot more affected by this Iran war because it's so energy import dependent. And China knows that as a revolutionary society, as an anti-peerless society, since 1949, the West is going to constantly try to compromise its sovereign development. And so if it's been relying on its coal, which is, you know, China has a lot of coal

and, you know, processes it domestically, and that has been its primary energy source, well, yes, it's a domestic energy source, but it comes with a lot of issues. And if we want to clean that up, well, we can either look to oil, which will have to be import-reliant. And, you know, they don't want to be like India or South Korea or Japan

that, you know, now is facing severe crises because they're so import-dependent, and they didn't have enough oil reserves, especially in the case of India. So they developed green technology, right? And that's, you know, that's kind of getting into the energy sovereignty piece of things now. But, yeah, you know, the form versus the content, that's a central point where you have essentially

all the same phenomena in India, but with very different outcomes, very different outcomes in China. And it's important to focus on the outcomes in China. And also, last point, when we say state capitalism, and I think this is something that listeners must internalize, is that our governments in the West are state capitalists. Okay. If we're Leninists, right, and we understand Lenin, you know, in the state and revolution as talking about, you know, the state as having bourgeois class character and acting in the interests of the capitalist class in facilitating capital accumulation. In spite of what they say about neoliberalism and the, you know, the withdrawing of the states, it's the withdrawing of the state in the state's role in socially reproducing society.

It's not a withdrawal of the state in facilitating capital accumulation. So we have state capitalism all over the world in all state, in all capitalist society. The state is involved. in capital accumulation. So if everything is state capitalism, right, if all capitalist countries are state capitalist in one form or another, what is China then? China is, you know, and again, here's where methodologically you have to look at the outcomes and the differential outcomes. It's one thing to compare China to India as global South societies, but we're seeing China and the development of the productive forces in China advance beyond even the productive forces

in the global north and the imperial core, which, you know, in addition to having a very dirty development policy reliant on coal and basically causing ecological crisis today, it also relied on imperialism to develop its own society. China, you know, is never relied on imperialism to develop its society. It had to develop it in a sovereign and indigenous kind of way. And now it's quickly moving away from coal, you know, other fossil. fuel. So that's on that. Yeah. No, yeah, China didn't need colonialism and slavery to jumpstart its development. And yeah, I think you make great points. Two points really quick to add to what you're saying.

One, just as a side point, in Iran, what is happening is that the U.S. is revealing the limits of its power. And one of the things that is really beneficial to any military force and was actually to the U.S.'s advantage leading up to this war is that there's a fundamental question mark about the power, right? When you think like, what would the China versus America war actually look like? Who would win? There's so many question marks. So many things we don't know. We've never seen modern and, you know, industrial and post-industrial China go to a full-on direct war with anybody, but certainly not, you know, another major power. There's lots of question marks about that. And there's lots of question marks on the U.S. You know, a lot of countries are like,

God damn, you know, America might be declining, but still it has this massive economy. It has this massive military. It dumps trillions of dollars into its military. You know, there's lots of things to be concerned about. And, you know, they are inflicting serious damage on Iran, but Iran is courageously and resiliently standing up to them. And now, you know, I always think of like Iran as like war shock in that in that movie where he goes to jail and is like, you know, I'm not trapped in here with you. You're trapped in here with me. Iran now has America. by the throat because it has the global economy by the motherfucking throat. And Trump's desperate genocidal threats, lashing out, et cetera, are a function of their weakness, having to move military assets from South Korea, having to siphon them away from Ukraine, to fill them in towards Iran and still getting their nose bloodied really badly and not being able to extract themselves from this horrific, you know, sort of quagmire that they find themselves in. It's interesting for so many reasons. One of them is that it reveals the limits of American power. And I think that's going to have reverberations going forward. But the other main

point I wanted to say about China's socialist character is that from a Marxist perspective, what should we expect? We expect that the development out of capitalism into socialism and towards communism is obviously a step-by-step process. You cannot jump steps. The shift from feudalism to capitalism went through generations of mercantilism. This small rising bourgeoisie started developing because of trade routes and colonialism. And that developed happened out of the real material conditions of feudalism and developed through material necessity towards the development of what we would now call capitalism.

And we should expect the same thing. So China, after a century of humiliation, right? it rises up what does it have to do well it has to develop its economy it has to establish its sovereignty it has to build up a capacity to defend itself against lashing out military powers and that is a process you can't just immediately go into full on cultural revolution over and over and over again right i mean i love Mao i love the chinese revolution very sympathetic to the entire dynamics involved there trying to dialectically weave together a top down and bottom up revolution, you know, class contradictions intensify, et cetera.

This, you know, this other approach, it is more long term. It's more, I think, inherently stable. And it is building up the necessary prerequisites to eventually make a more robust shift into what, you know, China itself refers to as the secondary phase of socialist development. Right now it's in the primary phase. And so I think that would all make sense from a Leninist perspective. It is only when you step outside of Leninism and I would argue you step outside of Marxism.

You have a sort of idealist version of how you think socialism should look or how revolution should look. And you impose that abstract idea on the real material conditions of Chinese society and history. And I think that that can lead to what is in my opinion wrong conclusions on that front. But these are important discussions they're worth having, totally open to hearing people disagree with us on this point. But that would be my argument in addition to yours for why that this would still qualify, not as merely state capitalism. You made a wonderful point there, but actually as a legitimate primary stage of socialist development. Yeah. And I think, you know, it might help to say that I think as I was becoming a Marxist, I streamed actually more into the Marxist. this Leninist Maoist understanding of the world, understanding of China.

You know, I think I was also, you know, I was raised in Hong Kong and there's a lot of anti-China propaganda and also highlighting a lot of the issues, the real issues in China. And so, you know, if China's not an ideal utopia that we often associate with socialism, then, you know, if it doesn't meet that ideal, then it's not socialist. But I think us Westerners kind of need to step out of. internalizing the end of history frame where we are somewhere near the end of human development. Like there are centuries left of, you know, and more than that, of building civilization, building socialism, building a new socialist modernity. This is, you know, this is a,

these are active debates in China, you know, if the only kind of modernization that we've known is Western modernization, a model based on slavery and capitalism and imperialism, then, you know, China and Chinese academics are currently trying to theorize what does Chinese modernity or Chinese modernization or socialist modernization look like. So we have to step out of this frame and say, you know, it's not the end of history. We are kind of at the priority stage of building socialism and a big reason in China. And a big reason why China had to take this route is actually because of imperialism. So when we talk about imperialism being the primary contradiction, this is not abstract, right? if China during the Mao period, which was certainly a lot more radical and revolutionary and not just on its own, okay, this was a post-war revolutionary upsurge in history more broadly around the world, right?

This was a revolutionary wave in the 60s and 70s that were, you know, kind of at, you know, the height of things in a lot of ways. So what was happening in China was reflective of those broader processes. But remember that in the Mao period, China was desperately poor, and it was desperately poor in no small part because of the trade embargo imposed on it by the United States and by the West. And, you know, socialist societies at that time, Russia and China or the Soviet Union and China alongside others, were actively, you know, they were poor. They were recovering from their however many centuries or decades of humiliation. And the West undercut them and embargoed them and besieged them in order for them not to develop their productive forces further in line with their egalitarian and radical relations of production. Imagine if China and the Mao period was able to access, like, and the Soviet Union for that matter, the highest tech that the West guarded for itself. We would be living in a very different moment.

but because of, so when Westerners complain about China, you know, foregoing socialism and this kind of thing, well, China had to deal with a very real contradiction of imperialism and their sovereignty, right? They had to protect their sovereignty first and not collapse in on itself, like the West then did to, you know, several countries, right, like Libya, et cetera, and what they're trying to do to Iran now. So this kind of proves the historical correctness of this position. And what China is essentially done, we're talking about how, you know, it's hard to even imagine a conflict between the West and China or the U.S. and China when this is when the U.S. is so much on the back foot with Iran, a besieged economy. What's it going to do with China now that it's developed itself and made itself kind of internally and productively strong, you know? Yeah, it's incredibly strategic.

you know, truly China is playing 5D chess. Trump is playing tick, tack, fucking toe. And it's clear that they're sitting back and they're playing these long games. And one of the long games is the Petro dollar. You know, the reserve currency status of the United

States, it's not going away overnight, but it's getting weakened. And precisely, it is that form, it is the petro dollar and the reserve status of the American dollar that allows it to inflict sanctions regimes around the world that allows it, you know, to impose these brutal embargoes that stunt and strangle the

development of countries that will not incorporate themselves willingly and subordinate themselves to Western multinational corporate interests. They're losing that ability. And part of the reason they're losing it is precisely because China is on the rise. They're now trading in yen for, you know, for Iranian and Gulf produced oil during this crisis. and every time the U.S. lashes out, either monetarily, through sanctions regimes or militarily, like we're seeing now, it exposes and weakens itself and actually accelerates its own decline. The rise of bricks, while in and of itself is not enough to completely dislodge, you know, U.S. monetary power around the world.

It is one of these processes that have begun to do precisely that. And it is in response, direct response, to the U.S. leveraging, weaponizing, and abusing its currency status to impose economic misery to make the economy scream of these other countries that will not, again, subordinate themselves to global Western-led capitalist infiltration and plundering. And so it's just fascinating to see. And in every step of the way, China is playing a longer game, a more strategic game, and is winning time and time again in this recent war in Iran.

another iteration of the U.S. losing in so many ways, right, reputational economically, currency-wise, it's standing in the international realm. And when America is acting like this, China again and again and again steps up to try to show itself to be the responsible sort of agent on the global stage. And that's just a process that we're living through. And it's going to continue. So your essay does tie green industrialization to both energy, sovereignty, which you've talked about and technological sovereignty. Why are those two forms of sovereignty in particular so decisive? Yeah. So, you know, I've talked a little bit about already China's energy sovereignty. We only have to see, you know, the difference between

how China is responding to the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormos versus India, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, which are in one form or another very much linked to the West, some more than others, but also very, you know, energy import dependent, right? So China, you know, has been able to, if it needed to get off of coal, right, if it needed to get off of coal because it was damaging its ecology, it could either turn to oil, you know, or oil and gas, or it could turn to renewables and green energy more broadly. And the difference between those two is that, you know, oil and gas would have to be imported via the trade of our moves, which is a, you know, choke point, as we're seeing now, as well as the Malacca Strait, which is a narrow

straight between the southern part of Thailand and part of Malaysia and on the bottom side, Indonesia, which, you know, the West, in its designs against militarily blockading China, where militarily confronting China has envisions a blockade of the Malacca Strait. So China then, you know, really in that case, needed to, and it would have been in its best interest, long-term interest, to lean into energy sovereignty, which is in the green energy direction, which gives it its energy sovereignty. And we're seeing today that China's energy self-sufficiency rate stands at about 85%. So that's on the energy sovereignty piece. How is China, how is China's green development anti-imperalists? Well, one point is the energy sovereignty.

The other point is the technological sovereignty, right? I've mentioned already that here in the solar sector, in the wind sector, in the green vehicles sector. It's not just about, you know, assembling, you know, production being relegated to just assembly, right? You import all the parts and you assemble it. No, there's a priority on developing end-to-end supply chains. And in the case of, you know, the green vehicles, for example, the electric vehicles, end-to-end supply chains where there's no choke point that the West or any other kind of foreign powers can have leverage over China's industry. And like I mentioned, they did that through their state-led or their developmental state, activist state policies like the joint ventures that encourage tech

transfer, like the local content policies, like the dual credit policy, et cetera. And I think there's a broader point around this. And again, you know, I'm drawing on these Chinese scholars from this source, Meng Ji and Zhang Zubin, where they talk about there's actually a political correctness in China around indigenizing production and indigenizing technology. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier in the conversation about since the establishment of the PRC, since the Chinese Revolution began, these dual imperatives of sovereignty and industrial capacity or industrialization

or we can call it re-industrialization after a century of humiliation, those two priorities, sovereignty and industrialization, have always been intertwined. And this continues in China's ongoing revolution. So there's a political correctness about indigenizing production and indigenizing technology and fostering technological upgrading. So, you know, in brief, that's how China's green development is both about energy sovereignty and technological sovereignty.

and that is anti-imperialist. Maybe the last point I'll mention on this is that, you know, if you read Samir Amin, you know, a dependency theorist and, you know, third world African Marxist, you know, he kind of outlines five monopolies of the imperial core that, you know, these are domains that the West and the Imperial Corps have a monopoly over that prevents sovereign development in other parts of the global south. perpetuates uneven development between the core and the periphery, it perpetuates unequal exchange. You know, I won't go into those five monopolies, but two of those monopolies are the

global North's monopoly over the planet's natural resources. And, you know, one way to think about this is through the petro dollar, right? Everybody needs oil. Everybody needs energy, but everybody has to use US dollars, you know, or, you know, other kinds of, you know, Western, foreign exchange to, but principally the US dollar to, to pay for that oil, which then puts pressure on how much they can spend in the global south on education, on health care, etc. So one of those monopolies is the monopoly over the planet's natural resources. China, by developing its green sectors, it's breaking that monopoly. The West no longer has a monopoly on the planet's natural resources. Cuba, as blockaded as it is and, you know, intensifying, as it

intensifies now, the U.S. and the West, well, principally the U.S. can't block the sun, right? It can't have a monopoly over sunlight. And so as long as that stands, China's green tech is, you know, and solar panels, solar technology is aiding Cuba in overcoming that monopoly. So it breaks one of those monopolies, corresponding to energy sovereignty, the monopoly over energy in a sense. And it breaks another monopoly, the second monopoly out of the five, which is the Global North's monopoly over advanced tech. Some of those advanced auto technology, right, is now coming from China. We've all known that the auto giants are Japan, you know, Germany, the U.S., South Korea.

You know, do you have a Korean car? Do you have a Japanese car? Well, now the biggest auto producer in the world is Chinese all of a sudden, right? And so it breaks and, you know, this tech can be further redistributed. across the global south, and we're going to be seeing this as the Strait of Formos crisis continues, right? And countries in the global south are going to look to a shift to green energy and green vehicles to get around this constraint of importing oil. So it breaks the West's monopoly over advanced technologies as well. So that is how its green development is anti-imperialist. It breaks these monopolies of imperialism.

Such an important and fascinating point that literally the hyper-necessary transition to a more ecological, sustainable form of energy, by developing it, particularly the Global South developing it, it undermines Western imperialism because so much of Western imperialism has, among other things, depended on its ability to control, dominate and cut off their perceived enemies from natural resources. The entire presence of the U.S. in West Asia over the last century has, among other things, been about that, about resource domination, the controlling of these resources through puppet regimes and all these other things. And often throughout, right, military aggression, economic sanctions, and having the Western attack dog of Israel in the region to do what it does violently lash out at all these other countries that won't submit to this domination. So it's just a beautiful irony of history that to do the ecological transition, to transition into renewable clean energy is at the same time to undermine a core pillar of Western imperialism's power over the global South over the last century. So what a beautiful, beautiful thing. A very last question for you here as we wrap up this conversation. do you see China's model, as we've laid out already, as historically or culturally specific to its conditions, or are there general lessons here for other countries in the global South trying to pursue ecological development without imperial dependence? Absolutely, there are lessons here.

And unlike the West, much of the Global South does not have the option to develop via imperialism, slavery, and colonialism. It simply does not have that option. and it has to find other ways to do it. And China is kind of leading the example at sovereign development. You know, we're seeing Iran kind of come a close second. And, you know, if Iran is able to mobilize resources from controlling the Strait of Hormoz and kind of forcing the West to lift some of its sanctions on it, you know, who knows? We'll see a new model of, I mean, you know, Iran has been a resilient, sovereign,

economy since it's been sanctioned, but following this new phase, you might see an entirely new model being developed as well that can be replicated by others. There are definitely lessons from Iran, but in terms of China, there are definitely lessons. And sure, you know, China's project, there are elements of it that are certainly historically contingent, like some of the balance of payments issues that plague a lot of global South countries, you know, the crises of having

very little foreign exchange to pay for your traded goods. And that is something that China hasn't really, at least, you know, following the reform and opening up, hasn't had to struggle with because of how big it is and how it's the producer of the world. And it supplied consumer goods to the global north. And in exchange, accumulated a lot of foreign exchange. So that's something that, and, you know, with that foreign exchange, it was, you know, able to do a lot more, right?

And to, and, you know, that is something that was historically contingent on, you know, kind of the neoliberal conjuncture in the 70s to 90s and, you know, the opening up of China, et cetera. In that sense, yeah, China's project has some level of historical contingency. But on the other side, it's interesting. It might be easier now, you know, it depends. We'll have to see in each, you know, this is a difficult process. It's not some easy thing that you and I are having a conversation of.

about, but to actually build a sovereign project in your country in, you know, South Asia, in Africa, in the Caribbean, in Latin America. These are real hard things that real human beings have to do. And so it's difficult. But in a sense, it might be easier to deal with the Chinese than, you know, China needing to deal with the West, right? China had to compel the West into coming into joint ventures as a form of, you know, you know, in order to cultivate technology, answer. I presume it might be easier that, you know, China, China's not imperialist. It doesn't have a history of imperialism or colonialism or settler colonialism, etc. So this ideological bandage that comes with the West, right, in their engagement in, you know, seeing others, Africans as beneath them

were incapable, etc. The Chinese, they had to fight for their sovereignty, so they understand the importance of sovereignty. And they, when they engage in, in diplomatic, relations, they have an understanding of mutual respect for sovereignty. Now, China is able to assist other countries in redistributing its, you know, green productive capacity. Like I said, China is kind of front-loaded the burden of human civilizational regeneration by massively subsidizing and proliferating these green industries. And these will get redistributed across the global society.

South, but it is these global South countries themselves as well that have to determine if China was able to indigenize its production and thus develop its green technology, it can, you know, African countries and, you know, I study Pakistan as well. Pakistan can also bring in these green productive capacities, but the question of indigenizing production and indigenizing technology are still questions that they themselves have to deal with, right? Pakistan themselves, you know, several African countries themselves. You know, a professor of mine, you know, supervised some of my work. He, you know, does work on South-South cooperation.

And he, you know, recently with a co-author, released a chapter on looking at China's renewable, renewable productive capacity in Africa. And, you know, what are some of the benefits? What are some of the drawbacks? And, you know, he certainly notes, he and his co-author, certainly note that you get a very different developmental model with the Chinese, one that, you know, has rapid infrastructure deployment, you know, concessional financing, state-led investment, you know, so it's the state-owned Chinese companies that are leading the investment in Africa. So that's a different model from the

West, right, that brings a lot of capacity. But, you know, questions of technology transfer, of, you know, labor practices, environmental safeguards. These are. issues that the countries themselves in Africa, in, you know, South Asia, in the Caribbean, they themselves have to come up with their own institutional frameworks, right? It's their sovereignty, right? That has to be asserted in order to make this development benefit them, right? And so, you know, it's not a story of China being benevolent and coming to aid the global south and doing this kind of reverse Western imperialism, right? Because we kind of sometimes think in these ways where, you know, the West.

imposes its will and its subjectivity on others in a disruptive way, if China is supposed to be internationalist, then China should impose its own subjectivity on the Global South in a good way, you know, like in a... But no, I think China has a deeper understanding of sovereignty, which means you do it yourself, you know, and you... It's only you that has to do it and has to be able to do it. And a lot of countries in Africa, etc., across the Global South, their institutions, their states, have been hollowed out by...

structural IMF structural adjustment, et cetera, to the point where, you know, some of these states, they don't even have enough personnel, enough policy researchers to review these deals and whatnot to then add conditions, add further conditions on the Chinese to make it benefit them themselves. So, you know, we're Marxists, we see things in a dialectical fashion in, you know, centering the contradiction. So you definitely, it is in no small part a huge deal that China has generated these green productive capacities and is able to redistribute them across the global south. But it is these individual global south countries that now have to have to come up with their own people-centered projects that can advance a developmental agenda that engages with the

Chinese and engages with this green tech in the optimal way to suit that country's sovereignty. So that's kind of a more nuanced and necessarily nuanced view of the situation here. Yeah. Amazingly said, Ashwin, it's a pleasure to speak with you. The essay is titled China's Green Development is both anti-imperialist and socialist from the Journal of International Solidarity. I'll link to that in the show notes as well as your wonderful podcast. I encourage everybody go check it out. International Solidarity Podcasts.

I'll link to that as well. Thank you for your amazing work. Thank you for sharing your time with us today. let's keep in touch and continue collaborating. Absolutely, Brett. Thank you for having me on. Thank you for listening. Rev Left Radio is 100% listener funded.

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