Invent the Future

Sunlight and sovereignty: the Chinese technology behind Africa’s solar boom

Africa’s solar installations rose by a record 54 percent in 2025, and 15 major African markets imported more than $400 million worth of solar panels in the first quarter of 2026 alone – more than two-thirds of the total for the whole of the previous year. In this article, Carlos Martinez looks at what lies behind those numbers.

The projects driving the continent’s green transition are overwhelmingly built and financed by China, from the Benban Solar Park in Egypt and the Adama wind farms in Ethiopia to De Aar in South Africa and a solar plant with battery storage in every one of Zambia’s 156 constituencies. What has made them viable is two decades of sustained Chinese public investment, which has driven the global cost of renewable energy down to a fraction of what it was 15 years ago.

Carlos also takes on the charge, increasingly fashionable in parts of the Western left, that this amounts to a new “green imperialism”. Market share, he argues, describes a trade relationship, not domination and coercion – and the function of the accusation, whatever the intention behind it, is to manufacture consent for the New Cold War.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

A report in the South China Morning Post on 7 September highlights the contrast in energy policy between the United States, where, particularly under the present administration, the watchword is “drill, baby, drill”, and China, where the national strategy is to “walk towards the light”. Two energy behemoths, two approaches to the future of the planet, and the resulting choice facing the people of Africa.

The SCMP article observes that, for African governments seeking to expand access to electricity, the principal deciding factor is cost. And on cost, the argument is now over.

Africa’s solar installations rose a record 54 percent in 2025, adding 4.5 gigawatts of new photovoltaic capacity, and that record is likely to be broken again this year. The International Energy Agency reports that 15 major African markets imported more than $400 million worth of solar panels in the first quarter of 2026 alone – against $600 million for the whole of 2025.

“Africa’s solar revolution is here,” says Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council. “Growth is spreading to new markets across the continent, and rooftop and distributed systems are putting power directly into the hands of households and businesses.”

Reds under the bed and in the tractors

In the following article, Carlos Martinez surveys a burst of anti-China stories in the British right-wing press – the Telegraph’s warning that Chinese chips in GPS-guided tractors could be used to spy on farmers and fitted with kill switches; the Times’ claim that Chinese-made wind turbines could be used to shut down Britain’s electricity supply; and the Telegraph’s discovery of a hotel near RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus with a good view of the runway.

In each case, he notes, the evidence is absent and the motive is never explained. Meanwhile every documented instance of weaponised supply-chain hardware – Stuxnet, the NSA’s intercepted routers, Nord Stream, the booby-trapped pagers in Lebanon – belongs to Britain’s Western allies rather than to China.

He also points to an instructive contradiction: in the same week that Chinese industrial policy was being described as a threat to national survival, both the Guardian and the Financial Times carried pieces arguing that Britain should be learning from it. The purpose of the hysteria, Carlos argues, is not to inform economic policy but to build support for the US-led New Cold War.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

If the right-wing media is to be believed, Britain is facing a systematic attack by the Communist Party of China.

On 4 September, it emerged that the perennial evil-doers in Beijing are hacking our tractors. The Coalition on Secure Technology, headed by the Labour MP Graeme Downie, warns that Chinese-made chips are standard in GPS-guided tractors, farming drones and irrigation systems, and that around 70 percent of the world’s cellular internet-of-things modules are made in China.

Beijing, we are told, could use this fearsome capability to harvest data on crop yields, production forecasts and livestock populations. All of this information is, of course, published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), but it’s understandable that the Chinese would rather spend their time compromising combine harvesters in Lincolnshire.

We are further informed that the Chinese will likely have fitted kill switches to these tractors, albeit without any evidence or indeed any suggestion of a possible motive.

There is, as it happens, a documented case of a tractor manufacturer installing software locks: the US firm John Deere builds them into its machines, chiefly to stop farmers repairing their own equipment. That threat comes not from Beijing but from Moline, Illinois.

Just days earlier, the Times warned that those same sneaky Chinese communists may have inserted spying devices in our wind turbines.

Slander over solidarity: the BBC reports a Himalayan disaster

The following article by Carlos Martinez examines the BBC’s coverage of the catastrophic glacier collapse of 26 August, which sent a wall of ice, rock, mud and water down the river valleys straddling the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet (Xizang) Autonomous Region, killing well over a thousand people.

Rather than report on the disaster itself, or on its underlying cause in the accelerating warming of the world’s highest mountain range, the BBC’s China correspondent chose to run a story alleging that Beijing was suppressing footage of the event – footage which, as Carlos points out, had been released by the Chinese port authorities at Gyirong and was circulating widely on Chinese platforms. A massive rescue operation, with the direct involvement of China’s top leadership, becomes a “muted response”; Communist Party members being asked to assist their neighbours becomes evidence of authoritarian anxiety.

The article also takes apart the BBC’s assertion that Tibet was “annexed” by Beijing in the 1950s – a formulation at odds even with the declared position of the British government, which abandoned the colonial-era doctrine of “suzerainty” in 2008.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

On August 26, a glacier collapsed high on the Nepali side of the Himalayan range, sending a wall of ice, rock, mud and water down the river valleys straddling the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet (Xizang) autonomous region. Some 42 kilometres of road were wiped out, leaving helicopters as the only means of reaching survivors. At the time of writing, Nepal’s death toll has since passed 900, with more than 4,000 people missing; on the Chinese side, 16 have been confirmed dead, and 546 are reported missing.

This is the disaster that Laura Bicker, the BBC’s China correspondent, chose to report as follows: “Shocking footage isn’t being shown in China – and we know little about victims there.”

Numerous people in China immediately pointed out that the footage is, in fact, all over Chinese platforms. Indeed, the very video used in the BBC’s own report was released by the Chinese port authorities at Gyirong. So the sequence runs: the Chinese state published the clip; the BBC ran the clip; the BBC then published a story about how the Chinese state is suppressing the clip.

Several commentators have made another significant point: Chinese media does not operate on the principle of “if it bleeds, it leads.” You will not see grieving relatives and footage of bodies looped for 24 hours. The BBC treats the absence of disaster pornography as evidence of a cover-up rather than a different editorial culture.

The West wrote the book on forced assimilation. Now it’s accusing China.

On 1 July, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress came into force – the country’s first comprehensive national law on ethnic affairs. Within days came denunciations from Washington and Brussels, a European Parliament resolution, and a wave of headlines announcing that China had ordered its minority peoples to “assimilate”. CNN’s version: “China tells its ethnic minorities to integrate or face consequences.”

In this contribution to the international webinar China’s National Unity vs US Social Hierarchy, Carlos Martinez looks at the distance between what the law actually says and what we have been told it says. The law prohibits discrimination against any ethnic group, explicitly reaffirms the right of all peoples to use and develop their own languages, and requires the state to direct infrastructure, industry and public services towards minority regions. It continues a framework that in the West would be called affirmative action – preferential university admissions, bilingual education, protected minority-language broadcasting, autonomy arrangements, and exemption from the one-child policy throughout its existence.

“Assimilation”, meanwhile, is not a neutral word. It names specific and well-documented crimes: the residential schools of Canada and the United States, the stolen generations in Australia, forced adoption and conversion, languages beaten out of colonised peoples – including generations of Welsh schoolchildren punished for speaking their own. Applying that word to China takes an association rooted in Western colonial history and lets it do the work that evidence cannot.

The video also goes through the record the coverage leaves out – life expectancy in Xinjiang rising from around 30 in 1949 to 77 today, Uyghur population growth of 16 percent between 2010 and 2020 against 2 percent for the Han population, 420 poverty-stricken counties in ethnic autonomous areas lifted out of absolute poverty, minority-language publishing and schooling, and central government transfers flowing towards the periphery rather than away from it – along with the documented history of CIA and National Endowment for Democracy sponsorship of separatism, the strategic reasons Xinjiang and Xizang matter, and the warning of Yugoslavia.

The article this contribution is based on: Manufactured outrage: the truth about China’s ethnic unity law (Friends of Socialist China).

The webinar was organised by Friends of Socialist China, the United National Antiwar Coalition and the International Manifesto Group, with contributions from Chen Weihua, Jason Smith, Jacqueline Luqman, Arnold August and Sara Flounders.

Transcript

Comrades, thank you very much for inviting me, and thanks to the organisers for putting this event together.

Brazil’s October election is a front line in Washington’s war on the multipolar world

The Trump administration is reportedly considering fresh Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who presided over the case that sent Jair Bolsonaro to prison for plotting a coup – the latest move in a sustained campaign of US interference timed to Brazil’s electoral calendar.

In the following article, Carlos Martinez and Sara Vivacqua argue that October’s election has become a front line in Washington’s war on the multipolar world: a sovereign election treated as Washington’s own affair, alongside the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, the energy siege of Cuba and a hard right installed across the continent. They also set out why Brazil – a BRICS charter member that now trades more with China than with the United States – is not an easy nut for Washington to crack.

This article was first published by the Morning Star.

The Financial Times reports that the Trump administration is considering fresh Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who presided over the case that sent Jair Bolsonaro to prison for plotting a coup. Brazil heads to the polls again in October. President Lula’s principal challenger is Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former president, whose campaign has become entangled in the Banco Master affair, one of the largest banking frauds in the country’s history.

The official justification for the proposed sanctions is human rights and press freedom. Yet one of the FT’s own US sources endorses Trump’s interference outright: De Moraes has “gone after the supporters of Trump. Not just Elon Musk, but Maga types in Brazil. Even if we want a good relationship with Brazil, obviously this guy is an enemy.”

The actual aim is an obvious one: to punish the justice for holding Bolsonaro to account over his attempted coup to overturn the 2022 election. After losing to Lula, Bolsonaro and figures around the military plotted to annul the result; on 8 January 2023, his supporters stormed Congress, the Supreme Federal Court and the presidential palace in Brasília in a bid to trigger a coup.

Fidel Castro: the revolutionary America couldn’t kill

On what would have been Fidel Castro’s hundredth birthday, and with Cuba under its most severe siege since 1959, Carlos Martinez joined Radhika Desai on the Geopolitical Economy Hour alongside Francisco Domínguez, a founding member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and a specialist on Latin America’s political economy.

The discussion traced Fidel’s revolutionary audacity from Moncada and the Granma landing through his personal command at Playa Girón, the internationalism that sent hundreds of thousands of Cuban troops to help defeat apartheid South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale, and his refusal to follow Gorbachev when 85 percent of Cuba’s trade vanished overnight – and asked what all of this tells us about whether the revolution can survive Washington once again.

The full auto-generated transcript is reproduced below, lightly edited for readability.

Transcript

Radhika Desai: Hello and welcome to another Geopolitical Economy Hour, the socialist and anti-imperialist conversation that illuminates the fast-changing political economy and geopolitical economy of our times. You’re watching Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economist, and I’m Radhika Desai.

The topic today is extremely socialist and anti-imperialist. It’s Fidel Castro. Last week, along with our two guests here today, I had the privilege of attending the celebration of the life of Fidel on his 100th birthday. That was on the 13th of August. It was organised by the Cuban embassy and it was a deeply, deeply moving affair. Two magnificent speeches were given by former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Cuban ambassador, Ismara Vargas Walter. And there was also a beautiful short film on the life of Fidel.

Between them, these three contributions really brought to life the awe-inspiring political feats of the great Fidel, who was known, as you all know, among Cubans simply by his first name. He made Latin America’s first socialist revolution. He defeated imperialism militarily at the height of its power. He took the revolution to great heights of human development. He practised a legendary internationalism, both militarily and, as many people will know, medically. The revolution he led survived the loss of support of the other great superpower, namely the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And Fidel also kept up an analysis of the world situation with a diamond-like clarity — and of course also of the situation, often quite dire, of Cuba itself — and shared it on a regular basis with the Cuban people in his legendary speeches, which were listened to with rapt attention even though they often went on for hours.

Appreciating all this when a new assault from the United States is endangering Cuba’s mighty revolution once again was especially poignant. So with me to discuss Fidel’s legacy, and what it means for Cuba today and for Latin America, are two intellectuals with decades of engagement with and commitment to Cuba, Latin America and revolution: Francisco Domínguez and Carlos Martinez. Welcome both.

A response to The Guardian’s open letter: Opposing the war on Iran means rejecting war propaganda

The Guardian has published an open letter to Iran’s “political prisoners”, signed by Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Rashid Khalidi, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Walden Bello and others, which presents the Islamic Republic on one side and the United States and Israel on the other as “the two blades of a scissors”, with the Iranian people crushed between them.

In the following article, Carlos Martinez argues that this manufactured symmetry between the perpetrators of an ongoing war of aggression and its victim erases both Iran’s four-decade record of anti-imperialist solidarity – from the Palestinian resistance to apartheid South Africa, Cuba and Venezuela – and the achievements of the Iranian people since 1979. In a war of aggression, he writes, the absolute priority must be to show solidarity with the country under attack.

This article was first published by Press TV.

The Guardian has published an open letter to Iran’s “political prisoners,” signed by Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rashid Khalidi, Robin DG Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judith Butler, and Walden Bello, among others (although Kelley has since withdrawn his signature, and there is considerable doubt that Mumia Abu-Jamal knowingly lent his name to the venture).

These are not people to be dismissed lightly. Many have made important contributions to the anti-imperialist and Black liberation movements, and one of them is currently writing from within a US prison. Nevertheless, the letter is wrong and serves an objectively harmful purpose.

The central metaphor employed is that of “the two blades of a scissors”: the Islamic Republic on one side, and the United States and Israel on the other, with the Iranian people being crushed between them. Such an image manufactures symmetry between the perpetrators of an ongoing criminal war of aggression and the victim of that war; between the warmongering Epstein coalition and an independent country with no record of invading anyone.

The signatories justify their position by “rejecting the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism”. But how hollow, exactly, is Tehran’s anti-imperialism?

A new McCarthyism on both sides of the Atlantic

Two stories eight days apart, both from London newspapers, both pushing a McCarthyite agenda – one aimed at Britain, one at the United States. The Telegraph announced that “China is funding pro-Palestine marches in UK”. The Times reported that members of the Democratic Socialists of America had signed a public statement of support for Chinese socialism and, worse, had travelled to China.

Neither story alleges a crime. Neither produces a document showing a payment from the Chinese state or an instruction from the Communist Party of China. Both rest on the same syllogism: people hold anti-war positions that are also held in Beijing; therefore they hold them because of Beijing; therefore anti-war campaigners are not citizens exercising their rights but instruments of a foreign power.

The following article takes the two chains apart – four degrees of hedged separation in the British case, and in the American one the discovery that socialists are interested in socialism – and sets them against how Washington and London actually operate, from AIPAC’s congressional junkets and the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program to the pro-Israel lobbyists who have donated to half of Keir Starmer’s cabinet.

It then places the episode in its proper lineage. Ellen Schrecker’s segregationists blamed “outside agitators”; the NAACP was investigated for communist infiltration; Paul Robeson lost his passport for eight years; W.E.B. Du Bois was indicted as an unregistered foreign agent in his eighties. The purpose was never to prove foreign control, but to deny that the people protesting had minds of their own.

And it examines the machinery now being assembled: 3,061 terrorism-related arrests in Britain in the year to March 2026, 92 percent of them relating to Palestine Action; the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme and the campaign to add China to its enhanced tier; and, in the United States, presidential memorandum NSPM-7, which lists “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” among the indicators federal agencies are to investigate.

The following article by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez is an expanded version of a piece that first appeared in the Morning Star. This version was published on Friends of Socialist China.

Two stories, eight days apart, both from London newspapers, pushing a McCarthyite agenda in two different countries. The Telegraph announced that “China is funding pro-Palestine marches in UK”. The Times reported that members of the Democratic Socialists of America – “the left-wing group behind Zohran Mamdani’s rise” – had signed a public statement of support for Chinese socialism and, worse, had travelled to China.

Neither story alleges a crime. Neither produces a document showing a payment from the Chinese state, an instruction from the Communist Party of China, or any kind of broken law. Both rest on the same syllogism: people hold anti-war positions that are also held in Beijing; therefore these positions are taken up because of Beijing; therefore anti-war campaigners are not citizens exercising their basic democratic rights, but instruments of a foreign power.

Britain: four degrees of separation

Take the evidence as presented by the Telegraph. US congressional investigators are examining £250,000 in “alleged” payments to a company “linked to” CodePink in the UK, from firms “connected to” Neville Roy Singham, a US businessman “accused of” financing pro-China content.

Four degrees of separation, with every link in the chain a substantial hedge, from which emerges a headline asserting that the People’s Republic of China is funding the mass movement in Britain against genocide in Gaza. Singham is a US citizen who made his money building a software consultancy and now spends it on causes he believes in. What the allegations amount to, at most, is a US businessman with left-wing opinions funding a US peace group that has a British affiliate.

And what are the recipients of this money charged with doing? Organising protests against Britain’s involvement in genocide. Campaigning for peace with Iran. Calling for the removal of British military bases in Cyprus. Visiting China and saying that it is not our enemy. Every one of those is a lawful (and obviously principled and correct) political position, and several of them are held by most of the British public. Polling by YouGov in July found that 50 percent of Britons believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza against 17 percent who believe it is not, and that 55 percent think Britain should no longer treat Israel as an ally.

Also, consider the sums under discussion. A quarter of a million pounds would barely cover the placards at London’s anti-genocide demonstrations, let alone the portaloos. Spread across the half of the country that has reached the conclusion Beijing supposedly paid for, it comes to less than a penny a head. If that is the price of British public opinion, the Chinese state has driven a remarkable bargain.

The US: socialists found to be interested in socialism

The US version of the story is, remarkably, even thinner. The Times has made the extraordinary discovery that socialists are interested in socialism.

Thirteen members of the DSA, it reports, have signed the Friends of Socialist China statement, declaring that they aim to support the People’s Republic and to promote understanding of Chinese socialism. This is a public statement, published on a public website, which anyone may sign and which has attracted just shy of 1,000 signatories to date from dozens of countries. Thirteen of them turn out to belong to a US socialist organisation. Many readers may struggle to identify a scandal.

Then comes the evidence of sinister coordination: some DSA members went to China. A provincial foreign affairs office in Guizhou helped arrange an itinerary. They attended the parade marking 80 years since the victory over Japanese fascism. According to one of them, they were – gasp – treated well.

From this, the anti-China campaigner Alexander Reid Ross concludes that the trips “exhibit fingerprints of extraordinarily high-level co-ordination by the People’s Republic of China”, and speculates that these individuals’ standing within the DSA “has been improved precisely through the efforts of foreign parties”, raising the question of “who they’re working for”. No offence is alleged and no evidence is offered.

It is probably not a coincidence that the story has surfaced just as Washington is making a concerted effort to revive its Xinjiang campaign. One of the DSA members had visited Xinjiang and reported that he found nothing to support Western accusations of forced labour. To go to Xinjiang and decline to repeat the slanders is evidently the graver offence. Better by far to be one of those who have built entire careers on Xinjiang atrocity claims and who have, for the most part, never set foot in the place.

Set this against how Washington and London actually work

The double standard is easily identified. AIPAC’s affiliate flies members of Congress to Israel as a matter of routine. The State Department’s own International Visitor Leadership Program has hosted more than 230,000 foreign leaders since 1940, over 500 of whom went on to become heads of state or government – a rate of return on hospitality that Guizhou could barely dream of. The National Endowment for Democracy funds journalists, opposition parties and NGOs across the planet and publishes the grant lists in its annual reports.

Meanwhile in London, pro-Israel lobbyists have donated to half of Keir Starmer’s cabinet, a sum considerably higher than the £250,000 that so alarmed the Telegraph.

None of that is considered “foreign interference”, but a Chinese provincial foreign affairs office booking a few hotel rooms is a matter of national security.

The New Red Scare

None of this is new.

The historian Ellen Schrecker describes how segregationists in the American South always insisted that the region’s black population was perfectly content with its subordinate status, and that demands for change were “the product of ‘outside agitators’”. Linking those agitators to the Communist Party, she writes, gave the segregationists “new allies as well as a more modern rationale” for their campaign against the civil rights movement. The same device had served US employers for decades before that: strikes were never the product of legitimate grievance but the work of outside agitators, “usually foreign-born”.

The purpose was never to prove foreign control. It was to deny that the people doing the protesting had minds and interests of their own.

So the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909 and considered the US’ oldest civil rights group), by then a decidedly moderate organisation, was investigated for communist infiltration and became, as Gerald Horne records in Black and Red, among the first targets of the red scare. Paul Robeson had his passport confiscated for eight years and was systematically denied concert venues, the object being, in Horne’s phrase, to make him “radioactive”. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped and briefed against, with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI formally designating him “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism”.

And the world-famous scholar Dr. WEB Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP, then in his eighties, was indicted as an unregistered foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The damage was not confined to the individuals named. Schrecker’s verdict is that opposition to the Cold War became so completely identified with communism that “it was no longer possible to challenge the basic assumptions of American foreign policy without incurring suspicions of disloyalty”. That is the actual purpose of an exercise like this one: not primarily to convict any particular individual, but to make a set of opinions – against war, against racism, against genocide, against the encirclement of China – too expensive and too dangerous to hold.

The machinery now being built

In Britain, Palestine Action has been proscribed under terrorism legislation, and the consequences show up in the government’s own figures. In the year ending March 2026 there were 3,061 terrorism-related arrests, an increase of 1,186 percent on the previous year, and 2,819 of them – 92 percent – related to alleged support for Palestine Action. Quite an upsurge in “terrorism” – without a single fatality or even injury. Charges under section 12 of the Terrorism Act, which covers support for a proscribed organisation, had run at around five a year between 2019 and 2023; in 2024 there were 17. A counter-terrorism apparatus built to deal with bombers now focuses nine-tenths of its arrests on a protest movement, perhaps a majority of whom are pensioners, and only a small fraction of those arrested are ever charged.

As Sara Vivacqua documents in the Canary, the same powers have been turned on journalists covering the genocide. Asa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada had his home raided in October 2024 and his devices seized, containing material capable of identifying sources in Palestine, and has never been charged. Kit Klarenberg was stopped at Luton Airport under Schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act, and says the questioning made plain that the object was his journalism rather than terrorism.

The Foreign Influence Registration Scheme went live last year; its enhanced tier, which makes it a criminal offence to act at the direction of a specified foreign power, in areas beyond just political influence, without declaring it, currently applies to Russia and Iran, and there is a sustained campaign to add China to the list. Put that together with a year of newspaper stories linking the Palestine movement to Beijing, and the state acquires a mechanism for treating anti-war protest as a hostile foreign operation.

In the United States the equivalent already exists, and it is the same statute. Presidential memorandum NSPM-7, signed in September 2025, directs federal agencies to investigate nonprofits, activists and their donors, listing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” among the indicators to be looked for, and assigning Joint Terrorism Task Forces to pursue violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. An organisation whose members are on record supporting Chinese socialism, and who may have accepted a hotel booking from a Chinese provincial government, is precisely the kind of thing that memorandum was drafted to capture.

What is actually being defended

Ordinary British people did not need the Communist Party of China to make them angry about Gaza. Nearly three years of televised mass killing, British-made components in the aircraft, RAF surveillance flights out of Akrotiri feeding information to an army facing genocide proceedings at the International Court of Justice: millions of people in Britain concluded that their government was complicit and reaching that conclusion required no assistance whatsoever from Beijing. Nor do young Americans need instructions from Guizhou to notice that they cannot afford rent, and that a country which has eliminated extreme poverty and become the world’s first green energy superpower might be worth studying.

Which is what the accusation is for. Not to show that anyone took Chinese money – nobody has shown that anyone did – but to disqualify a position rather than answer it. An argument traced back to a foreign capital need never be met on its merits. So the Times assembles a chain running from rent control in New York through the DSA and a Guizhou hotel booking to Beijing, and the Telegraph assembles one running from a march against genocide through CodePink and a US software millionaire to the same destination. And it has to be China at the end of both chains, because China is the country doing most to prove that socialism works and that a better world is possible.

It’s essential that we see through this cynical manoeuvre, defend those being targeted, and resist the creeping authoritarianism that is being normalised in the name of “security”. The people marching for Palestine are not instruments of a foreign power. They are ordinary human beings who are disgusted with their own government’s complicity in genocide. And on this issue at least they represent the views of the majority.

The antibiotics crisis and the case for socialism

Ara Darzi – surgeon, Labour peer and author of the 2024 review of the NHS – has written in the Financial Times that the West has handed China “the keys to the medicine cabinet”, warning of the “peacetime weaponisation” of pharmaceutical supply chains. China supplies around 94 percent of the key raw materials for amoxicillin and nearly half of global antibiotic ingredient exports.

The following article by Carlos Martinez takes the sinophobic framing apart. China has never withheld medicine from anyone, while the United States is currently obstructing medical supplies to Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, and held up ventilator and PPE shipments during a pandemic. However, what Darzi concedes along the way is of interest.

Darzi’s own diagnosis is that antibiotics are a permanent market failure: a drug whose value rises the less it is used cannot recoup its research costs, so Novartis, AstraZeneca and Sanofi have all quit the field, and the company that brought a new antibiotic to market in 2018 was bankrupt within a year. As former British Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies put it, a medicine that cures you in a week is a worse business proposition than one you must take for life. Meanwhile some 4.71 million deaths were associated with antibacterial resistance in 2021, with the heaviest burden falling on South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa – precisely where the market is least likely to step in.

Darzi’s conclusion is that antibiotics should be treated not as a commodity but as critical infrastructure, planned and publicly supported. The article agrees, and observes that when China applies exactly that logic – to antibiotics, solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, high-speed rail or semiconductors – it is denounced as overcapacity and distortion, and met with tariffs. Darzi has written a very persuasive argument for socialism, and appears not to have noticed.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

Ara Darzi – surgeon, Labour peer, author of the 2024 review of the NHS – has written a recent op-ed for the Financial Times, under the headline “The west has given China the keys to the medicine cabinet”.

The framing is the usual anti-China rhetoric: China supplies around 94 percent of the key raw materials for amoxicillin and nearly half of global antibiotic ingredient exports; some 700 medicines approved in the US depend on at least one chemical made only in China; a Council on Foreign Relations report calls this a threat equal to the rare earths challenge, with potential for “peacetime weaponisation”.

Darzi’s concern echoes that of the US House Select Committee on the CCP, which recently held a hearing titled “From the Science Lab to the Medicine Cabinet: How China is Cornering the Market on Our Medicines”. A British peer writing in a British newspaper is recycling the talking points of a US congressional committee established for the express purpose of manufacturing hostility towards China.

This notion of weaponisation is some combination of profound paranoia and cynical slander. China has never withheld medicine from anyone. The country that actually weaponises medical supply chains is the one currently blocking Cuba’s access to medical equipment and obstructing insulin and cancer drugs reaching Iran and Venezuela; the one that held up ventilator and PPE shipments during a pandemic. Projection remains the governing principle of Western commentary on China.

China isn’t trapping the Global South in debt. Your pension fund is.

China is routinely accused of lending recklessly to poor countries, waiting for them to default, and then seizing strategic assets. A major new study of the Belt and Road Initiative finds the opposite: infrastructure construction is associated with falling debt risk, stronger state capacity and improved governance.

This video examines that research alongside the independent evidence. It revisits Hambantota – the Sri Lankan port that China supposedly “seized”, although Sri Lanka retained ownership and received 1.12 billion dollars for the lease – as well as the false claims concerning Entebbe airport and Mombasa port.

It also looks at how Chinese lending actually works – lower interest rates, longer maturities and grace periods, and none of the “structural adjustment” conditionality attached to IMF and World Bank programmes. And it asks the question largely absent from Western coverage: who actually receives the bulk of debt payments from lower-income countries, and what has the neoliberal debt system done to sovereignty, public services and development across the Global South?

Sources and further reading:

Mao Weizhun and Zeng Qingming, “Measuring the Political Effects of Belt and Road Infrastructure (2013–2023)”, Quarterly Journal of International Politics, vol. 11 no. 2, 2026, pp. 1–40 (in Chinese) – link

Nearly 200-country study shows China’s Belt and Road Initiative cuts debt and corruption (South China Morning Post)

Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri, Debunking the Myth of “Debt-trap Diplomacy” (Chatham House)

Deborah Bräutigam and Meg Rithmire, “The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth”

Rhodium Group, “New Data on the ‘Debt Trap’ Question”

Boston University Global Development Policy Center, China–Africa Lending in 2024: Concentration and Retooling

Debt Justice, “Debt payments to private lenders three times higher than to China”

Why Chinese “debt trap diplomacy” is a lie (Friends of Socialist China)

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

A new study of the Belt and Road Initiative has found that, far from driving participating countries into debt distress, Chinese-financed infrastructure actually tends to reduce their debt burden.

That cuts directly across one of the most successful anti-China narratives of the last decade — the claim that Beijing deliberately pushes poor countries into unsustainable debt, waits for them to default, and then takes control of their ports, their railways, their power stations and other strategic assets.

The phrase “debt-trap diplomacy” has been repeated by Western politicians, think tanks and media organisations so often that it’s now widely treated as a matter of record. But the specific claim is rarely even defined, never mind backed up with evidence.

The claim is not simply that Chinese banks have made loans that went wrong. Every large creditor has obviously done that. It’s not that some Belt and Road projects have been badly planned or overpriced or tainted by corruption. Some, of course, have. And it’s not that Chinese banks are charitable institutions unconcerned with getting their money back. They’re not.

But the debt-trap thesis makes a much more serious allegation: that China knowingly creates unpayable debts in order to seize assets or extract strategic concessions. If that’s true, there ought by now to be a visible pattern — of reckless lending, of engineered defaults, of confiscated infrastructure, of political submission.