Chinese Imperialism, Multipolarity and Marxism – Part 1.
Introduction
We are witnessing a paradigmatic shift in the geopolitical focus of power today. The United States and its allies have gradually faded in dominance, giving way to China as its main rival. This is a process more than two decades in the making. Ironically, it had started since the moment the United States attained unipolar hegemony after the Soviet collapse. Wade (2011) has observed that neoliberal globalisation had brought about massive economic growth to states in the global South (such as ASEAN states and China), giving them new leverage in geopolitics. Of particular significance, the twenty-plus years since Chinese ascension to the WTO and adherence to the “Washington Consensus” had not only brought tremendous growth to its economy, but also made its international presence irreplaceable through its integration into the global production chain. In this short time span, China has become the second largest economy in the world in terms of GDP; leading to aforementioned spectacles of it being the most potent rival to the United States. Budd (2021) has analysed China’s changing position in the stratified production chain of globalised capitalism from a purely peripheral, exploited state by foreign capital to one of advanced, high value productivity (p. 124-125, 131-132). Aligning with Budd’s observation, Li and Tsai (2021) explained that Chinese (mostly economic) instruments of foreign policy such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) “aimed at extracting natural resources and gaining access to advanced technology for China’s domestic economy (p. 607)”.
Other than the BRI, we connect to Butler’s (2018) article on a rivalling, alternative to the US-dominated normative international order represented by BRICS. Butler connected China’s meteoric rise in global significance to its promotion of BRICS, alongside its values of non-interference and peaceful co-existence (p. 11). These values contest against the US-dominated order’s definition of sovereignty by returning to a more “traditionally Westphalian” understanding. As such, we witness the biggest changes in international relations lying within the gradual importance of multipolarity and its principle of non-interference. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the 2025 Davos Economic Forum represents a strong confession from a prominent global leader regarding this shift in international norms.
Chinese imperialism or multipolarity? Or both?
So far, this essay has summarised as precisely, yet as concisely as possible； China’s rise, the prominence of multipolarity over US-led unipolarity and the interconnectedness between the two events. It has emphasised how this represents a major, if not the biggest change in international relations today. Therefore, what is the state of the Marxist perspective towards these changes in international relations?
Marxists have traditionally pioneered perspectives on international relations through a lens of vertically organised power-structures - best demonstrated through the Leninist theory of imperialism. Hitherto China’s emergence in the 2000s, arrangements in international political economy (IPE) bore many similarities with the imperialist extraction of “super-profits” through colonisation of the late 19th to early 20th century as observed by Lenin. The neoliberal expansion of capitalism at a global scale was one where economies of different regions became increasingly stratified into specific roles of production through coerced economic interdependence with “developed” economies of the West. The forms of coercion were marked by the normative, selective enforcement of international institutions, such as the United Nations, the IMF, World Bank and the WTO – which was popularly termed the “Washington Consensus”. It was thus easy for the Marxist to conclude globalisation as really a form of neo-imperialism from the West, with the United States as its helm and the global “South” as recipient peripheries of exploitation. The latter suffers from an almost perpetuating relative political-economic underdevelopment, as had outlined in theories of “dependency” like Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory (WST) (Wallerstein, 1993).
It would then be discovered that the positions of “exploiter” and the “exploited” in international relations were not static. Traditionally “exploited” countries in East and Southeast Asia have grown to be a significant anchor in geopolitics as their economies developed. Most importantly, as have been explained earlier, formerly peripheral capitalist states have “uplifted” themselves from heavy dependence on neo-imperialist exploitation, with China as the most significant example. Instead, it has intertwined itself heavily with the American economy – a form of interdependence (Budd, 2021, p. 131-132), even if an unequal one (Li & Tsai 2020). Moreover, we derive an observation from the article by Vlados et al. (2022), that the world is undergoing a new stage of globalisation – one under the auspices of multipolarity officialised by multilateral free trade agreements like the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Here, China’s role as an active participant alone, bears much leverage and significance. As a whole, it is the first era of all eras in capitalism and imperialism that former recipients of exploitation have grown organically to be the new exploiters.
It would be logical to point back to Lenin’s theory of imperialism and reapply it to modern circumstances. States in the new multipolar world are capitalist states engaged in an imperialist world system of inter-state rivalry (Budd, 2021, p. 129-130). However, China’s historical claim as a Marxist-Leninist, socialist (with “Chinese characteristics”) state complicates the matter for Marxists. From then on, intense debates have arisen within Marxist circles on how to perceive a state like China. Fundamentally, it really starts from questions regarding the Chinese political economy – is the Chinese state a capitalist state? Or is it state-capitalist, or even socialist? Emerging from these questions is the question of Chinese imperialism – the nature of Chinese capitalism in an imperialist world system. This is because Lenin’s theory informed us that imperialism is an evolutionary state of capitalism – the state of Chinese capitalism or lack thereof will then determine whether its international role constitutes as imperialism. Lastly, the answers to these questions will give us a huge piece of the puzzle to understanding international relations today, and how Marxism should perceive multipolarity moving forward.
With regards to everything said, this series will be presenting extant literature on the history of political economy of the People’s Republic and the applications of Lenin’s imperialism to the modern international system. It aims to bring about a new perspective on multipolarity and China’s emergence – that it is a dialectically progressive development especially for domestic Marxist struggles in the global South. These developments have increasingly shifted primary contradictions away from the external to the internal, without dismissing as a whole the persistence of an imperialist (capitalist) world system. As such, they also bear consequences for Marxist praxis.
In Solidarity,
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Bibliography
Budd, A. (2021). China and imperialism in the 21st century. International Socialism Journal, (170), 123-150.
Butler, S. (2018, September). Visions of world order: Multipolarity and the global ‘constitutional’framework. In European Society of International Law (ESIL) 2018 Research Forum (Jerusalem).
Liu, M., & Tsai, K. S. (2020). Structural power, hegemony, and state capitalism: limits to China’s global economic power. Politics & Society, 49(2), 235–267. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220950234
Vlados, C., Chatzinikolaou, D., & Iqbal, B. A. (2022). New globalization and multipolarity. Journal of Economic Integration, 37(3), 458-483.
Wade, R. H. (2011). Emerging World Order? From multipolarity to multilateralism in the G20, the World Bank, and the IMF. Politics & Society, 39(3), 347–378. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329211415503
Wallerstein, I. (1993). The modern world system. Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, 427.
