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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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China is not going to be the second USSR because its economic model is inherently neoliberal, and one that adheres to the market principles set by the IMF, despite what many Western leftists want to believe in otherwise.
This is what market socialism actually means, and what many Western commentators misunderstand about the Chinese model. In fact, the government has repeatedly stated that it vows to be the defender of the free trade order, and that it is the US that violates the international rules it sets itself.
You have narratives from both sides that attempt to paint China as “imperialist” or “anti-Western imperialist”, and neither of them is correct. China is the biggest beneficiary of the neoliberal free trade order, with the global industrial capacity being deliberately concentrated into China, at the expense of the rest of the world since it rendered the rest of the Global South vulnerable to the onslaught of Western finance capitalism.
The US is happy to de-industrialize itself, and China is happy to keep the system going and benefiting from it for as long as it can. As long as the IMF ideological indoctrination continues to hold, China’s actions will be constrained by the framework set by the US-dominated institutions.
The problem now is that the long term de-industrialization in the US has caused the rise of populism, and erupted in the form of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s movements in the mid-2010s, following the 2008 global financial crisis that truly ended what remains of class mobility in the country and fully disillusioned their own working class of the “American dream”. Everyone who is not establishment knows that the system is broken. This is itself the contradiction of the American neoliberal capitalist system.
Forced to respond to the rise of populism, American capital is now attempting to forge a new international order that would allow its own finance capital to remain hegemonic while at the same time pacifying the dissent of its own working class. A new form of fascism, if you will. It is a huge bet full of risks and contradictions in and on itself, but this is the only way for American capitalism to survive and perpetuate itself.
On the other hand, China wants the status quo to remain, and the continued de-industrialization in the US is good for China. Yet another contradiction at the global scale that will continue to build the geopolitical tension, until something breaks.
And the work had already begun with the first Trump term, with its initial foray into a trade war with China since 2018 (the same play dealing with Japan in the 1980s). Biden ramped up the trade war and completed the subjugation and disciplining of the European economy through Ukraine War and the Build Back Better policies (the long-term effort of neutralizing the euro as a major challenger to the dollar since the fall of the USSR, during which the plunder and monetization of post-Soviet industrial capital finally enabled Europe to form its own currency zone).
Trump II is now continuing the effort by playing up the global tariffs, with Europe out of the game and Japan is still too slow to recover its growth, most likely with the intention of setting off a mercantilistic fight throughout the world, allowing China to flood its cheap goods across the world while it hides itself behind the tariffs. This will weaken the domestic industries in many economies of the world, which will then set the stage for global supply chain to be reshaped, as they are plundered by IMF/bailouts by foreign capital.
Europe will likely be forced to purchase American goods and invest hundreds of billions in the US. Again, another layer of contradiction that relies on the Europeans playing ball - the last time Europe was being squeezed to pay its war debt beyond its ability to American creditors post-WWI, they ended up squeezing the defeated Germany which directly caused the rise of Hitler and Nazism. A very dangerous game to play here.
This is just a long winded way of saying that if you want China to act to the benefit of the Global South, the neoliberal ideology must first be purged in China.
The problem is that even after the Ukraine war started, despite many Global South countries wanting to jump on the de-dollarization train, China has been extremely reluctant to do so precisely because of what I described above - it benefits greatly through dollar hegemony, and this is the result of its economic framework being constrained by neoliberal theories. It does not have an alternative framework like the USSR did. This emboldens the US to continue to challenge China and the rest of the world, because its calculation is that China will still prefer to keep the status quo than to radically change the rules of the world.
The PRC's economic model is not inherently neoliberal. What is this nonsense?
OP thinks neoliberalism is when free trade lol.
Even then China has substantial import controls and protectionist measures. For example, The Great Firewall is mostly a protectionist measure for domestic tech development.
There are neoliberals struggling for neoliberal policy in the PRC government and liberal policies for many industries, but the way it treats capital is usually more akin to a classic econ, Keynesian, and of course Marxist logic.
It may br faur to assume OP is speaking more about its international economic relations, where imperialist peers have exported neoliberal policy via something like the IMF. They .ake reference to the IMF. The usual aspects of neoliberalism in that context are to tie strings to loans for imperialized countries to convert their economies into (dependemcy) profit maximizers for imperialists. Cut their labor protections, abolish domestic food production via multiple means including removing protectionist barriers, leading to greater proletarianization for there to be workers for the imperialist-owned factories, cannibalization of social programs and many functions of the state that threaten this regime or remove opportunities for profit.
But even then China is at best somewhat complacent with other countries' neoliberalism. They do not attach those strings and their direct investments tend to not involve net exploitation (vs. their domestic workforce). This is a debated point among Marxist nerds but I find the analyses in line with what I've described more convincing and rigorous.
I think the most salient criticism is that China's strategy of economic integration is a double-edged sword. While the imperialists are stuck with the choice between attacking China and having unstable economies and profits, China is stuck trying to figure out what to do with their export-driven productive economy if they ever tried to decouple.
The term you’re looking for is imperialism, or financial imperialism, not neoliberalism. There are many Global South countries today that are obviously not imperialist and yet have their economic model fully adhere their to the neoliberal framework.
I mostly agree. I used both terms in their own context, while they're also related, as imperialism frequently uses the imposition of neoliberalism to achieve its ends. If we ask how China could be fundamentally neoliberal we quickly exhaust the question domestically, so we'd need to look at how it could be neoliberal in a farther-reaching sense in that it imposes neoliberalism on other countries or strictly relies on an expansion of neoliberalism elsewhere in order to function.
Just explained to another user but here you go:
Definitionally, China’s economy fits fully into the neoliberal framework and adheres closely to the IMF prescription (balancing the budget, export-led growth, privatization etc.). Please don’t say just because China has industrial policy that it is not neoliberal. Many countries, including Japan and South Korea, have industrial policies and still fit fully into the neoliberal framework.
From an academic standpoint, economics departments across Chinese academia are already dominated by Western neoclassical and Austrian school economists who studied in Western universities. You want to find Marxist economists? They’ve all been banished to the humanities and social sciences departments decades ago.
From a historical standpoint, China’s reform and opening up model was designed by the Chicago school and Milton Friedman was even invited twice to China to educate Chinese policymakers. Shanghai’s financial sector was designed by the Chicago school lol.
Perhaps the most prominent economist and policy advisor in China today, Justin Lin Yifu, who pioneered the New Structural Economics that defined the Chinese economic model for the past 30 years, was the first ever Chinese PhD graduate from the Chicago school of economics and the protege of Theodore Schultz himself, the co-founder of Chicago school of neoclassical economics together with Milton Friedman.
Again, you are confusing a country having industrial policy and some level of capital control, which I remind you, that exist in many countries in the world today, as being not neoliberal.
Many people don’t even understand how the Chinese economy works and its history think they know China better than myself lol, and I don’t even claim to be an expert.
The IMF neoliberal framework is one of balancing budgets through austerity (etc). Neoliberalism is definitionally destructive to state-owned capital - as you mention, privatization. Generally speaking, it refocuses the profit drivers to finance through cannibalization of productive capital. While one could've argued for a worrying trajectory towards this in China in 1999, today the trend and actuality is opposite to this, with a growing state, growing SOEs, deprivatization, growing infrastructure, direct confrontations with an already-suppressed financial capital sector, and a steadily increasing domestic production for domestic consumption.
It is certainly true that China ticks some boxes (e.g. allowing its own exploitation, export-driven economy), but these are not sufficient to be neoliberal.
Oh yes there is certainly a strong element of this political economic miseducation. It is not quite that dire, as even the Shanghai School integrates Marxist thought, and not just for show. Similarly, nerds like Liu Yuanchun and Hu Angang have substantial influence and intersect with the Tsinghua crowd. China's governance has finance sector veterans following the plans of Marxist SOE advocates. These things get mixed together. Much of the strength of the anti-finance (or at least finance-critical) crowd focuses on the anarchy of production when finance capital becomes too strong, for example. Attempts to reign in real estate highlighted these struggles and with, appropriately, mixed bag outcomes.
Reform and Opening Up absolutely drew from neoliberal schools of thought, openly and intentionally, but also balanced by ML critique and retaining a very different political economic system than the Chicago Boys implemented on, say, Chile via Pinochet.
I do also want to note, however, that much of this is not in real service of whether China's economy is fundamentally neoliberal. It could basically all be true in fact and intent while China's actual economic function is not neoliberal.
He headed the World Bank, too! Very enmeshed in the explicitly political structures of global capital. But again this just reads as an attempt at association but without strong thesis. And NSE, while easy to criticize, is a departure from neoliberal economics in quite a few ways, particularly when it comes to the role of the state and private capital.
I don't believe I've said or implied either of those things. In fact, the comment you replied to was very very short and just doubted China being neoliberal. Are you thinking of a different person or comment?
I'm not sure I'd make a blanket statement that I simply understand a given country's economy. I can often identify salient aspects.
really wish you would stop using this wildly inappropriate term for China, it's like your definition of neoliberal comes from an alternate universe
Everyone reading this thread should fucking read Losurdo's Class Struggle. China's proletarian party is working in the long term interests of the proletariat by allowing bourgeois management of the economy and slowly learning from and then replacing it. But applying the Unity of Action principle means also letting specific models succes and fail of their own accords after attempting to apply them well. And right now, the economic model is working and being slightly shifted where needed, but achieving the long term goals. If China were to give all this up, and attack and then be destroyed by the imperialist west to stop the current atrocities (as much as I care about it too), the genocides that would follow would be even larger and worse. I'm not starry eyed enough to think China would actually win a global war right now, because the enemy is genuinely very powerful.
Stalin wanted to win in Spain but knew that destroying themselves there would prevent their survival in the coming war. It's a fundamentally future and empirically oriented position, and that feels horrible and harsh at any given moment of inability.
Can you explain how is it inappropriate?
Definitionally, China’s economy fits fully into the neoliberal framework and adheres closely to the IMF prescription (balancing the budget, export-led growth, privatization etc.). Please don’t say just because China has industrial policy that it is not neoliberal. Many countries, including Japan and South Korea, have industrial policies and still fit fully into the neoliberal framework.
From an academic standpoint, economics departments across Chinese academia are already dominated by Western neoclassical and Austrian school economists who studied in Western universities. You want to find Marxist economists? They’ve all been banished to the humanities and social sciences departments decades ago.
From a historical standpoint, China’s reform and opening up model was designed by the Chicago school and Milton Friedman was even invited twice to China to educate Chinese policymakers. Shanghai’s financial sector was designed by the Chicago school lol.
Perhaps the most prominent economist and policy advisor in China today, Justin Lin Yifu, who pioneered the New Structural Economics that defined the Chinese economic model for the past 30 years, was the first ever Chinese PhD graduate from the Chicago school of economics and the protege of Theodore Schultz himself, the co-founder of Chicago school of neoclassical economics together with Milton Friedman.
Again, you are confusing a country having industrial policy and some level of capital control, which I remind you, that exist in many countries in the world today, as being not neoliberal.
No, I'm talking about a country where the biggest companies and the banking sector and land are owned by the state. I'm talking about a country like this:
Neoliberalism is first and foremost about privatization. After that it is about deregulation. It is not about the college an economic advisor went to or who their professor was a student of. None of the processes that have historically defined neoliberalism are dominant in the actual Chinese economy. China's economy is probably the least neoliberal on earth outside of the other four ML states.
"SOE" is an economist weasel word, it covers everything from a soviet factory to a public corp handling contracts for 90% privatized services in post soviet countries. there isn't even a percent of public ownership that makes an SOE an SOE.
Not saying Chinese SOEs function a specific way, but simply having them doesn't pass muster imo, we need to interrogate the characteristics of them to actually know if they're neoliberal or not.
Sounds to me like western leftists need to organize and get a revolution going as the contradictions in neoliberalism continue to escalate towards fascism. We can't rely on China to save us, or Palestine.
It sounds depressing and hopeless now, but western leftists should remember how fast things progress sometime. At one point, Lenin was convinced he wouldn't see the revolution during his lifetime. Hell, all the stuff with the Paris Commune happened in like three months.
I simply don’t see how China can save the working class in the Imperial Core if they don’t have organized movements themselves to perform revolutionary defeatism from within.
Without left wing movements, declining economies and the amplifying effects of climate change will simply accelerate into fascism like you said. You have millions of people getting radicalized in real time but with no (serious) movements to join (organizing milquetoast protests do not count lol!) - and so in a world where everyone is out for themselves, even those with left leaning sympathies will be forced to adopt reactionary stance just for their own survival.
Also, History is always marching on and full of surprises. You can never truly plan for what’s coming - there are so many historical precedences where accidents or unanticipated incidents can tilt the balance in one way or the other very quickly, and those who were not in the position to capitalize on the changing order will be swept away by the winds of History and became nothing more than a footnote.