In the second of two articles on China, Adrian Budd looks at how China is growing as an imperialist power and threatening the position of the US at the apex of the world imperialist order. Read Part One here.
The apparent randomness of Trump’s aggressive pursuit of US interests since his inauguration has startled even close partners. The imposition of tariffs on allies, the threats over Greenland and the Panama canal and to Europe over NATO spending, the willingness to end the Ukraine war on terms favourable to Russia, and the proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza all bear the hallmark of Trump’s narcissistic personality. But they are connected by a logic with the overarching objective of reasserting US imperial might and containing the rise of China.
Russia is courted to weaken its ties with, and increasing dependence on, China. Increased military spending by NATO’s European members would contain Russia in the future and free the US to focus elsewhere. Trump also expects that a deal over Ukraine would allow access to Ukraine’s rare earth and other mineral resources – vital for a range of consumer and military technologies – and so lessen China’s dominance over global production. Ukraine has deposits of 22 of what the EU defines as 34 critical minerals, and 20 percent of these lie in territory now under Russian control. Meanwhile, Greenland has deposits of 90 percent of the world’s critical minerals.
Trump’s novelty and vulgarity only thinly disguises the continuity in US strategy which has always combined both unilateral power projection and compromise within multilateral institutions. It is locked into a global system of rival imperialisms rooted in capitalism’s core dynamic of competitive accumulation. Competition is tempered by elements of cooperation, but no state – liberal or authoritarian, neoliberal or statist – can isolate itself from this system, any more than an individual capitalist firm can escape market competition. The US is at the apex of the inter-imperialist system. Just below that apex is China.
China and Imperialism
For the first two decades of China’s post-Mao transformation US strategists believed that they could manage the development of the subordinate power as a low-cost production base for Western multinational capital. Instead, China’s state capitalist ruling class has skilfully managed its articulation within the global economy to become the world’s second largest economy and a leader in key sectors, including renewable energy, AI, robotics, and electronic vehicles. China’s economic power underpins its growing political influence and military modernisation.
Trump’s first-term response included a tech war against major Chinese firms, such as Huawei, and restrictions on high-tech exports. The extension of the restrictions under Biden meant that the announcement of Deepseek’s AI model in January 2025 was a contemporary Sputnik moment for the US. While cost estimates vary, Deepseek was qualitatively cheaper to develop compared with the hundreds of billions spent by Western AI models like ChatGPT, demonstrating that Western restrictions have actually accelerated the development of Chinese high-tech, posing a threat to US technological leadership in key consumer industries and in the military sphere.
The tech war dovetails with wider efforts to weaken China via the decoupling of the Chinese and Western economies. This remains concentrated in high-tech and militarily-sensitive sectors, but capital in a range of industries has begun to relocate to lower-cost neighbouring countries. Decoupling is limited by the scale of the capital sunk in supply chains and by capital’s interest in producing for the Chinese market: ninety percent of Apple products are still assembled in China and Musk’s Tesla company has major factories in Shanghai. Meanwhile, many Chinese firms are off-shoring in search of lower costs and ways to avoid US tariffs. But while there are limits to rapid decoupling, and while China may prove more economically resilient than Trump believes, competitive pressures are driving China towards a more aggressive global promotion of its interests.
China in Asia
In its immediate environment, China’s “good neighbour” strategy of c.1990-2010 has given way to a greater assertiveness. China claims almost all of the South China Sea, one of the world’s major shipping lanes, as its own territorial waters and has been building military installations there for over a decade. Naval clashes with other states in the region are commonplace. The US meanwhile has been deepening its military ties in the region since Obama’s 2010 pivot to Asia and conducts joint exercises with its regional allies on a huge scale. The risk of miscalculation by local officers, fired up by Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” or Trump’s MAGA rhetoric could result in a conflict which would embroil all of Asia.
The threat of conflict is increased by the strengthening of US-led alliances in recent years – the QUAD grouping and AUKUS for instance. In September 2024 Japan’s prime minister Shigeru Ishiba intensified regional tensions by proposing a NATO-style military pact for East and South-East Asia. Fearing a worsening of tensions with China, other regional states rejected this, but Ishiba’s proposal highlighted the dangerous drift in the region. This is likely to be increased by Trump’s transactional approach to international negotiations, which puts pressure on states to increase their bargaining power. There are early signs of a new global arms race, illustrated in Asia by Japan’s proposal to spend billions of dollars a year more on US weapons.
The same transactionalism applies to Asia’s main flashpoint, Taiwan, over which Trump is sending mixed messages. On 4 March Elbridge Colby told the Senate hearing on his appointment as undersecretary of defence that Taiwan is important but not an “existential” interest to the US. This reinforced Trump’s argument that Taiwan should pay for US help (which prompted Taiwan to consider buying $10bn more weapons in 2025). Yet, while some strategists believe that the US’s fundamental security red line in Asia is not Taiwan but Japan, the US State Department has recently removed “we do not support Taiwan independence” from its Taiwan fact sheet. Beijing is likely to interpret this as a US commitment to defend Taiwan were it to declare independence.
China’s military pressure on Taiwan has intensified in recent years, with numerous large-scale naval exercises and frequent violations of Taiwan’s air space. Some commentators believe that Trump’s economic statecraft and unpredictability will encourage Taiwan to move closer to China. But this is as unlikely as US acquiescence to any Chinese effort to force unification, which would inflict severe damage on the US’s credibility as a military power and security guarantee. This would have serious consequences not just in Asia but globally.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative
Since Xi Jinping’s announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, the US-China rivalry has intensified right across the globe. The BRI is a vast $1 trillion system of infrastructure projects linking China by air, land and sea to the rest of the world. It is concentrated in Eurasia, but its 150 members also cover most of Africa and parts of Latin America. In the official Chinese narrative it is presented as a “win-win” for China and the Global South, a claim that some on the Left parrot. But, while the international linkages fostered by new infrastructures provide some benefits to recipient countries, particularly their ruling classes, the BRI’s chief purpose is to promote China’s interests. The core of the BRI is improved trade links providing access to export markets and sources of vital raw materials and energy supplies. An added benefit for China is that BRI projects provide opportunities for the export of surplus capital that is unable to find profitable domestic investment opportunities. This is a central feature of Lenin and Bukharin’s theory of imperialism.
The criticisms of Western imperialism made by anti-imperialist movements in the Global South apply equally to China. Supporters claim that Chinese loans come without the neoliberal conditionalities imposed by the West. But while China does not demand the sort of macro-economic structural adjustment imposed on the Global South by the international financial institutions since the 1980s, Chinese loans do come with onerous conditionalities. A major study, AidData’s Banking on the Belt and Road, highlights that China charges higher interest rates than other international lenders, and that its loans are frequently secured via collateralisation – failure to meet repayment schedules entails the transfer to Chinese control of the energy, natural resources, etc whose exploitation the lending facilitates. Other conditions include the use of Chinese firms to build projects (such as the Serbian railway station whose roof collapsed recently, provoking major protests).
There are numerous other criticisms of China’s imperialist conduct. It promotes the trade openness associated with the Washington Consensus, which has in any case now been largely achieved in the Global South. Its loans provide support to authoritarian states, which in return provide protection for China’s investments. They also frequently turn a blind eye to the environmental devastation attached to Chinese extractive activities. Extraction is a key issue, for China replicates the traditional patterns of imperialism. In the same way that Britain undermined Indian industry in the 19th century, critics argue that industry in the Global South is undermined, and jobs lost, by Chinese imports. In Latin America’s most industrially developed country, Brazil, over 90 percent of exports are agricultural or primary products while a similar proportion of its imports from China are manufactured. Argentina’s economy has suffered “re-primarisation” as a supplier of food and raw materials to China, according to academic sources. In the terms of Marxist political economy, the flow of value is from the Global South into China. The chief beneficiaries are the ruling classes of China and the Global South and not surprisingly there has been mounting criticism of China by protests movements and civil society groups, notably in Africa.
BRICS and Beyond
China joined Russia, India and Brazil to launch the BRIC grouping in 2009 (BRICS from 2010 with the addition of South Africa). BRICS gave institutional form to the argument in the Communist Manifesto that “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere”. Those connections could plausibly be seen as a protection against the greater economic power of the leading Western imperialist countries. Today, the BRICS group is more obviously a vehicle, dominated by China, for promoting members’ interests and thereby challenging US interests.
One illustration is the steps towards the establishment of an alternative financial architecture, including the BRICS New Development Bank and a new currency, that would weaken the global role of the dollar, a key component of US power. Although unsure whether China is a BRICS member, Trump understands the threat to US power posed by an alternative world reserve currency. In January he posted that if “these seemingly hostile countries” create a new BRICS currency or “back any other Currency to replace the mighty US Dollar” the US will impose 100% tariffs on them.
The separate interests of the BRICS countries and the centrality of the dollar and US financial system in the world economy mean that displacing the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency is unlikely, at least in the short-to-medium term. But the BRICS challenge to the US is also demonstrated by the list of countries joining the expanded BRICS+ group in 2023, when not only Iran and Ethiopia but also established US allies UAE and Egypt joined. Indonesia, which has been a strategic partner of the US since 2015, joined in January 2025.
The inclusion of countries from the Middle East in the BRICS+ group suggests that China’s challenge to the US reaches into the heart of a region long central to the calculations of US strategists. The increasing diplomatic leverage that accompanies China’s growing economic power was used to organise a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023 to move towards a resolution of the Yemen civil war. Even in Israel, more firmly bound to the US than ever as protection for the murderous assault on Gaza, China is involved in building some of the physical infrastructure of settler colonialism.
China is an imperialist rival to the US and the wider West not because it represents a different, socialist, mode of production, but because it is embedded in a system whose core competitive dynamic forces it to enhance its global role in pursuit of the interests of its state-capitalist ruling class.
Having successfully pursued those interests during the five decades of post-Mao reform, China is now a considerable threat to US and Western interests in many parts of the world. It is not an equal of the US. In July 2020 the South China Morning Post argued that Beijing “has far fewer choices to inflict pain on American businesses than Washington does against Chinese firms”. This remains true and the same applies at the wider economic and military levels. But the gap has narrowed, and Trump’s MAGA project represents an aggressive attempt to weaken the challenge of China, mobilising what are still enormous power resources (including the reserve status of the dollar, technological leadership in many sectors, military might and a global system of alliances).
As China’s power has increased, exaggerated claims by Western states and mainstream media about the scale of the China threat have become commonplace. We have been warned of China’s military aggrandisement and emerging global extension. But in highlighting China’s first overseas military base (a port in Djibouti) and a few smaller sites that may have a military use, the West rarely mentions the more than 750 overseas bases of the US.
The successful reassertion of US power is far from guaranteed. Trump’s tariffs will increase prices for US consumers, disrupt supply chains and force US companies to suspend investment decisions. Although they are an attempt to bind US labour to US capital by presenting foreigners, including workers, as the enemy of both, they will create class tensions in the US and highlight the divergent interests of the MAGA project and millions who voted for Trump. At the international level, the MAGA project is putting severe strains on the transatlantic partnership amid a wider collapse in trust in the US. The Japanese business newspaper Nikkei wrote recently of “Asia’s opportunity to ‘decouple’ from the US” and deepen economic ties to China, whose decision making is more stable and its commitment to free trade apparently more solid.
Socialists around the world will welcome the difficulties that Trump poses for US imperialism. But China does not provide a progressive alternative. The logic of inter-imperialist rivalry forces China to behave in much the same way as more established imperialisms. It produces a permanent tendency towards conflict and permanent preparation for war. In a world of economic inequality, hunger and all the other pathologies of capitalism, siding with either Beijing or Washington is a mistake. The promotion of socialist values and working-class interests is a task not for states but for workers themselves.
