THERE is a story, possibly apocryphal, regarding a parliamentary by-election in St Pancras, north London, in 1949.  The Communist Party stood a candidate and, amidst a deteriorating Cold War atmosphere, polled fairly dismally.

Johnnie Campbell, a laconic Scotsman central to the CPGB’s leadership for decades, was dispatched to the locality to rally the troops in the aftermath. Surveying his dispirited comrades, he supposedly declared: “Well, things aren’t going our way in St Pancras right now…but we’ve won in China!”

To many, that was the immediate significance of the Chinese revolution. For millions of Communists and sympathisers around the world, as well as oppressed masses in the colonies and semi-colonies, the victory of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the party-led People’s Liberation Army was a huge advance – really the greatest conceivable – in a worldwide process of socialist revolution.

That was one evaluation, in its own time, of the significance of the Chinese revolution.  Perhaps it seems archaic today. That may speak to the wisdom attributed to Zhou Enlai in 1971, almost certainly apocryphally in this case, that it was too early to judge the impact of the French Revolution (he was likely actually referring, more reasonably, to les evenements of 1968).

As such, any judgement on the significance of the great revolution in China on its 75th anniversary must be provisional. 75 years is not so very long. We would speak of it as roughly a single lifetime and this brings a pertinent point to mind: a citizen born in China today can expect to live three years longer, to the age of 78. In 1949, they would not have expected to see their forty-fourth birthday.

There is the significance of a single statistic, probably the most important of all. “Live long and prosper” as Mr Spock enjoined in Star Trek and People’s China has made good on that Vulcan salutation. More than a billion people are living longer and prospering as never before.

Perhaps the significance of the People’s Republic of China proceeds along three distinct but closely entwined axes.

The first is the “standing up” of China itself, its transformation from the mutilated prey of sundry imperialisms and a laggard in world standards of social development, into a mighty power in sight of having the world’s largest national economy. 

This reverses what has been called the “great divergence” in economic power and prosperity, which began with the 19th-century opium wars, imposed on China by the British, which opened up an enormous gap in favour of the West over succeeding decades. This is the developmental axis.

Second, it both represents and further encourages a global shift of power from the West European/North American bloc, which dominated two centuries of history, towards what we now call the global South. It challenges the monopoly of global violence at the state level exercised by the United States and its allies. This is the democratic and actually anti-imperialist axis.

Third, by maintaining a socialist orientation after other developments in that direction have faltered it both keeps open the possibility of plural systemic options in the world, defeating Washington’s dreams of ideological unipolarity, and prevents socialism itself from being pushed into the shadows of history, even as it reconceptualises what socialism might mean (as revolutionary movements have always done). That is the socialist axis, and it may be the most contested on the left.

The foreign policies of the Chinese state has gone through several modifications since 1949. Initially, it aligned closely with the Soviet Union, fought the US to a standstill in Korea and played a full part in the world communist movement while paying particular attention to trying to rally the nations just emerging from colonial rule into a common front. In short, it behaved as Johnnie Campbell anticipated in 1949.

China and the USSR fell out in the early 1960s, codifying their differences in a series of ideological polemics that now have an archaic quality, if still replete with points of interest. For all the fulminations against the USSR, however, the leadership of the CPC surely did not anticipate its collapse in the form it took, and this was a circumstance which could not be ignored – the enhanced opening to market forces and deeper integration with the capitalist world economy initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1992 followed directly on the end of Soviet power.

That event forced adjustments on every player on the world stage, ushering in as it did the “unipolar moment” when all issues apparently lay within the grasp of the USA for its determination.  That “moment” should be remembered above all as a time of endless wars of intervention. Part of the global significance of the People’s Republic is that it took part in none of them and always sought peaceful dialogue in preference.

Unipolarity is now passing. Already weakened by US military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan and the disastrous consequences of “Washington Consensus” economics, leading to the banking collapse of 2008, it now faces a systemic negation. That is due not only to the decline of the USA, now reflected in its intractable internal political turmoil, but also to the peaceful rise of China.

The alternative world order promoted by the Chinese government offers co-operation and development for all and eschews militarism and interference.  It prioritises adherence to international law and peaceful resolution of disputes. This is not the world order of imperialism — pressure, threats, looting and diktat. 

We should not try to squeeze the experience of Chinese socialism into the straitjacket of European experience. Although the CPC was founded as a consequence of the October Revolution and under the guidance of the Communist International, that was the start, and not the end of the story. Attempting to mechanically reproduce experience elsewhere proved not to work. Basing strategy on the realities of the Chinese people’s rich history of elemental struggle, from the Taiping Rebellion to the Boxer Uprising, the 1911 revolution which overthrew the Qing dynasty, and the May 4th movement did, uniting peasant discontent with national aspirations within a global proletarian movement.

The CPC has since championed the “sinification of Marxism,” an idea which bears two meanings. The first is that it consists of the application of Marxism as a given set of principles to the particular social conditions of China. Mao Zedong and his comrades set about this work — they placed the peasantry at the centre of communist politics as a revolutionary subject and developed the concept of “New Democracy” among other innovations. These are of enduring importance. 

The second meaning posits the transformation of Marxism itself through the experience and reflection of the Chinese people (more than one-fifth of humanity), Chinese traditions and the Chinese revolution. In this understanding, China takes Marxism from the European labour movement and returns it to the world enriched, developed and nearer to universalisation, but not, of course, “finished,” something which would be entirely impossible.  

It introduces novel philosophical elements into Marxism, supplementing Hegel’s method with ideas from the Confucian and other Chinese canons. Some of this sounds quite alien to Western class-struggle socialism, but demystified it is not necessarily at odds. For example, the CPC champions “common prosperity” and a “harmonious society.” An ordinary person in Britain may easily identify those as features of a socialist society, and certainly they are not attributes of contemporary Britain or the USA at all.  

Since the present system in China does not correspond to past models of socialism, some deny its socialist character tout court. It is, of course, somewhat arrogant to dismiss the views of the Chinese state and ruling party altogether. However, there are points which cannot be overlooked – the dizzying levels of income inequality, the persistence of unemployment and the intrusion of market relationships into basic public services (all unknown in Mao’s time) – and which must raise questions.  

Yet the CPC leadership insists that moving a huge and originally very poor country into a fully socialist society is the work of many generations. And the complete elimination of absolute poverty, a recent achievement of the CPC, is not just a staggering achievement, it is a socialist one.

The future of socialism in the world depends very heavily on developments in China and on the leadership of its Communist Party. As Xi Jinping has said, without China socialism risked being pushed entirely to the margins of world affairs after 1991.  

After 75 years, the People’s Republic of China therefore stands at the very heart of an alternative to the world of the Washington Consensus, neoliberal centrism, the militarised “New World Order” and economic crisis and chaos. The alternative itself is unfinished and perhaps unfinishable, but China is holding the door open to possibilities beyond the status quo, to a menu of other options for humanity.  

That is most likely the most profound global significance of the PRC on its 75th birthday.

This article appeared in the Friends of Socialist China special anniversary supplement published by the Morning Star on September 28. A more detailed version appears as a chapter in People’s China at 75: the flag stays red, published by Praxis Press.