Invent the Future

Interview: Fighting spirit has allowed the CPC to survive and adapt over a century

The following is the full text of an interview given by Carlos Martinez to the Global Times, marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). An abridged version was published by the Global Times on 12 July 2026 as part of a special series of interviews with international scholars reflecting on the party’s century-long journey.

In the interview, conducted by GT reporter Xia Wenxin, Carlos explores the meaning of the CPC’s “fighting spirit”, or “spirit of struggle” – a concept he argues is routinely misread in the West as blind confrontation or factional intrigue, but which in fact flows directly from the dialectical core of Marxism. Struggle, in this sense, is not a mood but a method: the recognition that development happens through contradiction, and that a serious revolutionary party must identify the principal contradiction of each period and mobilise the masses to resolve it.

Tracing this thread from Mao Zedong’s 1945 parable of the Foolish Old Man who removed the mountains through to the present day, Carlos discusses how the same method has allowed the party to survive and adapt across a century that saw so many other revolutionary projects defeated. He examines the CPC’s practice of self-revolution and its unrelenting campaign against corruption; the targeted poverty alleviation drive that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty; and the fundamental difference between the Chinese dialectical understanding of struggle as productive and the Western view of conflict as terminal.

Finally, he considers how this fighting spirit will be tested on the new battlefields of the 15th Five-Year Plan – high-tech self-reliance under conditions of US containment, the green transition, and the assorted domestic challenges on the road to the Second Centenary Goal of 2049. As he concludes, “on the record of the last 105 years, I would not bet against the CPC and the Chinese people surmounting these new challenges.”

The abridged version of this interview first appeared in the Global Times. The full version was first published on Friends of Socialist China.

As the CPC marks its 105th anniversary, it stands as one of the longest-governing political parties in modern history. Looking back at this journey, how do you evaluate the role of the “fighting spirit” in helping the party navigate historical crises and constantly adapt to changing eras?

I think that, for the CPC, “fighting spirit” is closely related to the dialectical core of Marxism: the recognition that development happens through contradiction, that nothing valuable arrives without meaningful effort, and that a serious revolutionary party has to identify the principal contradiction of each period and work to resolve it. Struggle, in this sense, is not a mood; it is a method.

This is not a recent slogan grafted onto the Party; it runs right through its tradition. One of the clearest statements of it is Mao’s closing speech to the Seventh Party Congress in June 1945, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains”, in which he retold an old fable. A foolish old man sets out to dig away two great mountains that block the way to his house; when a wise old man mocks the folly of it, he replies, “When I die, my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can’t we clear them away?” The two mountains, Mao said, were imperialism and feudalism, and the task of the Chinese people was to dig them out. What turns the parable into a statement of strategy is its ending: “Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?”

Fighting spirit, in this conception, is not so much heroic individual will as the conviction that an apparently immovable obstacle yields to patient, collective, intergenerational effort, once the masses are mobilised to do the digging.

That method is exactly what has allowed the Party to survive and adapt across a century in which so many of the other revolutionary projects of its generation were defeated. Consider the sheer range of conditions it has had to navigate: a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country torn apart by foreign invasion and civil war; the construction of an entire industrial and social base from near-zero after 1949; the turn to reform and opening up; and then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states in 1989–91, when counter-revolution triumphed almost everywhere – but was resolutely defeated in China. As Deng Xiaoping told Julius Nyerere in 1989, “so long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world”.

That the People’s Republic did not collapse was not luck. It was the product of a party willing to struggle on every level: against foreign domination, against feudalism, against poverty, against underdevelopment, against corruption, and against ideological ossification.

Manufactured outrage: the truth about China’s ethnic unity law

The following article by Carlos Martinez responds to the coordinated storm of condemnation that greeted the entry into force on 1 July of China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress – a campaign that seeks to revive the discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative and extend it to Xizang (Tibet) and beyond.

Carlos examines what the law actually says, and contrasts China’s record on minority rights – rising life expectancy, the elimination of absolute poverty, and the protection and flourishing of minority languages – with the treatment of minority communities in the West.

He traces the long history of Western sponsorship of separatism in China, from the CIA’s two-decade Tibetan programme to the National Endowment for Democracy’s funding of exile groups today, and locates the current hysteria in the failure of the propaganda war: as polling shows steadily warming attitudes towards China, particularly among the young, the ideologues of the New Cold War are increasingly desperate to re-toxify China’s image. What China is building is strength through unity in diversity; what its adversaries want to see is disunity and disintegration.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist 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, adopted by the National People’s Congress in March.

Within days, a remarkably well-coordinated storm of condemnation had been whipped up: denunciations from Washington and Brussels, a resolution in the European Parliament, and a wave of media coverage announcing that China had ordered its minorities to “assimilate”. The thoroughly discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative is being dusted off and relaunched – this time with Xizang (Tibet) added to the charge sheet for good measure.

The role of China in bringing down the empire

In the video embedded below, Carlos Martinez speaks on the role of China in the global project of bringing down the empire, at the Workers World Party hybrid forum “The World is Bringing Down the Empire!” (9 July 2026).

The single biggest factor in overcoming imperialism in the present epoch is the emergence of a multipolar world – and the single biggest factor in that process is the rise of People’s China. This talk traces how China’s role has evolved from the overt anti-imperialism of the 1950s, through the “hide your strength and bide your time” period of Reform and Opening Up, to the leading role it takes in world affairs today: the Belt and Road Initiative, the Community of Shared Future for Humanity, and the Global Development, Security, Civilisation and Governance Initiatives.

Along the way, Carlos addresses war and peace, China’s engagement with Africa, the recent war on Iran, and the argument – associated with Samir Amin – that a multipolar world provides the framework for the necessary overcoming of capitalism.

Transcript

Comrades, thank you very much for inviting me.

I’ve been asked to speak on the role of China in the global project of bringing down the empire. I want to start with a simple claim, which is that the single biggest factor in overcoming imperialism in the present historical epoch is the emergence of a multipolar world. And the single biggest factor in that process is the rise of People’s China.

So let me talk about what China’s role actually is, how it’s changed over the decades, and why it matters so much for everyone who wants to see a different world; a world of peace, equality, prosperity, friendship and solidarity.

What defines the CPC’s 105-year success? – a CGTN Dialogue

The following is a discussion from CGTN’s Dialogue programme marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Broadcast in the wake of Xi Jinping’s anniversary speech – in which he hailed the Party’s 105-year history as the “most magnificent epic” of the Chinese nation – it brings together Xia Lu, associate professor at the School of CPC History and Party Building at Renmin University of China; Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China; and Radhika Desai, convenor of the International Manifesto Group.

The panel discusses how to evaluate the CPC’s achievements and governing logic; the role of Marxism – seeking truth from facts, the mass line, and the Party’s capacity for self-renewal – in explaining its longevity and legitimacy; and the distinctiveness of Chinese modernisation. Radhika Desai argues that the Chinese revolution, following the Bolshevik revolution, set humanity on a path to socialism, and that amid a declining capitalism China has become an “ocean of stability”. Carlos Martinez stresses that China’s is a modernisation achieved without colonialism, slavery or war – shattering the Eurocentric assumption that to modernise is to Westernise. Xia Lu reads the Party’s six outstanding qualities through the lens of dialectical and historical materialism, and emphasises the mass line and the Party’s vigilance against detachment from the people.

This discussion was originally broadcast by CGTN’s Dialogue. The video and a transcript follow.

Transcript

Host: Hello and welcome to Dialogue. Addressing a gathering marking the 105th anniversary of the Communist Party of China, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Xi Jinping hailed the 105-year history of the Party as the “most magnificent epic” of the Chinese nation. He urged the Party to press ahead to build China into a modern socialist country on schedule. So how should we evaluate the Party’s achievements and governing logic over the past 105 years? What does the speech tell us about the Party’s discipline and capacity for self-renewal? And as China moves toward its long-term modernisation goals, what challenges lie ahead? Joining me today from Beijing are Xia Lu, associate professor from the School of CPC History and Party Building at Renmin University of China; Carlos Martinez, author of The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China; and also Radhika Desai, convenor of the International Manifesto Group. Welcome to the show. Radhika, I’ll start with you: I’m sure you followed the speech, so I wonder what were your major takeaways?

Radhika Desai: Well, first of all, President Xi’s speech really grasps the fundamentals of the achievements of the Party. I would say that for this party to be more than a century old – 105 years old – while retaining its legitimacy among a billion-strong population, and having essentially transformed the people of China not only into an agent of their own history, giving the destiny of the people into the hands of the people of China, but into an agent of world history – that is a tremendous achievement. The second major event setting the world on a path to socialism after the Bolshevik revolution was the Chinese revolution. And the Bolshevik revolution is no longer; the Chinese revolution is still going. So it set humanity on a path to socialism, and it continues there – at this particular time in history when circumstances have become extremely dangerous, thanks to the decline of that very capitalism. In its decline, capitalism is unleashing chaos, destruction and economic disruption all over the world. In this context, the CPC not only holds great legitimacy among the people of China, but shows the way forward to the rest of the world, and has become a beacon, an oasis of stability, and a visionary path to the future.

Host: Carlos, President Xi said the Party’s endeavours over the past 105 years have fundamentally transformed the future of the Chinese people – as Radhika said, blazed the right path toward the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, demonstrated the strong vitality of Marxism, had a profound influence on the course of world history, and made the CPC a powerful communist party. What do you make of such a statement?

The Great Road – Zhu De, fifty years on

The following article by Carlos Martinez marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Zhu De – founder of the People’s Liberation Army and, with Mao Zedong, one of the leading architects of the Chinese Revolution’s victory.

Drawing on the classic accounts of Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow and Evans Carlson, it traces Zhu De’s journey from a tenant’s hut in Sichuan, through to the founding of the Red Army and the rostrum at Tiananmen Square – and asks what his life still teaches, half a century on.

This article was first published on Friends of Socialist China.

Fifty years ago, on 6 July 1976, Zhu De died in Beijing at the age of 89. It was a year of terrible losses for the Chinese people: Zhou Enlai had died in January; Mao Zedong would follow in September. Of the three, Zhu De is the least remembered in the West – and yet the army he built, the People’s Liberation Army, remains the guarantor of everything the Chinese Revolution has achieved, and his life traces the arc of that revolution more completely than almost any other.

Red Virtue: origins in Sichuan

Zhu De was born in December 1886 into a tenant family in Yilong county, Sichuan, on an estate whose landlord was known locally as the “King of Hell”. By what Edgar Snow called “a strange accident of language”, the two characters of his name mean “Red Virtue” – a fact his parents could hardly have foreseen, “or they would surely have changed it in terror”.

His mother bore 13 children; the last five were drowned at birth because the family could not feed them. She herself, he recalled, “was so humble that she had no name of her own”. The clan pooled its resources to educate a single son who could talk back to the tax collectors – and so Zhu De, almost by accident, became literate, passed through the old examination system in its dying days, and entered the Yunnan Military Academy, where he joined Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary Tongmenghui (a radical secret society and precursor to the Kuomintang) and took part in the 1911 Revolution and the campaigns that destroyed Yuan Shikai’s attempted monarchy.

The hardest battle

By his mid-thirties Zhu De was a general in the warlord armies of the south-west: wealthy, decorated, and addicted to opium. The 1911 Revolution, he concluded, had been “aborted by republican compromise with foreign imperialism”; warlordism was a dead end, and he was part of it. So he walked away. He gave up his commands and his fortune, and broke his opium addiction alone – pacing the deck of a Yangtze steamer for a month, in what Snow called “the hardest battle of his life”, proof that “this man had more steel in his will than his acquaintances supposed”.

Then he asked to join the infant Communist Party. His reasoning was characteristically direct: if the foreign imperialists attacked this party with everything ugly in their vocabulary, “it was the party for Chu Teh” (Chu Teh being the older Western spelling of his name). Rejected in Shanghai by then CPC General Secretary Chen Duxiu – who could not believe a former warlord general capable of becoming a communist – he sailed for Europe, and in Berlin in late 1922 presented himself to a student organiser more than ten years his junior named Zhou Enlai. His old life, he said, “had turned to ashes beneath his feet”. He was admitted to the party he would serve for the remaining 54 years of his life.

Weightier than Mount Tai: the life and legacy of Ali Khamenei

This week, millions of Iranians are filling the streets of Tehran, Qom and Mashhad for the funeral of Seyyed Ali Khamenei, assassinated by the US and Israel on 28 February along with members of his family. Delegations from around a hundred countries have come to pay their respects; not one Western leader is among them.

In this video, Carlos Martinez asks who Ali Khamenei actually was, and why the most powerful country on earth considered him so dangerous: his lifelong defence of Iranian sovereignty after a century of foreign domination; his unmatched support for the Palestinian struggle; the social transformation of Iran under sanctions; his orientation towards the multipolar world; and the austere scholar behind the Western caricature – the man Nelson Mandela called “my leader”.

Transcript

This week, millions of people – the authorities actually expect more than ten million by the end of the week – are filling the streets of Tehran, Qom and Mashhad for the funeral of Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated by the US and Israel on the 28th of February, together with several members of his family – including his 14-month-old granddaughter.

The funeral had to be delayed for four months, because the country was under bombardment. And now that the ceasefire is holding – for the moment – the Iranian people are finally able to bury their leader. Delegations from around a hundred countries have come to pay their respects. Not a single Western leader is among them.

So in this video I want to ask a simple question: who was Ali Khamenei, and why are millions of people mourning him? Why did Nelson Mandela call him “my leader”? And why did the most powerful country on earth consider this eighty-six-year-old cleric, poet and scholar so dangerous that it carried out an extrajudicial assassination of him and his family?

Donald Trump called Khamenei “one of the most evil people in history” – this from a war criminal and close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein, so make of that what you will. The BBC and CNN will tell you he was a dictator, a fanatic, a tyrant. What they don’t do is explain why his coffin is now surrounded by one of the largest crowds of mourners in human history.

Khamenei’s legacy is deeply entwined with the history of Iran, and the project of defending Iran’s sovereignty.

For most of the last century and a half, Iran was not allowed to govern itself. In 1907, Britain and Tsarist Russia simply divided the country between them into “spheres of influence” – without consulting a single Iranian.

In 1953, when the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, committed the unforgivable crime of nationalising Iran’s oil, the CIA and MI6 organised a coup, overthrew him, and installed the Shah as a dependable guardian of Western energy interests. For the next quarter of a century, Iran’s oil flowed west, and the Shah’s secret police tortured anyone who objected.

One of the people they tortured, incidentally, was a young cleric named Ali Khamenei, who was imprisoned six times under the Shah’s dictatorship.

The Revolution of 1979 ended Iran’s century of humiliation. And whatever else you want to say about the Islamic Republic, it has stuck firmly to its promise of asserting its sovereignty. The Revolution ensured that Iran would never again be anyone’s client state.

Khamenei embodied that principle for over forty years – as president from 1981, and as Supreme Leader from 1989.

In February this year, when the bombs started falling on Tehran and his advisers begged him to move to a secure location, he refused. He said that since millions of ordinary people in Tehran had nowhere to go, he was staying put. He was in his own home, not a bunker, observing Ramadan, and that’s where he was killed.

What did he stand for? I’d point to four things.

The USA and the CPC – a tale of two anniversaries

On 1 July the Communist Party of China turned 105; three days later, on 4 July, the United States turned 250. In this article, Carlos Martinez asks what these two political projects – born of two very different revolutions – have contributed to the world.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

This week features two anniversaries that, taken together, tell much of the story of our age. On 1 July, the Communist Party of China marked 105 years since its founding. On 4 July, the United States celebrates 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. The two milestones invite a comparison: what have these two political projects contributed to the world?

War and peace

The US was born in a revolution against empire and has spent much of its life building one. By one widely cited reckoning, the US has been at war for over 90 percent of its history – from the wars of continental conquest to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Iran. It maintains around 800 military bases in 80 countries and spends over a trillion dollars a year on its armed forces.

What would Rajani Palme Dutt have made of contemporary China?

To mark the 130th anniversary of the birth of Rajani Palme Dutt – theoretician, organiser and, for half a century, one of the foremost Marxist minds in the British movement – Carlos Martinez asks what he would have made of contemporary China, testing his 1967 pamphlet Whither China? against the verdict of history.

This lecture was delivered on 27 June 2026 at the R. Palme Dutt Memorial Lecture 2026 at SOAS University of London, organised by the Students’ Federation of India UK and the Young Communist League.

The text was first published on Friends of Socialist China.

Comrades and friends. Thank you to the Students’ Federation of India UK and the Young Communist League for organising this event, and for asking me to speak.

We gather to mark the 130th anniversary of the birth of Rajani Palme Dutt – theoretician, organiser, anti-imperialist, and for half a century one of the foremost Marxist minds in the British movement. A man whose very name – the Bengali ‘Rajani’ and ‘Dutt’ alongside the Swedish ‘Palme’ – embodied the internationalism he preached and practised.

I want to use my time to ask a particular question. Palme Dutt died in 1974. He did not live to see China’s reform and opening up, the collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s rise to becoming the second-largest economy on earth, or the New Cold War now being waged against the People’s Republic. So: what would Rajani Palme Dutt have made of contemporary China?

It might seem a strange or pointless question to pose. The most substantial thing Palme Dutt wrote about China was his 1967 pamphlet Whither China? – which is, on its surface, a sharp polemic against the Chinese leadership, written at the height of the Sino-Soviet split, a year into the Cultural Revolution.

Palme Dutt was of course very much on the Soviet side in that split. Nonetheless, his pamphlet was not a simple repetition of the Soviet line, but a careful and serious analysis from a fundamentally comradely perspective.

So the question is posed not as a parlour game, but as a way of asking what a great Marxist of the past would make of the present; of testing his analysis against the reality of history; and of separating enduring principles from contingent positions.

A pamphlet of its moment

The Sino-Soviet split was, of course, one of the greatest setbacks our global movement has ever suffered, and reading Palme Dutt’s pamphlet, you feel the weight of it on every page. He is clearly shocked and deeply saddened by the bitterness of the situation.

And with the hindsight of six decades, we can recognise that both sides were at fault and went too far. As Deng Xiaoping put it to Gorbachev in 1989, when the two parties finally normalised relations again, “there was a lot of empty talk on both sides”. Deng’s verdict – “we no longer think that everything we said at that time was right” – could stand as an epitaph for the whole dispute.

So let me look at the substance of a few elements of Palme Dutt’s critique, and subject it to the test of history.

Why the Chinese working class won’t pay for Western neoliberalism

The following article by Carlos Martinez responds to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s call at the recent EU summit for a new “Plaza Accord” to force up the value of the Chinese renminbi.

Carlos recalls how the original 1985 Plaza Accord was not a neutral rebalancing of trade but the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor – Washington strong-arming Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar, plunging Japan into a “lost decade” of stagnation while failing to dent a US trade deficit that originated in Washington’s own model of high consumption and low savings, not in the exchange rate.

Carlos argues that China today cannot be treated as Japan was. Where Japan was a subordinate Cold War ally hosting tens of thousands of US troops; China is a sovereign socialist state with an increasingly prosperous domestic market of 1.4 billion people, an independent financial policy and a central bank that answers to no one in the West – it simply cannot be “Plaza’d”.

The article also takes aim at the language of “overcapacity”, which Carlos describes as a euphemism for European and North American industry failing to compete after nearly half a century of financialisation, privatisation and deregulation. Chinese competitiveness in electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels flows from a complete industrial system and sustained investment in technology – not from currency manipulation – and the EU’s tariffs of up to 35 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles are, he writes, “an act of self-harm disguised as self-defence”.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

At the recent EU summit, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared the Chinese renminbi to be undervalued by as much as 30 per cent and floated the idea of a new Plaza Accord — a co-ordinated effort to force up the value of the currency, just as Washington did to Japan in 1985.

It is worth remembering how that story ended, because the history Merz is reaching for is not the cautionary tale he imagines it to be.

The Plaza Accord was not a neutral exercise in rebalancing trade. It was the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor. Meeting at New York’s Plaza Hotel in September 1985, the United States strong-armed Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar.

Within two years, the dollar–yen rate had fallen by half. Japanese exports were hammered, capital fled into frenzied property and stock-market speculation, and when that bubble burst at the end of the decade, Japan was plunged into a “lost decade” of stagnation that stretched into a lost generation.

Tokyo’s tormentors, meanwhile, failed to reap much from this harvest: the US goods trade deficit with Japan stood at around $46 billion in 1985 and, instead of shrinking, climbed past $55bn in both 1986 and 1987. The currency had been clobbered, but the imbalance remained.

The reason is that the imbalance never originated in the exchange rate in the first place. It grew out of the US’s own domestic economic model of high consumption and low savings, and out of the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, which compels the US to run deficits in order to supply the world with dollars. No amount of bullying Tokyo could fix a problem made in Washington.

Why could Japan be treated this way at all? Because it was never a sovereign equal but a subordinate ally — a Western outpost in East Asia, permitted to grow rich as part of the cold war project of containing communism, but never permitted to seriously challenge its benefactors. When push came to shove, hosting tens of thousands of American troops and sheltering under the US security umbrella, Tokyo had no choice but to fold. The Plaza Accord is now near-universally regarded, even by mainstream economists, as an act of economic sabotage dressed up as co-operation.

The world says no: Iran, the Global South and the end of the unipolar moment

The US-Israeli war on Iran has been defeated – and the world’s response to it, above all from China and the Global South, reveals how profoundly the global balance of forces has shifted. In the article below, Carlos Martinez argues that Iran’s victory provides important evidence that the unipolar moment is over.

The criminal US-Israeli war on Iran has wrought devastation on a horrendous scale. The campaign has included the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and numerous other political leaders and scientists; the bombing of schools, hospitals, bridges and energy infrastructure; and, from April, a naval blockade of Iran’s ports. Aerial attacks have killed around 3,500 civilians, including 168 children at an elementary school in Minab, in one of the gravest single atrocities since the Vietnam War.

This is a war of aggression, pure and simple. There has been no Security Council authorisation, and UN human rights experts have denounced the assault as a violation of the most basic principles of the UN Charter. The pretext – that Iran was on the cusp of acquiring a nuclear weapon – is the same threadbare story Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling since 1992, and is roughly as credible as Tony Blair’s claim in 2003 that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

But something distinguishes this war from the Iraq war a generation ago. In 2003, Washington could assemble a “coalition of the willing”, browbeat the UN, and assume the world would fall into line. In 2026, the world is conspicuously refusing to do so. And the war has not merely been opposed – it has been defeated. As of late June it stands suspended under an interim memorandum of understanding whose terms read like a list of concessions wrung from Washington. The response to this war – above all from China and the Global South – tells us a great deal about how profoundly the global balance of forces has shifted.