Chinese Strategy Towards a Socialist Market Economy
Discussion
Nel Bonilla:
"Mainstream Chinese Marxist economists like Cheng Enfu describe the PRC as a “socialist market economy” governed by a “dual regulation mechanism,” in which the Party‑state steers markets over the long term to develop productive forces and raise living standards. Western Marxists tend to read this as straightforward state capitalism, but even on Cheng’s own terms the key point for my argument is that China’s internal socialist tendencies are in constant dialectical tension with the capitalist imperatives of the world‑economy it remains part of. Global integration—WTO membership, foreign direct investment, participation in value chains—is treated as a tool to be used under Party leadership, and not as a step toward building a parallel socialist world market. In other words, the official doctrine assumes a long transition conducted inside a capitalist world‑system that continues to set many of the constraints.
Nonetheless, I am not saying that the Chinese government just sits there, trapped. Of course not. China is actively trying to reduce its vulnerability within this hostile system. The Five-Year Plans and industrial policies are the practical expression of Cheng’s “wealth-power dialectic”: using markets and global integration to build national strength, while gradually re-socializing wealth over time. The current push for technological self-reliance—semiconductors, AI, green tech, advanced manufacturing—is a deliberate strategy to move up value chains, make China less dependent on the US-centric core, and reduce the leverage that Washington can exercise through export controls and financial denial, all while avoiding an abrupt rupture that would destabilize the Chinese economy itself.
In short, China is trying to change its position and degree of vulnerability within the existing world-system over decades, using state-led industrial policy and controlled openness.
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If we ask ourselves why there is no alternative “outside” yet, we can point to a crucial historical lesson drawn directly from the Soviet collapse—an event the Chinese leadership has studied exhaustively. They concluded that trying to build a global mass movement, with open-ended support for various liberation struggles, invited severe overextension and ultimately damaged the state. For Beijing, the Soviet experience demonstrated the material impossibility of sustaining a global counter-hegemonic project against a hostile capitalist world-economy that could absorb it eventually.
Thus, beginning in the late 1970s, Beijing’s priority shifted from global revolution to securing a “peaceful international environment for development” and “managing our own affairs well.” The core lesson was clear: trying to maintain a global revolutionary posture without first prioritizing domestic development and flexible adaptation led directly to strategic vulnerability.
The most direct evidence of this internal understanding comes from Zheng Bijian, the former Executive Vice President of the Central Party School and a key architect of the “China’s Peaceful Rise” doctrine. In 2006, he stated:
“In strengthening comprehensive national power, the Chinese people will not pursue the ‘Soviet Dream.’ Back then, the Soviet Union engaged in an all-out arms race and large-scale ‘export of revolution’ abroad, whereas China simply focuses on developing itself. ‘We only export computers, not revolution.’“
And in 2011 this was specified further in a text about the strategic outlook for China’s development between 2011 and 2020, he explicitly contrasted China’s path with the American Dream (high energy consumption), the European Dream (colonization), and the Soviet Dream (exporting revolution). “We only export goods, capital, and markets; we do not export revolution.
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What we are not yet seeing, in any sustained or systemic form, is an anti-imperialist project. The historical infrastructure of anti-imperialism—a shared horizon, mass organizations that mobilize ordinary people across borders, collective security arrangements, a positive vision of a different mode of organizing society and the economy—is absent. The international outreach that does exist is overwhelmingly elite-to-elite: infrastructure deals, academic exchanges, and diplomatic communiqués. It builds connectivity, certainly, but it does not build a shared ideological project.
China is the clearest illustration of this pattern precisely because it is the largest and most capable of the multipolar powers. If a socialist state with a Marxist leadership, a vast state sector, and enormous economic weight is not building an anti-imperialist “outside,” that tells us something meaningful about the structural constraints everyone is facing. In essence, China is focused on reducing its own vulnerability to ensure its survival within the existing system—a defensive posture mirrored by dozens of other countries just trying to find safety and stability in a hostile architecture.
Any attempt to convert the current capitalist multipolarity into something genuinely anti‑imperial would require, at minimum: drastically reducing reliance on US‑controlled financial and legal levers, rewiring trade and payments outside that orbit at scale, and taking real political risks on behalf of weaker, more exposed states and movements. These are steps that would invite enormous costs and severe instability for any coalition of states collectively willing to make the attempt.
The current multipolar world is anti-hegemonic. That reality should not be minimized. But until the material and organizational conditions for a true alternative exist—more mixed economies, more cross-border institutions rooted in popular participation, and a shared horizon that goes beyond civilizational coexistence—the default trajectory will remain elite-competitive. The empire can live with that. And this will mean continued violence."