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China, the world’s leading producting and trading country
vendredi 5 décembre 2025, par
China, the world’s leading trading country, is becoming the leading country in surplus value accumulation.
China, on the verge of becoming the world’s leading power, is more than just an essential player in all future negotiations ; it now intends to assume the role of conductor.
After becoming the world’s leading trading power in 2013, with a trade volume exceeding that of the United States, China was poised to become the world’s leading economic power. According to estimates published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on October 7, the Middle Kingdom will become the world’s leading economic power in 2014, surpassing the United States. In fact, it has probably already done so, but the news must not be spread…
“If we take nominal GDP as the benchmark,” the following publication states, “calculated using official exchange rates, then the United States continues to far outpace China. According to IMF figures, US GDP at the end of 2014 will be $17.416 trillion, while China’s will be $10.355 trillion. (…) China’s labor productivity, measured by output per worker, increased by 6.6 percent year on year in 2015. (…) Labor productivity reached 76,978 yuan ($11,842) per person last year, up 4,733 yuan from 2014, marking the fifth consecutive annual increase, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said. At the end of 2015, China’s total labor force had reached 774.51 million.” China created 13.12 million new jobs for urban residents in 2015.
The latest IMF reform marks a significant step forward for China on the world stage… After years of effort, the 2010 IMF voting rights and governance reform program finally took effect on January 26 of this year. This is the largest voting rights and governance reform in the IMF’s history, and also the largest adjustment to voting rights in favor of emerging and developing countries. The reform has doubled the IMF’s own capital, which now stands at approximately 470 billion Special Drawing Rights (about US$660 billion), and has also moved China to third place among the largest voting members of the IMF, representing a substantial increase in China’s voice within the organization. Today, the IMF launched its fifteenth discussion on voting rights and governance reform, including determining voting quotas, the rate of increase in voting rights, and the allocation of these rights. Clearly, governance reform is of major importance for emerging and developing markets. The IMF hopes to complete this work before its annual meeting in October 2017.
On November 30, 2015, following a rigorous assessment by the IMF Executive Board, the RMB was granted the status of a "freely usable currency" internationally, and as of October 1, 2016, it will be added to the US dollar, the euro, the yen, and the British pound to form the basket of currencies of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). However, much work remains to be done to further strengthen the role of SDRs in the stability of the international monetary and financial system and their widespread use in international financial markets, and this will be one of the important issues to be addressed by the G20.
Behind the honeymoon between the Chinese regime and capitalism lies a fierce competition, both economic and otherwise, coupled with market conquest and military development. Entire regions are falling under the sway of this new imperialism, and not only in Africa : also in Asia and in large parts of Russia. It goes without saying that the outcome cannot be solely economic and peaceful... The arms race under the guise of pacifism
On March 4, 2009, the Chinese parliament voted to increase the 2009 defense budget by nearly 15%, bringing it to €56 billion. In 2009, China’s defense budget represented 6.3% of total Chinese state spending, a proportion lower than that of many imperialist countries, particularly the USA. China’s fighter aviation has also made significant progress with the development of multirole fighters such as the Chengdu J-10 (equivalent to the American F-16), which began production in 1998, and interceptors like the Shenyang J-11 (a Chinese version produced under license from the renowned Russian Su-27). For several years, China has been working on developing stealth fighters capable of competing with the best Russian and American aircraft, such as the Shenyang J-XX project. In 2003, China began production of a modern design attack helicopter, the Wuzhuang Zhisheng-10, intended to compete with the American AH-64 and Eurocopter’s Tiger.
The Chinese fleet is no slouch either. By 2005, it had already become the third largest in the world, after those of the US and Russia. At that time, it comprised 424 warships with a total tonnage of nearly 800,000 tons, equivalent to the combined tonnage of the Royal Navy and the Japanese Navy. In 2002, the Russian aircraft carrier Varyag, whose construction had been suspended in 1993, joined its new owner : China. Equally important, the Chinese navy has been undergoing a complete rearmament since 1999, and each year has seen the arrival of its contingent of ultra-modern submarines, frigates, and destroyers.
In the spring of 2008, the US ambassador to Japan "asked Japan to increase its military budget in the face of the arms race in East Asia." He specifically targeted China, noting that it had "increased its defense budget by an average of 14.2% per year over the past ten years," and then cited the (positive, in his view) example of South Korea, whose 2008 defense budget exceeded $28 billion. (AFP, 05/22/2008) At $49 billion in 2008, Japan’s defense budget was indeed roughly equal to that of Russia or Germany ($46-50 billion), but lower than that of France or the United Kingdom ($61 billion). But according to Washington, it is essential that Japan’s military spending be commensurate with its economic power : while Japan has devoted barely 5% of its state budget to defense, South Korea devoted more than 15% in 2008.
Japan is expected to be overtaken by China for the whole of 2010. Already between April and June, China’s nominal GDP, at $1,336.9 billion, surpassed that of Japan, at $1,288.3 billion.
And the Japanese economy is slowing down alarmingly. On Monday, August 16, the Government Office announced GDP growth of 0.1% between April and June (0.4% year-on-year). Japan has recorded its third consecutive quarter of growth, but between January and March, it had reached 4.4%, and growth in the second quarter was expected to be around 2.3%.
Activity suffered from stagnant consumption, which contributes 60% to GDP formation, persistent deflationary pressure and a slowdown in export growth to 5.9%.
Looking ahead, analysts expect limited growth, or even a return to recession. This is due to the sharp appreciation of the yen against the dollar, with the greenback reaching its lowest level since 1995 on August 12, at 84.72 yen. The continuation of this trend could harm exports from Japanese companies and, consequently, the entire economy.
INEVITABLE CHANGE
This situation stands in stark contrast to that of China, where growth reached 10.3% in the second quarter and is expected to settle at 9.2% between July and September. A slowdown is certainly foreseeable, particularly because, as Yu Yongding, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, recently wrote in the Financial Times : "China has been obsessively focused on GDP growth for far too long. This cannot be an excuse to postpone structural adjustment any longer than necessary. And this readjustment, when it happens, will inevitably lead to a slowdown."
But the shift in the hierarchy of global economies remains inevitable. "This is the final step for China before the United States," believes Claude Meyer, author of a comparative study of the economic evolution of the two major Asian powers (China or Japan, Which Leader for Asia ?, New Debates, Presses de Sciences Po). "It is also a form of revenge, particularly with regard to Japan."
The new situation is not necessarily being met with resistance in the Archipelago. Nearly half of those surveyed in April by the Asahi Shimbun on this subject did not consider the rise of their Chinese neighbor to the rank of second largest economy in the world to be a major problem.
Above all, Japan hopes to benefit from the growing wealth of its large neighbor. On July 1st, the government eased visa requirements for tourists from China.
And more and more Japanese companies are accepting capital from investors in that country, even if some are hesitant, worried about respecting intellectual property. Others fear being relegated to research and development activities, with sales handled by their Chinese partners.
MAIN PARTNER
But all this is fading given the financial resources of Chinese companies and the increasing number of agreements signed. Evatech, a Kyoto-based manufacturer of spare parts for photovoltaic cells, chose a Chinese partner to overcome its difficulties. On the verge of bankruptcy in early 2010, the group received a 4.5 billion yen (52.2 million euro) investment from A-Power Energy, a Shenyang-based group. A-Power Energy was preferred to a Japanese competitor, which was only willing to invest 500 million yen (5.8 million euros).
On a larger scale, the Chinese solar energy giant Suntech entered the Japanese market in February 2009, in partnership with the distributor Yamada Denki. The consumer electronics retailers Laox were acquired by Suning Appliance, and the clothing giant Renown by Shandong Ruyi. Renown CEO Minoru Kitabatake sees this as a good way to "accelerate its overseas development."
Because while the Chinese invest to access cutting-edge technologies and benefit from the good image of the Archipelago’s groups, the Japanese, for their part, are counting on their new partners to gain a foothold in China.
In total, according to calculations by the Teikoku Economic Research Institute, 611 Chinese companies have invested in Japanese groups in recent years.
This will strengthen China’s position as Japan’s main trading partner. But it will also threaten what remains of Japan’s regional supremacy, namely, according to Claude Meyer, "its technological lead, its pivotal role in the integrated circuit of Asian economies, its large corporations, and its financial network."
Brice Pedroletti (in Beijing) and Philippe Mesmer (in Tokyo)
China is making "a big leap" in Africa
While everyone is convinced that China seeks to extend its influence across all continents, it is in Africa that its offensive is most massive, particularly in the economic sphere. But for Beijing, the economic realm is not the only one ; there are also military and geostrategic considerations to establish and preserve its global imperialist interests. Indeed, China arms regimes and sells weapons to numerous clients on the continent. From the early 1990s/2000s, a period heavily marked by massacres and bloody chaos in the continent’s main regions, it was known that Beijing was the (often covert) military supplier to many countries, especially in the Great Lakes region. For example, Chinese weapons were used to commit the horrific atrocities that resulted in millions of victims in the DRC.
Indeed, having become practically a major power like any other, China now aspires to the role of number one gangster in Africa, and in fact, Chinese imperialism is pushing some of its competitors out of their traditional positions. In this context, it goes without saying that France is squarely in China’s crosshairs.
"Chinafrique" is tending to supplant "Françafrique."
China has invested in almost every country on the African continent, mobilizing all available resources to maintain a strong presence, effectively ousting France from a number of countries that were once part of Paris’s sphere of influence. How does China achieve this, and what methods does it employ ? Let’s take just one example that summarizes and illustrates China’s clout : in the construction sector, the Chinese are challenging all their competitors by offering prices 30 to 50% lower than those offered by the French. This means that some major French groups, like Bouygues, are directly threatened by the Chinese predator wherever they are established or seeking to establish a presence. Consequently, some French companies are desperately trying to retreat to other African countries outside of France’s former colonial stronghold (such as South Africa or Angola), where, of course, the competition is no less fierce. In any case, China uses roughly the same "low prices" weapon in all other commercial sectors, including arms. To put it simply, the Chinese threat to France is global.
French imperialism is losing ground almost everywhere in its former colonial stronghold, both economically and politically. Moreover, symbolically, it is highly significant to see China openly courting Côte d’Ivoire, France’s former "showcase" or "economic jewel" in Africa. Indeed, not only are major French companies threatened by the Chinese offensive, but at the state level, Ivorian President Gbagbo himself is being heavily courted by Beijing, which is "protecting" him at the UN against sanctions and which, at one point, was able to provide him with the necessary funds to pay civil servants’ salaries—something Paris no longer does. Another powerful symbolic act is when Beijing begins organizing its own "China-Africa summits." This is yet another Chinese response that is entirely deliberate and aimed at the former Gaullist power.
Furthermore, if France were to evacuate its military bases in Africa (its main asset), as announced by President Sarkozy, China would undoubtedly be very happy to permanently oust it from the continent.
The concrete manifestations of China’s desire to play a leading role in the imperialist arena are only just beginning, and its main rivals will not miss an opportunity to respond in a manner commensurate with the challenges posed by Chinese ambitions. In short, no amount of talk about peace and understanding between nations will be able to mask this reality, which is synonymous with desolation and material and human destruction.
The future of the proletarian revolutionary struggle in China and the future of the world
The future of the world depends essentially on the proletariat, and particularly on the Chinese proletariat.
Many people tell us that the future of the world depends on what happens to capitalism, and they are wrong because, in this area, the die is already cast, even if we don’t yet know the exact timing. Capitalism no longer has any cards to play, nor any capacity to rebound by pursuing any particular policy. Since the 2007 collapse and its subsequent freeze in 2008, it has already played all its cards, and this has only bought it a few years, but by rendering the future completely dead for the old, utterly obsolete system of exploitation. The crisis of capital overaccumulation has clearly revealed itself to be not cyclical but permanent. Far from resolving it, the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to capitalists have only exacerbated overaccumulation, that is, the excess of capital relative to possible and profitable productive investments. This is true throughout the entire system, from the USA to China. State intervention is certainly easier in China than in the US, but that doesn’t change the fundamental issue. Real production is indeed greater in China than in the US, relative to the production of fictitious capital, but here again, overaccumulation is rampant everywhere, there as elsewhere. Without massive state financial aid, we would no longer be talking about capitalism, in China or anywhere else.
There is no need to be a prediction-maker, no need to pretend to be a fortune teller, no need to construct a fiction to ensure that capitalism will not last much longer and will not manage to find a new dynamic equilibrium, whether by remaining more or less peaceful or by plunging the world into the carnage of war, even the worst, even the most destructive.
There is no recourse. There is no alternative policy. There is no room for doubt. Besides, those in power have no doubt. They know. They simply muddy the waters, and this is all the easier because the exploited classes have no desire to believe it. They have no desire to think that the old world is going to collapse and that they will have to rely on their own strength to build a new one.
The fact that China has become the world’s factory and has developed by fostering the exploitation of a large industrial proletariat while the richest countries in the rest of the world have seen this economic sector collapse will in no way save the country economically, socially, or politically—far from it. An economy that grows at high speed and then hits a wall, blocking all development, is like a high-speed train that is suddenly brought to a halt. This cannot happen smoothly, gradually, or without violence. It is necessarily an explosive shock.
China’s economic, social, and political situation is very different from that of other countries, not only the USA, Europe, and Japan, but also Russia. The blockage of the real global economy signifies a future catastrophe for the major capitalist countries, but it signifies an immediate catastrophe for China, and this country is forced to prepare for it. In China’s case more than any other, Marx’s well-known text applies : "Capitalism first developed its own gravediggers, the proletariat." Indeed, the hypertrophy of Chinese industrial capitalism, in which the big capital of all rich countries has invested, presupposes the formation of a massive working class that inevitably wages struggles. And the regime in place, officially communist but violently anti-worker in reality, means that the population has no opportunity to express itself and criticize, yet it violently hates the system, while the petty bourgeoisie dislikes it as much as anyone else !
Far from guaranteeing social stability for the Chinese dictatorship, the Tiananmen Square revolution clearly demonstrated the enormous risks of destabilization. The regime is far more hated than appearances suggest. This isn’t solely due to the absence of media outlets and unions capable of critically examining the system. It’s a regime that acts in the name of proletarian power and accuses all opponents of being anti-communist. Again, in times of relative social calm, this provides a sense of security for the propertied classes, but in times of economic collapse, it becomes a far more serious destabilizing factor than in the rest of the world.
This means that the capitalist world fears nothing more than social and political destabilization in China. It would be unlike any other destabilizing social wave the world has already experienced, such as those that swept from Egypt to Tunisia, from Sudan to Kazakhstan, and in South America. If the Chinese proletariat loses faith in the capabilities of China’s dominant system, a veritable social tidal wave would be unleashed, and no wealthy country would be able to withstand it.
Far from fostering such revolutionary destabilization, Western policies, which feign to combat Russia and its Chinese ally, are in fact helping the Chinese regime to suppress social unrest within China. Indeed, anyone who appears as an opponent in China can only be seen as supporting Taiwan, supporting Western capitalism, and ultimately supporting China’s direct enemies, such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia, which seek military confrontation with China. Thus, any opponent of the oppressive and exploitative social system in China is portrayed as an enemy of the Chinese people ! These aggressive policies against China, particularly those of US President Biden, only serve to silence those who oppose the Chinese ruling class.
Yet the Chinese regime, despite its socialist and communist label, is and always has been a violent enemy of the proletariat. This is why global big capital has rushed to invest in China. This is also why the major Western capitalist countries, while denouncing the oppression of the Uyghurs, have never denounced the crushing of strikes, the arrest of trade unionists, or the maintenance of the world’s largest gulag, the "Laogaî," in which all militant workers, all those who dare to provide critical information against the Chinese regime, are imprisoned.
Far from supporting Chinese trade unionists, far from publicizing the death sentences handed down to Chinese protesters and dissidents, Western countries only talk about the Uyghurs and Nepalese oppressed by China. These groups, in turn, denounce China’s so-called "zero COVID" policy rather than the waves of anti-social repression in that country.
As for China’s ultra-interventionist economic policies, far from denouncing them, the so-called ultra-liberal capitalist countries support and praise them, claiming that they inspire confidence for the future. For if there is one point on which all Western economic commentators agree, it is that China’s economic collapse would be (and indeed will be) the prelude to an inevitable, massive global collapse.
China’s methods for combating the recession are even more extreme than those in the rest of the world, and they are even less convincing in terms of the fact that capitalism still has a role to play. Several tactics have been employed, ranging from flooding the private sector with public money, as in the rest of the world and even more so, to prolonged bans on stock market sales, and even manipulating the real estate sector by demolishing large numbers of existing buildings or delaying the construction of new ones.
If there is one thing that the propertied classes of the Western world absolutely do not want, it is an economic and social collapse in China, and this is obviously due to a panic-stricken fear of the Chinese proletariat !
Compared to the rest of the world, the Chinese proletariat is the most industrialized, the most concentrated, the youngest, the most combative, the least collaborationist, the most experienced in mass struggles, and the least structured by reformist organizations (since these are not permitted in China). As a result, all revolts have been brutally suppressed, but also the Chinese proletariat has the fewest illusions in the world about the power it faces, and its popularity is arguably the lowest among the most exploited people in the world.
It must be added that, as in Tsarist Russia, another decisive revolutionary ingredient is found in China : members of the most educated classes have no sympathy for the Stalinist and dictatorial type of power that reigns over China to the point of being able to choose the revolutionary proletariat and participate alongside it in the foundation of a proletarian revolutionary party that will lead the struggle against the power.
And everyone in the capitalist system knows this. They’re clenching their buttocks and waiting for the system to implode in China, like in the story of the fall from the tenth floor, telling themselves, "We’re at the ninth floor and so far, so good"...
The fall of Chinese real estate, particularly Evergrande, is only a symptom of a much larger fall, not only of the Chinese economy itself but of the world economy, irrevocably linked to that of China and the gravediggers of the anti-worker Stalinist and capitalist Chinese dictatorship are also already there : they are the proletarians of China.
Of course, reformist and opportunist organizations, from the left to the fake far left, from trade unions to associations and political organizations, are careful not to tell us all this and to call on us to prepare to fight alongside the Chinese proletarians to bury the old capitalist system of exploitation once and for all.
Even worse, they act as if the stakes of the current global situation are determined by the wars between the Western capitalist world and the China/Russia alliance. This is completely false : the future is determined by the struggle of the proletariat against its exploiters, first and foremost those in their own countries and the states that serve them. The struggle we must wage against the Chinese state is that of the Chinese proletariat, just as the struggle against the Western bourgeoisies is that of the proletariat of Europe and America. And the struggle of the Chinese proletariat is, due to the objective situation of Chinese capitalism, the weakest link in the capitalist world, the most important of all proletarian revolutionary struggles in the world.
The French newspaper "Le Figaro" writes :
“Beijing is ramping up its economic and credit support measures by resorting to the usual expedients, particularly infrastructure, but this mobilization is struggling to translate into tangible results due to growing budgetary constraints. Local governments are worried about their debt levels and are therefore more selective in their choice of projects,” observes Dan Wang. While consumption has recovered, it remains sluggish and threatened by the risk of new lockdowns, which hangs like a sword of Damocles over Shanghai and Guangdong, where the number of Covid cases is rising again… “The Chinese economy will continue to rebound in the second half of the year, achieving a reasonable level of performance,” declared Yuan Da, the government’s chief planner, to the National Development and Reform Commission (NRDC). This elliptical, unquantified statement suggests that Beijing is abandoning its target of 5.5% annual growth.”