22 June 2026
The following is an edited version of our response to a discussion on “Imperialist militarization and social war against the world proletariat“ at the Meeting of Internationalist Forces in Paris on 17 May 2026. Whether China remains a deformed workers’ state and whether we should defend it featured strongly as points of contention during the discussion. Our main submission to the conference is available here: Inter-Imperialist Rivalry & the Tasks of Proletarian Socialists.
There is a reason the question of China is a key dividing line at this conference. Without understanding the class nature of the Chinese state, we can’t understand the conflict that will define this century.
The comrade from Etincelle China amusingly noted yesterday that “apparently we live in a peaceful deformed workers state.” We do, of course, appreciate the comrade’s greater knowledge of China from the ground, but in arguing China is not imperialist or even capitalist we do not paint the Chinese state as benign. The key word is deformed.
As the ISA–R and ICL have noted, we are in a minority in stating that China is not imperialist or capitalist. But I must commit some friendly fire: many of the arguments we have heard from those organizations aren’t very good. China isn’t a workers’ state because it is “peaceful,“ but because there were real gains in the 1949 revolution: the social relations of the state and property forms were changed, and although a lot of the benefit for workers is now gone, these relations were never reversed.
There is no rule that China doesn’t go to war or oppress nations outside its borders. All other deformed workers’ states have—of course they have. Most recently it had a border war with Vietnam from 1979 to 1991, and the Chinese presence in Laos or Myanmar, for example, does oppress locals. It is true that in the present day, the Chinese bureaucracy finds it more to its advantage to accommodate to the imperialist order, and act within its existing superstructure.
The point here is not that deformed workers’ states are peaceful, but that only a workers’ state could wield such enormous powers of production and concentration of capital and yet be so passive on the world stage. No capitalist state could be the world’s second great power, and largely independent, without this creating pressures that could only lead to predation on lesser powers—in order to protect investments, open up markets or secure new spheres of influence. The comrade who brought up the interwar isolationism of the United States as an example of passivity by a capitalist state has evidently forgotten about Latin America and the Monroe Doctrine. This capacity to act on the world stage in a different way is not a compliment. What does the Chinese state do with it? It fails the people of Palestine, Cuba, Iran and so on every day.
As Leninists we know that the class character of a state is determined by relations between the armed bodies, bureaucracy and property forms. They cannot be changed without the destruction and reconstruction of the state. Without rupture. When did this happen in China?
Whether you look at 1978, 1988 or the 1990s there is no rupture, only continuity. From the earliest stage, the state created in the 1949 revolution allowed limited capitalist development. The old capitalist class continued to exploit workers during the period of New Democracy until 1953. For less than a decade there was an experiment with Soviet-style command economics and the total liquidation of the big capitalists, then the period of voluntarist fantasy. But by the 1970s there was the reintroduction of rural smallholding, and laissez faire zones in the port cities. In 1988, there were changes to the constitution as mentioned earlier, and in the crisis of 1989 to the 2000s, there were many retreats from state ownership and welfare, some of which were later reversed. But through all of this there was no qualitative rupture in the relations between the Chinese state and economy—no coup, civil war or successful uprising. A change in wording in the constitution is not a counterrevolution. From 1949 until today, we are talking about the same basic entity.
Some comrades here believe China never broke with capitalism. That is in many ways a more viable position than those who say it saw a genuine revolution but then reintegrated into the imperialist world order without any smashing of the state. But they can’t account for the period in which Chinese capitalists were liquidated and replaced with a command economy, or the period of low-productivity collectivization. A bourgeois state couldn’t have allowed this.
In China today, the state continues to play a leading role in economic development, but its controlled use of private capital has allowed China to leverage foreign investments to gain technologies and create its own monopolies. It is a bizarre twist of history, but a deformed workers’ state has grown to become a key player within the global capitalist order.
Although the majority of firms in China are privately owned, the largest, most monopolistic and most strategic companies are state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SOEs have been the basic organizational unit of the Chinese economy since 1949. What changed in 1978 was that many smaller SOEs were privatized or converted into joint-stock companies with the state as majority shareholder. From the 1990s, there were consolidation efforts, and the state began to invest in the private sector as a form of partial re-nationalization. While private capital is very significant in China on paper, looking closer at ownership and governance shows a much higher degree of state control across both “private“ and SOE capital than first appears.
When China entered into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and other mechanisms of the US-dominated world system, there was an unprecedented drive to encourage the SOEs to invest overseas. Most of this investment was in imperialist countries, for securing access to new technologies. But after 2008, China began to invest in the semi-colonies, in Africa and the Indian Ocean for example. This is where we get the mistaken idea of Chinese imperialism, from people who think imperialism is all about capital export and nothing else, or from people who believe the US media about debt traps and other nonsense.
Why does China export capital? Abroad, as within China, the bureaucracy commands its SOEs to invest in ways that are frequently unprofitable. Its foreign spending is mostly in infrastructure and aid. Now don’t mistake me, in itself, infrastructure investments are not unusual. Imperialist countries often fund infrastructure in order to reduce “greenfield costs.“ If investors are interested in cheap neocolonial resources and labor, you need to overcome inadequate transportation, communications and utilities networks.
Chinese infrastructure investments, however, have almost no relationship to profitability. Huge loans are given at unusually low interest rates, and roads and railways are built towards things that yield no profits to China. There are no patterns in terms of economic size, government corruption or growth potential in the countries China invests in. These patterns do exist for the other big investors. The bulk of Chinese investment is subordinated to a goal of securing political alliances with semicolonial governments and other forms of “geopolitical risk hedging.“ This is all to help make sure some of the world will still trade with China if the US attacks it and starves it. A capitalist state can’t force investment on this scale for long without profits, or it would face a capital revolt. Chinese foreign investment is not directed by the law of profitability, but by the law of the bureaucracy’s survival.
Revolutionaries have a duty to defend the gains of the past. China has become a major prop of global capitalist development, but it remains a deformed workers’ state not truly open to world markets or the whims of capital. We don’t support the bureaucracy in Beijing. They seek peaceful coexistence with imperialism, and they don’t even follow the Soviet bureaucrats who at least occasionally pretended to help the masses overthrow capitalism. We do not argue that the growth of Chinese economic relations with the world is inherently benign and beneficial for the oppressed. We merely recognize that China is not an imperialist country and the collectivized property and state-planning mechanisms that continue to exist are progressive compared to what a counterrevolution would replace them with.
Look at what China can do compared to the stagnation of production elsewhere. Look at the rise in living conditions compared to their fall everywhere else. A communist revolution in China would not completely smash the state apparatus or need to build from nothing the basic elements of planning, public ownership and centralization. We need a political revolution against the bureaucracy and its tame capitalists, for democratic control by Chinese workers. We defend China against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution but advocate proletarian political revolution to seize power.
Our defense of China does not mean support to any imperialist ally of China. Imperialism in all its expressions is the biggest danger to what remains of the proletarian property forms in China—just as imperialism is the biggest danger to the interests of the working class worldwide.