THERE IS NO SENSIBLE ALTERNATIVE TO THE CHINESE APPROACH
The new and revolutionary approach being taken by China to modernisation offers us in the poor world a new hope for development.
In a word, it offers all humanity a new hope for a more just, fair and humane civilisation, a new option for the modernisation of mankind. For us who are still shackled under neocolonialism, it offers an opportunity to set ourselves free and start to develop. It is not possible to develop under our current conditions of exploitation, marginalisation and neocolonial humiliation.But this, as we are already witnessing, will not be accepted or supported by those who for centuries have benefited, profited from our exploitation, marginalisation, subjugation and humiliation. This is because it will break their monopoly on the course the world takes.
This is a very big and important revolutionary move, initiative, being led by China. But whenever and wherever there’s a revolutionary move, initiative, there will always be a desperate counter-revolutionary move, initiative. And we must factor this in and prepare for it. It’s not going to bed of roses. Imperialism will fight against these revolutionary measures. China and its leadership will increasingly come under all sorts of attacks, provocations, sanctions and slander under this counter-revolutionary wave. And those from our poor world, who will try to follow the Chinese model, will also be ostracised and fought in all sorts of ways. We will be fought for trying to liberate ourselves from this neocolonialism the same way we were fought trying to free ourselves from classical colonialism.
This Chinese new approach to modernisation offers us a chance to truly free ourselves from centuries of exploitation, domination and humiliation. And because of its liberating nature it poses an existential threat to their hegemonic system.
Today, under the imperialist-imposed neoliberal system, the neocolonial plundering of our continent – Africa – continues, and is directly responsible for our people’s growing poverty, inequality, unemployment, and the destruction of our environment. European, Canadian, and Australian mining companies are siphoning off our natural resources. Our rich natural deposits, instead of bringing economic development to our people, have made them targets for manipulation by developed Western countries, leaving them with poverty, chaos, and a badly damaged ecosystem. The new approach being put forward by China, by contrast, redefines and de-stigmatises the concept of “modernisation” from a socialist and liberating perspective. The importance of the Chinese model of modernisation has been demonstrated by the amazing economic, political, and social developmental achievements of socialist China itself.
In 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded, its economy accounted for less than five per cent of the world’s total; its national income per capita was 20 per cent lower than that of India, and it ranked as the 11th poorest country in the world based on per capita PPP-adjusted GDP.
By 2021, China’s economy accounted for 18 per cent of the world’s and its per capita income was 2.7 times that of India. Today, China has fully eradicated absolute poverty, achieved universal nine-year compulsory education, and covered more than 95 per cent of its population with basic health insurance.
In 2021, the CPC launched initiatives to comprehensively promote rural revitalisation and solidly advance common prosperity. This ensures that the country’s rural population – 700 million people – with relatively low levels of income will benefit from economic development. I could wax lyrical about the beautiful and modern cities, the incredible public transport system – a good part of which is green – the world’s largest high-speed rail network, and so on.
When China began its reform and opening up in the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s slogan, “let some people get rich first” and the rapid growth of the private and foreign-invested economy, caused some of us to wonder whether China had deviated from the socialist line. The facts are now available to lay those doubts to rest. Deng Xiaoping also explained socialism this way: “Poverty is not socialism,” and, “Those who become rich first will lead those who become rich later to achieve common prosperity,” he said. Those ideas are becoming China’s reality today. From this decades-long process, we can see that generations of leaders of the CPC have taken up the mission of their respective times and continued the practice of enriching the country and strengthening the people.
China’s model of modernisation attaches importance not only to economic development, but also to the spiritual civilisation and moral development of the people. It may not be easy to see the moral level of a population in times of peace and plenty, but in the face of an emergency like a global epidemic, it is possible to see the state of a society’s spiritual civilisation. In the face of an epidemic that has claimed millions of lives globally – with more than a million in the United States alone – the ruling elite in the United States, the most developed country in the world, lied to its citizens, persuading them that the epidemic was over, while using insider information to make profits on the stock market. In contrast, the Chinese people have demonstrated a high level of morality in the face of the epidemic.
The CPC mobilised four million grassroots organisations – every residential community, the lowest level of society – to provide services to the people related to epidemic prevention and control. These included managing and organising food supplies, arranging large-scale nucleic acid testing, isolating and escorting infected people to hospitals, and regular visits to the elderly. In return, the Chinese people showed mutual trust, strict discipline, selflessness, and small personal sacrifices to dynamically clear the epidemic nationwide and safeguard people’s lives and production. This is the result of the spiritual civilisation inspired by and under the leadership and organisational capacity of the Communist Party of China.
Chinese modernisation is sustainable because it doesn’t plunder either other countries or nature. In the past decade, an amazingly short period of time, China has led the world in reversing the inevitable historical consequences of industrialisation. No other major country in human history has modernised to this level without invading and plundering other countries. It doesn’t make sense at all for our poor countries to ever think of following the impossible path of modernisation set by the United States. With 4.2 per cent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for 13 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions and 13.7 tons of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels per capita – three times the global average. Even though a significant portion of United States manufacturing has moved to China, its per capita carbon emissions are still 67 per cent higher than China’s. If our poor countries were to use the United States as a benchmark for modernisation, the planet’s natural environment would be quickly overwhelmed as the process has already begun. The Western modernisation narrative concludes that many, if not all, our countries will not be able to modernise.
There have been desperate and malicious attempts to smear the Belt and Road Initiative as a debt trap for our poor countries, but the reality of our daily existence exposes these lies. China owns only 13 per cent of poor African countries’ debt; the average interest rate of Africa’s debt to China is only 2.7 per cent, while the average interest rate of Africa’s debt to Western private capital – 35 per cent of Africa’s total debt – is five per cent. China’s infrastructure investment in sub-Saharan Africa is more than twice that of Western countries combined; and China never imposes a political agenda on another country based on debt.
The West lends the money it plundered from our poor countries through institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. They then hold our poor countries hostage to a series of liberalising reforms that destroy the foundations of industrialisation in our poor countries as well as our social services like health and education. They are the ones to blame for the constantly expanding debt trap of our poor countries.
Clearly, the Chinese model of modernisation can lead to successful and peaceful new forms of solidarity and cooperation. It can provide our poor countries with ideas and frameworks and inspire us to create our own new indigenous development models.
Fred M’membe
President of the Socialist Party