China: A Socialist Introduction

A challenge to prevailing Western narratives about China, offering a different perspective on the recent history of their civilisation and the West’s relationship to it. In particular we are asked to consider how China have developed so successfully, despite the West’s concerted attempts to suppress them, and reconsider events accordingly. For example we typically assume that the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre was a suppression of anti-Communist dissidence, when actually “exactly the opposite is true. They were protesting against the US-backed capitalist reforms”. Hickel provides various data and insights to challenge typical assumptions, including the role of markets in the clean energy transition, and what led to China’s success in reducing poverty and inequality (e.g. they put limits on billionaires). We’re asked to rethink suggestions that China is Imperialist, and consider whether it might even be more democratic than the US.