The Australian National University (ANU) chapter of the Platypus Affiliated Society held a panel on 25th September 2025, on the subject of China’s rise and its contemporary lessons for the left. We publish here an abridged version of the opening statements given by Christina Veselovskiy of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation.
Fifteen minutes of speaking tonight would hardly do justice to the task of understanding the most important political entity of the last 50 years, and indeed the next 100. I want to be upfront about what I believe, which is that I do not think the real, existing ideology of the CCP offers any concrete lessons to our Communist project in the 21st Century. We can only discuss China in relation to its key role within the planetary form of Capitalism that confronts us in the 21st Century, and I thus want to structure my comments in two parts. I’ll first offer a concise history of where and when I believe the Chinese Revolution made significant steps toward integration into the global capitalist system. I argue that this history was, if not entirely inevitable, a primary outcome of the historically misguided fusion of party and state. Second and lastly, I would like to outline the planetary condition that we, as Communists, are confronting, one which recognises China as part of a planetary capitalist system. We can only overcome such a system by abandoning the 20th-century dogmas of national liberation, merging party and state, and advocating for a socialist revolution in stages.
Chinese Integration into global capitalism
First, I would like to provide a history of the People’s Republic of China that does not assume fixed, abstract definitions of socialism, communism, or capitalism—concepts that exist at one moment but not at another. The Chinese Revolution, like all historical revolutions, was highly uneven and had to respond to a wide array of spontaneous desires, dreams, and visions across the population and indeed around the world. It is an oversimplification to say that the CCP emerged solely because of a crisis of national sovereignty amid imperialist aggression; the actual phenomenon penetrated much deeper into Chinese society. The decline of the Qing also meant the destruction of the imperial symbolic order, which, for all its restricted, aristocratic, and patriarchal nature, served as the common ground for nascent class struggle in the Chinese village. During the war, Mao Zedong Thought emerged as the ultimate solution to fill this gap in China’s agrarian north, where local resistance to state authority had a long tradition, unlike in the more consolidated and state-centric south. I do not want to deny the significance of Yan’an and the revolutionary semiotics that emerged there, nor the powerful aftershocks seen in May ‘68. Mao Zedong Thought was a genuine harnessing of the libidinal energy of the masses, who were finally capable of engaging in class struggle within their local contexts. However, the contradiction that would surface after 1949 was already evident—balancing various struggles while synthesising them into a unified national effort against the Japanese and the GMD, followed by the need to build a sovereign socialist economy. This was a tall order, regardless of how one sliced it. If the Communist Party were to resolve this contradiction on its own, it would need to deliver a flawless performance.
Unsurprisingly, nothing went as planned since the fragmented structure inherited by the Communists in 1949 was unsuitable for such a smooth transition. China lacked a unified economy; its landscape featured tiny urban pockets amid vast rural areas. Urban institutions and industrial environments were unfamiliar to the largely rural cadres. The Communists inherited the primary industrial sector from the Japanese colony-state of Manchukuo, a territory designed around the violent processing and exploitation of Chinese labourers subject to conditions of bare life. Using these technologies, the CCP began to shape its understanding of the universal and the particular through the lens of a state, positioning itself as the sole mediator between the two poles and as the sole driver of social and productive liberation. These visions greatly overlooked the reliance of China’s emerging industrial model on grain supplies from the countryside. When the Great Leap Forward started in 1957, decades of mass mobilisation rhetoric couldn’t prevent the collapse of this relationship. The post-Leap retrenchment marks the moment when the inequalities underpinning capitalist enclosure first took shape, as legal and economic conditions began to solidify the infamous hukou system in place. In addition, new social attitudes towards commodity production began to replace the older displays of productivist power. The Mao books, Mao literature, Mao caps, and other such objects exported worldwide in 1968 should be seen for what they were: the first wave of Chinese commodities greeting the world of global communication and exchange. With genuine moments of mid-60s class struggle foreclosed upon by 1969, the subsequent years of the Cultural Revolution leading up to Mao’s death were a procession of Rashomon-style theatrics intended to conceal the robust alliance of the party and the PLA keeping the decaying edifice in place– even in the often-fetishised Shanghai commune, voting was literally split down these lines in favour of a 2/3rds majority of party cadres and the military. All the conditions were right for the party to relinquish sole responsibility for its Sisyphean task of mediating the universal and the particular, of the masses and the state. It is no surprise, then, that these emerging consumer objects, which cultural revolution propaganda referred to as “Newborn Socialist Things,” quickly became the site for reintroducing the commodity form into China during the reform years.
I would like to delay further discussion of China’s post-1978 history until later this evening, as the focus should now shift to understanding our current task through the lens of China and its role in the global capitalist system. I believe that if we are to succeed, comrades must discard the fetishist trappings of the party-state form and understand that our present conditions all point towards the fundamentally bourgeois, exclusionist, neocolonial, and patriarchal character of the system of nation-states both China and Australia inhabit.
Confronting the conditions of the Chinese Century.
The core idea of Marxism-Leninism in the 21st Century is to demand that comrades cease questioning history. The history they present suggests that at some stage, all Communists have faced a series of natural institutions that needed to be accepted and worked around: the state, the family, the nation, and the market. They argue that rather than criticising the bourgeois nature of this line of reasoning, we should instead revise Marx himself to suit the axiomatic logic of real existing socialism. When we stop asking questions, our comrades become little more than sports fans, cheering on the Frankenstein-like collection of centre-right and right-wing autocracies loosely gathered around China’s arms-length diplomatic pacts, deluding ourselves that they ultimately aim to rival America as one united movement. I am highly sceptical of the ‘dual stage’ model of revolution these comrades put forward, as the historical record shows a tendency to focus solely on the first stage while rarely discussing the second. But for the sake of argument, let’s analyse their programme to understand their misguided and out-of-touch plan for achieving socialism after conquering the state.
In the mid-1960s, it would have been ridiculous for us to do what Stalin did and argue in favour of building our own Magnitogorsk in the Pilbara ranges. Today, it would be similarly fantastical to imagine a world where Australia, like China, could compete at the forefront of green manufacturing without the industrial expertise, with a domestic population barely two per cent of China’s, and to do all this while refusing to make any concessions to the living standards of ordinary Australians of the kind necessary to replicate the massive wealth transfers China’s government grants its exporting firms at the expense of its domestic households. We would be chasing a promised return to Fordist society and living conditions that, for structural reasons, can never return. This isn’t because Chinese labourers work for cheaper and we’d have to adapt to this challenge – China itself is undergoing massive deindustrialisation behind the shimmer of high-tech products. The task at hand involves understanding finance and manufacturing as interconnected industries, each supporting the uneven development patterns now mirrored globally. By 2025, what we once called the periphery of capitalist development is now its hinterland. The fundamental truth is imprinted on our very bodies here in this room. Chances are that your skin is more familiar with commodities finished in the scorching heat of the Pearl River Delta than with the caresses of those you care about most.
Thanks to social media, nearly everyone in this room could probably place the supposed neon utopias of Shanghai or Chongqing on a map. I’d hazard that very few here could locate cities like Shijiazhuang, Zhengzhou, or Anshan, where the belly of the carbon-intensive beast lies in the smog enveloping their populations. For all the tools Marx gave us, we seldom see capital in such a visible form as in this industrial smog. But the one thing Marx would point out is that beneath this smog lies the territorial and social origins of this eldritch beast. A Chinese academic pointed out in 2014 that if enclosure in England was a process whereby “sheep devoured people,” our modern-day counterpart in China’s urban wastelands is a phenomenon where “buildings devour people.” Brutal land conflicts initiated by millions of precarious migrant labourers against party officials are part and parcel of the everyday running of the Chinese labour market. Capitalism is not simply the force that undermines and subverts all the stable things we hold dear; with its other hand, it fashions new social and geographic configurations that reinstate hierarchies, heighten inequalities, and further segment forms of human activity, all so that people must sell their labour to continue existing. Here, the distinction between the “public” and “private” sectors is largely irrelevant when the lines between local, provincial, and party governments become blurred by the complex shareholding patterns of Chinese firms. We have in this system only one instance of the territorial structures that make capitalism possible on a global scale. The neocolonial condition is primarily a contradiction: we must simultaneously accept a never-ending desire to integrate ever more territory into a universal plane of market exchange, while keeping the subaltern “other”-the international proletariat— at a safe distance by erecting national and racial boundaries around their existence as subjects. As a microcosmic example of resisting this neocolonial bind, the fall of Apartheid in South Africa offers an important lesson. The end of white rule did not happen because the black population sought to establish independent socialist republics in the Bantustans. They only succeeded by seizing control of the colonial state itself. A dictatorship of the proletariat in this country, folded under the Chinese model and subject to the same form of party-state mediation, would be as deleterious to the goal of world socialism as a “Banthustan” solution to the question of Apartheid, or a “Socialist Gaza” solution to the question of Palestinian liberation.
If you were to ask what leaves me optimistic about China’s present condition, one prominent point would be that China’s willingness to integrate into the capitalist system is perhaps the most significant structural cause behind the climate crisis—the greatest crisis capitalism will ever face, and possibly the one thing that could lead to capitalism’s demise in the coming decades. But even this strains believability. The only conclusion I can come to is that a war against the planetary capitalist system, especially in the metropoles, can only be fought in hell.
Conclusion
I’ll sum up what’s been said by briefly answering tonight’s questions. To call China Communist would be an oxymoron, as Communists seek the end of the nation and state. Maoism surpassed Stalinism in a discursive sense when Mao’s Sinification of Marxism-Leninism paved the way for an indigenous application of nationwide political and armed struggle. Yet, in many ways, the Mao years mirrored the height of Stalinism in its uneven focus on production above all else. This fetishism foreshadowed the reintroduction of the commodity form and China’s integration into the capitalist world order. I believe there are multiple Maoisms, each with unique discursive, affective, and strategic aspects, each possessing its own energy and corresponding material conditions. However, the state ideology of the PRC embodies a wholly nonrevolutionary offspring, one shaped by decades of party-state fetishism. This view of continuity over change neither elevates nor vilifies Mao, Deng, or Xi Jinping; the historical record on these figures is increasingly distant from the current struggles before us. The lessons I’d take are that our discussion tonight touches on a key dividing line: that separating Communists from those who fear, dismiss, or see as immature the spontaneous, living moments of revolutionary violence needed to overthrow the system- those who prefer Australia’s orderly and “peaceful” drift into China’s developmental path under the sterile, militant discipline of a singular party. It’s as if revolutions were a clean, televisual military operation, like those I’d often see on the overhead screens on subway cars in Shanghai or Chengdu, rather than the messy, nauseating task of systematically tearing away the necrotic flesh of the global capitalist beast.
PARTISAN! 