A sprawling Chinese influence operation — accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official’s use of ChatGPT — focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
You are mixing together several different issues that need to be separated.
First, empires and imperialism are not the same thing. The Roman Empire and the Mongol Empire were empires. They expanded territorially through conquest. That tells us something about pre-capitalist state formation. It does not tell us much about how 19th–20th century industrial powers behaved once finance capital, monopoly capital, and global markets became dominant.
Using “imperialism” in the useful sense is not a dodge. It is an analytical category developed to explain a specific historical phenomenon: why advanced capitalist states began exporting capital, carving up colonies, enforcing unequal trade structures, and using military power to secure superprofits abroad. If a concept is meant to explain a modern phase of capitalism, applying it to Rome is a category error. We already have words for territorial conquest, war, annexation, and domination. Not every bad or aggressive action needs to be labeled “imperialism” to be condemnable. Just as not every atrocity is genocide, even though both can be severe crimes.
Second, on whether China’s development is rooted in socialist foundations: this is not a matter of faith but of historical sequence and institutional structure. The PRC began with massive land reform under Mao, eliminating landlordism and breaking the pre-1949 semi-feudal structure. That radically altered property relations in the countryside. It built universal basic healthcare, literacy campaigns, and heavy industry from an extremely impoverished base. When reform and opening began, it did so from a position where land remained collectively owned and the commanding heights of the economy were state controlled (the apparatus through which the people exert their power).
Today, state-owned enterprises dominate strategic sectors: energy, banking, telecommunications, transport, defense, and heavy industry. The largest and most systemically important firms remain under party-state control. Finance is not privately sovereign in the way it is in Western economies; it is subordinated to planning priorities.
Poverty alleviation on the scale China achieved (lifting hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty within decades), large-scale infrastructure coordination, and sustained anti-corruption campaigns targeting high-ranking officials are not typical outcomes in liberal capitalist states where capital structurally dominates the state. You can criticize implementation or inequality levels, but the development trajectory is not reducible to “normal capitalism with a flag.”
On social questions, sweeping claims about uniform repression do not reflect reality. China is not socially homogeneous. Urban centers like Shanghai have gender-affirming clinics operating openly. Chengdu has a visible and active queer scene. Ethnic minority regions have received significant state investment in infrastructure, education, and poverty relief; minorities were exempted from the one-child policy for decades. That does not mean no problems exist. It means the picture is more complex than “reactionary uniformity.”
China also began from a far poorer, more backward and much more recent starting point in the modern age than most contemporary developed countries. The speed and scale of industrialization, poverty reduction and social progress in roughly four decades have few to no historical parallels.
None of this implies perfection. A socialist transition in a large, unevenly developed country integrated into the global market will contain contradictions: inequality, bureaucratic distortion, market pressures, ideological struggle. Expecting a frictionless transition misunderstands the theory itself. Socialism is not a moral condition achieved overnight; it is a protracted restructuring of property relations, production, and global positioning under difficult constraints.
Finally, rejecting dogma cuts both ways. Treating “all rising powers inevitably replicate imperialism” as a fixed truth is also a form of ideological closure. The question should remain empirical: what are the property relations? Who controls finance? Is capital subordinated to political planning or vice versa? Is global expansion enforced militarily for superprofits, or is integration primarily commercial?
China can be criticized where warranted. But critique should rest on material analysis, not analogy or inherited narratives.
Edit: fixed formatting
Using “imperialism” in the useful sense is not a dodge. It is an analytical category developed to explain a specific historical phenomenon: why advanced capitalist states began exporting capital, carving up colonies, enforcing unequal trade structures, and using military power to secure superprofits abroad.
What a fascinating concept! Find a different term or add on modifiers. It’s not the heart of what imperialism is and it is self serving whether you admit it or not. I’ve heard liberals use the same cope when I tried to explain how America could institute an explicitly feudal model in the future. They claimed it needed a church like in medieval Europe to be feudalism, basically constraining the concept to a time and place that isn’t now. Don’t make the same mistake.
Also, “reactionary uniformity” was not what I said or implied. I said it followed global trends in reactionary social policy, because China is not special, and that rarely includes absolute genocide. Queer people are resilient and always make space for themselves; it’s kinda our thing. However, queer people having our own spaces or not having to hide never meant we were accepted by the government or safe from persecution. Few governments really want to get rid of us, just use us as scapegoats and attack us as needed. This is again, because despite everything different about China, it is not special.
China indeed has a different capitalist strategy, but I’ve met enough Chinese rich kids with family well connected to the party to know that it is still capitalism. They will not replace America’s tactics internationally because it isn’t a strategy they want. America’s is not the only imperial strategy and does not mean China’s isn’t still imperialism.
I don’t separate domestic and international strategy because I’ve seen that abused in my own country’s politics. It’s all the same conversation and not seeing how everything works together is a mistake. From the macro to the micro is all the same world, and one of humanity’s biggest flaws is not being able to integrate different scales.
Feudalism is a defined mode of production. It refers to specific property relations and hierarchical organization of society. The church was historically important in Europe, but it is not what defines feudalism. The defining feature is the structure of land ownership and obligations. The same applies here.
Imperialism, is not a synonym for “large country acting assertively” or “foreign policy I dislike.” It refers to a specific configuration of global political economy: monopoly capital, dominance of finance capital, export of capital for superprofits, division of markets, and coercive enforcement of unequal exchange. If you strip those structural elements away and use the term to mean “big state behavior,” the concept becomes analytically useless. It stops explaining anything.
You object to the definition but refuse to provide a coherent alternative. If you think the term should mean something else, define it clearly and demonstrate how China fits that definition and how it has meaningful value as an analysis tool. “Different imperial strategy” is not an argument.
On social transformation, dismissing China’s development as “not special” is evasion. The PRC began from conditions that included mass illiteracy, extreme rural poverty, war devastation, landlordism, widespread arranged marriage practices, and remnants of practices like foot binding within living memory. It was one of the poorest large countries on earth. Within a few generations it eradicated extreme poverty, built nationwide high-speed rail, electrified rural areas, massively expanded higher education, massively expanded women’s and LGBT+ rights and raised life expectancy by decades. That scale and speed of transformation is historically unheard of especially when coupled with not pillaging the third world to finance it. Flattening that into “every country follows global trends” avoids engaging the material record.
On your anecdote about rich, well-connected Chinese kids: that proves nothing about the structure of the system. Every large society has contradictions. The existence of wealthy individuals does not determine mode of production. What matters is whether private capital structurally dominates the state and the commanding heights of the economy.
I am a minority Chinese citizen originally from a rural village. I have firsthand experience of the countryside you are theorizing about from a distance. I also hold a master’s degree in Marxist theory. Wealthy diaspora anecdotes do not outweigh structural analysis or lived reality. Before asserting conclusions about an entire political economy, it would be worth engaging with its institutional structure rather than relying on social impressions.
Land in China is publicly owned. The banks are state-owned. Core sectors (energy, telecoms, rail, defense, heavy industry )are state enterprises. Planning institutions shape capital allocation. When private firms grow politically destabilizing, the state has shown it will discipline them. That is materially different from systems where finance capital disciplines the state.
You’re correct that macro and micro interact. That is precisely the point. If the internal system subordinates capital to state planning and national development goals, external behavior will reflect that structure. China’s international conduct: trade integration, infrastructure financing, debt renegotiation, absence of regime-change wars, follows from its internal political economy. It prioritizes development partnerships over military enforcement.
None of this means the system is perfect. It means it does not structurally match the definition of imperialism as a stage of monopoly capitalism enforced through global military dominance.
If you want to argue that it does, demonstrate the mechanisms. Identify the finance capital dominance, the coercive capital-export regime, the military enforcement of unequal exchange. Without that, you are asserting a label without meeting its criteria.
Precision is not dogma. It is the difference between analysis and rhetoric. And you are firmly in the rhetoric category for now.
You are mixing together several different issues that need to be separated.
First, empires and imperialism are not the same thing. The Roman Empire and the Mongol Empire were empires. They expanded territorially through conquest. That tells us something about pre-capitalist state formation. It does not tell us much about how 19th–20th century industrial powers behaved once finance capital, monopoly capital, and global markets became dominant.
Using “imperialism” in the useful sense is not a dodge. It is an analytical category developed to explain a specific historical phenomenon: why advanced capitalist states began exporting capital, carving up colonies, enforcing unequal trade structures, and using military power to secure superprofits abroad. If a concept is meant to explain a modern phase of capitalism, applying it to Rome is a category error. We already have words for territorial conquest, war, annexation, and domination. Not every bad or aggressive action needs to be labeled “imperialism” to be condemnable. Just as not every atrocity is genocide, even though both can be severe crimes.
Second, on whether China’s development is rooted in socialist foundations: this is not a matter of faith but of historical sequence and institutional structure. The PRC began with massive land reform under Mao, eliminating landlordism and breaking the pre-1949 semi-feudal structure. That radically altered property relations in the countryside. It built universal basic healthcare, literacy campaigns, and heavy industry from an extremely impoverished base. When reform and opening began, it did so from a position where land remained collectively owned and the commanding heights of the economy were state controlled (the apparatus through which the people exert their power).
Today, state-owned enterprises dominate strategic sectors: energy, banking, telecommunications, transport, defense, and heavy industry. The largest and most systemically important firms remain under party-state control. Finance is not privately sovereign in the way it is in Western economies; it is subordinated to planning priorities. Poverty alleviation on the scale China achieved (lifting hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty within decades), large-scale infrastructure coordination, and sustained anti-corruption campaigns targeting high-ranking officials are not typical outcomes in liberal capitalist states where capital structurally dominates the state. You can criticize implementation or inequality levels, but the development trajectory is not reducible to “normal capitalism with a flag.”
On social questions, sweeping claims about uniform repression do not reflect reality. China is not socially homogeneous. Urban centers like Shanghai have gender-affirming clinics operating openly. Chengdu has a visible and active queer scene. Ethnic minority regions have received significant state investment in infrastructure, education, and poverty relief; minorities were exempted from the one-child policy for decades. That does not mean no problems exist. It means the picture is more complex than “reactionary uniformity.”
China also began from a far poorer, more backward and much more recent starting point in the modern age than most contemporary developed countries. The speed and scale of industrialization, poverty reduction and social progress in roughly four decades have few to no historical parallels. None of this implies perfection. A socialist transition in a large, unevenly developed country integrated into the global market will contain contradictions: inequality, bureaucratic distortion, market pressures, ideological struggle. Expecting a frictionless transition misunderstands the theory itself. Socialism is not a moral condition achieved overnight; it is a protracted restructuring of property relations, production, and global positioning under difficult constraints.
Finally, rejecting dogma cuts both ways. Treating “all rising powers inevitably replicate imperialism” as a fixed truth is also a form of ideological closure. The question should remain empirical: what are the property relations? Who controls finance? Is capital subordinated to political planning or vice versa? Is global expansion enforced militarily for superprofits, or is integration primarily commercial?
China can be criticized where warranted. But critique should rest on material analysis, not analogy or inherited narratives. Edit: fixed formatting
What a fascinating concept! Find a different term or add on modifiers. It’s not the heart of what imperialism is and it is self serving whether you admit it or not. I’ve heard liberals use the same cope when I tried to explain how America could institute an explicitly feudal model in the future. They claimed it needed a church like in medieval Europe to be feudalism, basically constraining the concept to a time and place that isn’t now. Don’t make the same mistake.
Also, “reactionary uniformity” was not what I said or implied. I said it followed global trends in reactionary social policy, because China is not special, and that rarely includes absolute genocide. Queer people are resilient and always make space for themselves; it’s kinda our thing. However, queer people having our own spaces or not having to hide never meant we were accepted by the government or safe from persecution. Few governments really want to get rid of us, just use us as scapegoats and attack us as needed. This is again, because despite everything different about China, it is not special.
China indeed has a different capitalist strategy, but I’ve met enough Chinese rich kids with family well connected to the party to know that it is still capitalism. They will not replace America’s tactics internationally because it isn’t a strategy they want. America’s is not the only imperial strategy and does not mean China’s isn’t still imperialism.
I don’t separate domestic and international strategy because I’ve seen that abused in my own country’s politics. It’s all the same conversation and not seeing how everything works together is a mistake. From the macro to the micro is all the same world, and one of humanity’s biggest flaws is not being able to integrate different scales.
You’re still not engaging the substance.
Feudalism is a defined mode of production. It refers to specific property relations and hierarchical organization of society. The church was historically important in Europe, but it is not what defines feudalism. The defining feature is the structure of land ownership and obligations. The same applies here.
Imperialism, is not a synonym for “large country acting assertively” or “foreign policy I dislike.” It refers to a specific configuration of global political economy: monopoly capital, dominance of finance capital, export of capital for superprofits, division of markets, and coercive enforcement of unequal exchange. If you strip those structural elements away and use the term to mean “big state behavior,” the concept becomes analytically useless. It stops explaining anything.
You object to the definition but refuse to provide a coherent alternative. If you think the term should mean something else, define it clearly and demonstrate how China fits that definition and how it has meaningful value as an analysis tool. “Different imperial strategy” is not an argument.
On social transformation, dismissing China’s development as “not special” is evasion. The PRC began from conditions that included mass illiteracy, extreme rural poverty, war devastation, landlordism, widespread arranged marriage practices, and remnants of practices like foot binding within living memory. It was one of the poorest large countries on earth. Within a few generations it eradicated extreme poverty, built nationwide high-speed rail, electrified rural areas, massively expanded higher education, massively expanded women’s and LGBT+ rights and raised life expectancy by decades. That scale and speed of transformation is historically unheard of especially when coupled with not pillaging the third world to finance it. Flattening that into “every country follows global trends” avoids engaging the material record.
On your anecdote about rich, well-connected Chinese kids: that proves nothing about the structure of the system. Every large society has contradictions. The existence of wealthy individuals does not determine mode of production. What matters is whether private capital structurally dominates the state and the commanding heights of the economy.
I am a minority Chinese citizen originally from a rural village. I have firsthand experience of the countryside you are theorizing about from a distance. I also hold a master’s degree in Marxist theory. Wealthy diaspora anecdotes do not outweigh structural analysis or lived reality. Before asserting conclusions about an entire political economy, it would be worth engaging with its institutional structure rather than relying on social impressions.
Land in China is publicly owned. The banks are state-owned. Core sectors (energy, telecoms, rail, defense, heavy industry )are state enterprises. Planning institutions shape capital allocation. When private firms grow politically destabilizing, the state has shown it will discipline them. That is materially different from systems where finance capital disciplines the state.
You’re correct that macro and micro interact. That is precisely the point. If the internal system subordinates capital to state planning and national development goals, external behavior will reflect that structure. China’s international conduct: trade integration, infrastructure financing, debt renegotiation, absence of regime-change wars, follows from its internal political economy. It prioritizes development partnerships over military enforcement.
None of this means the system is perfect. It means it does not structurally match the definition of imperialism as a stage of monopoly capitalism enforced through global military dominance.
If you want to argue that it does, demonstrate the mechanisms. Identify the finance capital dominance, the coercive capital-export regime, the military enforcement of unequal exchange. Without that, you are asserting a label without meeting its criteria.
Precision is not dogma. It is the difference between analysis and rhetoric. And you are firmly in the rhetoric category for now.