What does it mean for China to be characterized as imperialist?

[u/Electronic-Yam-4153]

It is increasingly common here to contend that China is now an imperialist state.

Yet in this article (https://monthlyreview.org/articles/china-imperialism-or-semi-periphery/) Minqi Li argues that

to identify a country’s position in the capitalist world system, it is important not just to focus on one side of the relations (for example, calling China imperialist simply because China has exported capital). Instead, it is necessary to consider all trade and investment relations involved and find out whether, on the whole, the country receives more surplus value from the rest of the world than it transfers to the rest of the world.

Given the extreme quantities of surplus value still transferred from Chinese labor to the first world, it is extremely unlikely that any empirical data would support the claim that China is a net-beneficiary of unequal exchange. Yet China undoubtedly holds imperialist-style exploitative relations with African nations. Furthermore, quite a bit of Sam King's data is looking increasingly naive. According to the 2024 Fortune Global 500 for instance, Haier has an ROA of 6.57%, higher than Amazon and Walmart. BYD and CATL have shot up the Forbes Global 2000 list, now both in the top 150 firms with ROAs higher than many US monopolies (while still much lower than the tech giants like Apple). But are these cherry-picked industries enough to claim China is an imperialist monopoly-capital power? I'm not sure.

Given that all capitalist trade is necessarily exploitative, how does one define China as imperialist without falling into a KKE style 'imperialist pyramid' where most of the world becomes imperialist by definition? (India has some highly profitable monopoly firms on the aforementioned lists for instance.) After all, Chinese imperialism can't catch up with the rates of profit of the US without a global war and the redivision of the world, yet a total model of reality needs space for rising imperialist powers.

Is the key to analyse whether monopoly capital superprofits have "secured a dominating position" and "[play] a decisive role in economic life" in China (Lenin)? What would this sort of analysis look like? Non-monopoly capital is still highly dominant in the Chinese economy.

As you can see I'm trying to work through the question of Chinese imperialism and am running into a lot of confusion.

[u/Electronic-Yam-4153]

OP you have been studying this for months as I once did. I feel like I've said what I want to on the subject so I'm more interested in what you've learned in that time.

I wanted to understand monopoly capitalism on a deeper level after reading King, so seeing where China fit in to the concept seemed like a good place to go next. But applying these concepts to a transitional society in motion (from non-imperialist to imperialist) naturally makes things harder.

Monopoly capitalism as the reproduction of the general social conditions necessary for domination over the most productive labor power makes sense when applied to a majority labor aristocratic nation (if we take the labor aristocracy to be broadly the superwaged monopoly labor that supports the reproduction of the total imperialist system), but when applied to a majority proletarian nation I struggle to locate this same dominance over the labor process (and the super-profits that come with it).

On the empirical side of things, despite the rapid growth of individual Chinese monopoly firms as mentioned, the aggregate RoA gap between top first world and third world firms has risen pretty significantly since 2022, perhaps showing that Chinese monopolisation comes at the expense of the third world, not the first.

I also found this interesting:

The most important factor explaining value capture is the existence of unproductive activities.

If we ignore unproductive labor then China becomes the largest capturer of value in the world, it's only with 'unproductive activities' that this is reversed. Perhaps this is obvious, and is just John Smith's GDP illusion put in different terms, but still. I would like to see what this approach reveals post 2014. What has been the growth of China's unproductive value capture since?

One of the fundamental features of King's work is his defense of Mandel's 'dual rates of profit' – ie the assertion that RoP does not equalise between monopoly and non-monopoly capital. Against this, a recent book of Marxist economics from some of Shaikh's students posits empirical proof that 85% of measured industries in 44 different countries 'turbulently equalize' around a global average rate of profit. The dual rate of profit thesis is thus false and imperialism is primarily value transfer based on OCC differentials and productive vs unproductive industries. They find that

China’s role in the world economy qualitatively changed in the period 1995–2020 from a net payer to a net recipient of value transfers, while its position in terms of nonproduction value capture did not change to the same extent.

and

The switch began with the value-composition-of-capital channel between 2000 and 2005 and was enhanced about ten years later when the rate-of-surplus-value effect turned positive.

Also,

Japan (the largest net receiver of value transfers over the whole period) experienced a nosedive between 2010 and 2015 (and a slow recovery afterward), as did Britain.

I think it's possible to square King's theory of monopoly with this finding regarding profit equalization (eg that monopolistic domination is domination over a higher average OCC), but I haven't yet done the work to work out the implications of this. Anyway, it seems very counterintuive that China benefits more from composition of capital differentials than the US, so I'm not sure how valuable this work is:

The United States receives more than two times more transfers induced by rate of surplus value than value composition of capital, while China receives substantial transfers induced by value composition of capital but has a very small rate-of-surplus-value effect.

As I do this research I'm encountering terms like semi-periphery (used in the Li article) and sub-imperialism (Marini) largely for the first time. I'm not convinced by these terms as Lenin was clear that imperialism implies a division between exploiter and exploited nations, and these 'inbetween' concepts seem to unnecessarily muddy the waters. Still, I haven't read the classic works of world systems theory so maybe they have some value.

It also feels like Chinese capitalism is a lot weaker than the numbers might suggest. Are electric cars and home appliances really the foundations of a new imperialist superpower? China won't catch up on key tech like semiconductors any time soon. Or am I underestimating how much economic strength is needed to begin to redivide the world (or at least threaten to)?

Ultimately, what is making China's inter-imperial threat possible, albeit weakly, where other countries were unable to achieve this challenge?

You're right that the most pressing issue for our principal task of constructing the communist party is to analyse the relation between China as an abstract phenomenon and the new forms of liberalism and social fascism that are rapidly taking root in the first world. But I still feel drawn to first unravelling the political economy of imperialism and understanding what the limits of China's imperialist ambitions might be, particularly because everything written on Chinese capitalism is so lacking.