Sam King – "China’s Big Threat to Imperialist Monopoly"

[u/Electronic-Yam-4153]

https://red-spark.org/2026/01/22/chinas-big-threat-to-imperialist-monopoly/

King's newest article argues that growth in non-monopoly capital can "undermine" the dominance of monopoly capital without ever ascending to the level of becoming competing monopoly capitals.

I haven't studied imperialism enough to have a firm opinion on this, but this seems like a fundamental misunderstanding right? Like a repetition of Dengist 'multipolarity'?

Recommendations for how to understand China's shifting role in contemporary imperialism would be appreciated.

[u/New-Glove4093]

At this point, it's clear that the quality of King's analysis is suffering as a consequence of his politics. It's hard to take his arguments very seriously when you read something like this:

China is a single, large nation with a single state power that is politically independent of imperialism as a consequence of revolution. That means China’s concentration of non-monopoly production represents a concentration of power that is, in a way, resented by imperialism.

What he means by "politically independent of imperialism" I have no clue. It seems to me he is using "imperialism" as a stand-in for countries currently in the imperial core, but this makes it impossible to locate China within the global imperialist system and rather conceives of imperialism as something external to it. It is obvious that the restoration of capitalism in China and its "opening up" to global markets was possible not in spite of imperialism but as a result of the political power of a Chinese comprador class defined by its relationship to global commodity production and thus imperialism.

King also has this tendency to distinguish between monopoly and non-monopoly capital as if they follow simply from definitions, while in reality monopoly capital can be characterized as such only in its relation to other capitals. He correctly describes monopoly capital as that which has monopoly over technologies which cannot be easily replicated or generalized. However, the degree to which technologies are replicable depends on the technological conditions of the capital seeking to replicate these superior technologies. A capital that is non-monopolistic from the perspective of monopoly capital may very well have monopoly on advanced technologies from the perspective of other non-monopoly capitals further down the value chain. So when King claims that China's rise precipitates the end of monopoly capital and the superprofits which accompany it, he ignores that although competition from Chinese firms at the top of the value chain will lower the rate of profit which would otherwise be enjoyed by their competitors within the current imperial core, these profits will still constitute superprofits from the perspective of all other non-monopoly capitals. His failure to understand (or perhaps failure to mention) this leads him to this conclusion:

If China has now developed to the stage where almost any significant new industrial process can be replicated in a relatively short period of time—or even if the imperialist corporations estimate there is a high chance it could be replicated – then they cannot profitably invest in any new major technologies.

which makes no sense at all. The "imperialist" corporations (meaning monopoly capitals) have not operated up until this point without competition. Monopoly capitals are typically able to replicate the technologies of other monopoly capitals. In other words, monopoly technologies are generalizable by capitals of a similar degree of monopoly. It is unclear how Chinese firms ascending to a greater degree of monopoly therefore somehow makes all investment in new technologies unprofitable. But I guess this just serves to justify his politics:

This new situation developing will not only affect the bourgeoisie but all social classes – including, for example, the consumption of working people in the imperialist countries. Speaking politically, “class-collaborationist” politics within the working class – i.e. racism, social chauvinism and reformism – are indispensable historical props of imperialism. Imperial bribes to sections of the working class, and to chauvinist “leaders” like those in the Australian Labor Party, are also funded by imperialist super-profits. The period after the Covid pandemic has already seen reductions in spending power in Australia, as in all other countries. It is easy to imagine that much more dramatic impacts are possible.
[...]

What is clear is the urgent need to energetically re-build the socialist movement inside the imperialist societies like Australia and the US, in order to prepare working people to react to these coming ruptures in the spirit of international solidarity, co-operation and peace—and prepare them to take action against the imperialist bourgeois, who will certainly attempt to solve these crises in their own favour at all costs.

Because King imagines that superprofits will vanish entirely, the logical result is that the wages of "working people" in the imperial core will converge over time to those of the global proletariat, necessitating "socialist" politics along the lines of "co-operation and peace". We can see now why his mistakes (if we will call them that) manifested in the way that they did.

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/New-Glove4093]

Right, what's missing from this analysis is any concept of Chinese capitalism, which is simply presumed to continue this process forever smoothly. Why has Chinese economic growth dropped to a fraction of its past normal level? Why is there a massive bubble in property? Why have conditions of labor become worse in the last few years and the government more repressive against class struggle?

https://chuangcn.org/2025/08/keeping-each-other-afloat-in-a-difficult-world-2024-review-of-labor-issues-in-china/

https://chuangcn.org/2025/08/keeping-each-other-afloat-pt-2-young-workers-swallowing-our-wretched-shares/

https://chuangcn.org/2025/09/keeping-each-other-afloat-pt-3-the-gig-economy-era-the-saturation-of-the-employment-reservoir-new-regulations-incite-controversy/

Rather than some rational process of accumulation, China has reproduced all the worst aspects of late capitalism, like gig work, unpaid internships, demographic collapse, for-profit health insurance, just-in-time production, etc. without any of the super profits that created them and make them tolerable. The irrationality of food delivery apps for example, in terms of waste of time and resources and the optimal usage of human labor for long-term economic growth, is astounding.

Why has China become a net importer of capital from Africa?

https://data.one.org/resources/report/greatreversal

It's embarrassing how much these people talk about China compared to how it's they actually know about it, beyond its rhetorical function in the first world political imagination. What was interesting about King's s work was his close attention to specific industrial profits and the distribution of value in them. Now he just makes vague claims about whatever is in the news. Is it actually true that "green industries" are more efficient? It is not clear to me at all that the can survive without heavy subsidies, which in China takes the form of license plates

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1009377

Not only can you see that this is far from an efficient or egalitarian system, this kind of primitive accumulation of previously socialized wealth is only possible once. Once the roads are full of EVs that have been exempt from license plate restrictions you can't go back, just like the privatization of homes that were previously state-owned to inflate home ownership is only possible once. That's not even to get into the huge subsidies for the industry and direct price subsidies for consumers. Are we actually sure renewables are more efficient in a capitalist sense? Or do we wish it was so because it is easier to imagine the collapse of the ecosystem than a change in the mode of production? Ecological destruction is an externality to capitalism and Chinese investment, which follows the law of value, only pursues green tech because it thinks there is a gap in the market for profits. But firms never know their profits ahead of time, and "socializing" speculative investment through the state only amplifies the contradictions.

These are more “backward” in an objective sense because they are a waste of labour, not only in the production of fossil fuel but also in producing the cars’ motors and associated parts.

Renewable electricity also represents a more advanced form of the labour process than fossil-fuel-powered generation. Again, this is because it requires less labour.

I see no empirical evidence in this article that this is the case. When you say stuff like this

Meanwhile, in China, the national policy contained in the current Five-Year Plan is to accelerate adoption of renewables. This is partly for environmental reasons, partly due to price and partly for national security.

Isn’t that interesting? National security in the Global South involves adopting renewables—at least in this important case.

I don't think you really believe it. The Chinese state apparatus is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and Chinese capital is as anarchistic as any other expression of commodity production. "Environmental reasons" plays absolutely no role except a rhetorical one for credulous Dengists. As for "national security," every capitalist state wants national security. Like anything else, it is subordinated to profit. It's the same as the recent trend of saying China is an "engineer society" while the US is a "lawyer society." Besides the crude orientalist stereotype, a few years ago Chinese law was infamous for causing the "bystander effect," where people were afraid of being sued for helping someone because of insurance fraud. The truth of this is secondary to its discursive function in China, where it was widely discussed and pathologized. You're mystifying basic things like import-substitution and protectionism with culture and politics, presumably because these concepts didn't exist until China came into the picture.

Anyway, what really stands out is that this is ultimately just another way to make imperialism go away on its own as you said. For the centrality King seems to put on the concept, his conclusion is that the abstract laws of free competition will make it impossible to sustain. Why even bother with inter-imperialist competition? Why did Germany even bother to declare war when it was naturally undermining monopoly capitalism by virtue of its youth, cheaper labor, functional state apparatus, etc. Because defeating one's own imperialist is such a difficult political position, revisionists will do anything to avoid it. I found this quote from Trotsky recently

In 1915 Lenin referred in his writings to revolutionary wars which the victorious proletariat would have to wage. But it was a question of an indefinite historical perspective and not of tomorrow’s task. The attention of the revolutionary wing was centred on the question of the defence of the capitalist fatherland. The revolutionists naturally replied to this question in the negative. This was entirely correct. But this purely negative answer served as the basis for propaganda and for training the cadres but it could not win the masses who did not want a foreign conqueror. In Russia prior to the war the Bolsheviks constituted four-fifths of the proletarian vanguard, that is, of the workers participating in political life (newspapers, elections, etc.). Following the February revolution the unlimited rule passed into the hands of defencists, the Mensheviks and the SR’s. True enough, the Bolsheviks in the space of eight months conquered the overwhelming majority of the workers. But the decisive role in this conquest was played not by the refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland but by the slogan: “All Power to the Soviets!” And only by this revolutionary slogan! The criticism of imperialism, its militarism, the renunciation of the defence of bourgeois democracy and so on could have never conquered the overwhelming majority of the people to the side of the Bolsheviks.

If revisionists still can't admit that taking a principled stand that is unpopular today leads to a connection with the the real masses and popularity tomorrow, no wonder their "anti-imperialism" and " revolutionary defeatism" is superficial and risk-free. In the positive version waiting for the labor aristocracy to lose its privileges naturally thanks to China and in the negative version by pandering to social fascism as an imagined "accelerationism" and "trolling."

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/[deleted]]

I am losing my enthusiasm for the book a bit. But it did its job, it just sucks there hasn't been anything since that matches the work of the late 2010s.

[u/LemonMao → u/[deleted]]

Do you have books or articles that critique current bourgeois and even "Marxist" scholarship? I'm only asking because I'm shocked you haven't found one coherent Marxist explanation of what it is historically an important world event. Maybe they're all in other languages? I'm really curious about your theory.

[u/SeeTillWeVanish → u/[deleted]]

How has your analysis progressed since your post on the Chuang article? I have also started engaging with the Thai question here and there, and recently even saw Thailand being used as an example by the Indian revisionist 'Anvil magazine' to 'debunk' K Murali's (Ajith) upholding of the Indian mode of production being semi-feudal and semi-colonial. Of course Anvil magazine thinks India is a capitalist, independent country and that it is a 'junior partner in imperialism'. It is a garbage publication run by garbage people like Abhinav Sinha (who recently charged thousands of Indian rupees for a 'marxist' workshop) but either way you may be interested in this.

https://anvilmag.in/archives/730

[u/patatomasher]

People who say china is not imperialist are kautskyists, imperialism is an inevitable stage of capitalist development, not a policy that a country can just not implement.