Re: Overseas investment by China's private and public corporations

I’ve been influenced by both Micheal Roberts and Minqi Li who argue that China isn't imperialist. Minqi Li's article at https://monthlyreview.org/articles/china-imperialism-or-semi-periphery/ and a more recent long video interview of Michael Roberts at http://youtube.com/watch?v=kKDxKpHQmok are each worth consulting.

"Imperialism” is more loosely used today as an epithet rather than as a concept with explanatory power as it was in Lenin's time. It has limited utility, for example, in explaining both US imperialism and China's ostensible imperialism. In 1916, the core imperialist countries - Britain, France, Germany, and the US - were all net exporters of capital. The US today is a net recipient of foreign direct and portfolio investment ( https://www.bea.gov/news/2026/us-international-transactions-and-investment-position-1st-quarter-2026-and-annual-update ). Neither Lenin nor other Marxist analysts of imperialism could have foreseen the "exorbitant privilege" of a fiat currency de-linked from gold like the USD becoming the world's reserve currency. It is this which has allowed the US to maintain its global imperialist hegemony despite its adverse balance of payments. Nor did the turn of the 20th century theorists of imperialism account for China and other exploited countries in the periphery themselves extracting surplus value from countries in both the core capitalist countries and global south.

In fact, all the world’s countries which now trade with each other are both recipients and exporters of capital goods and services. This has led to Marxists identifying a profusion of "imperialist" and "sub-imperialist" countries, diluting the concept which once referred only to those countries which had formal "empires". Are Taiwan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Singapore, the UAE, Norway, and Switzerland - the next seven of the top 10 countries with positive current account balances after China, Germany, and Japan  - “imperialist” or “sub-imperialist”? ( https://statbase.org/datasets/finance/account-balance/ ). Do any of these states control the economic and political life of territories beyond their borders?

The whole notion of tying imperialism to countries is now misleading. National corporations have been replaced by multinationals with their manufacturing operations and supply chains distributed across the globe. They're no longer tethered to a particular country, even if headquartered there. The British, West European, Russian, Ottoman and Japanese empires of the WW I era have long since disappeared. It is now only the US which maintains a vast network of overseas military bases and alliances and, together with its control of the international payments system, can justifiably lay claim to being the world’s sole imperialist power.


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