Top Menu

China

Monthly Review Volume 77, Number 3 (July-August 2025)

July-August 2025 (Volume 77, Number 3)

This month’s “Notes from the Editors” discusses the accelerating progress of China toward sustainability. China’s decline in carbon emissions and rapidly decarbonizing energy sector demonstrates the importance of societal realignment and extensive planning to shift toward the ecological modernization that has continued to elude monopoly-capitalist regimes. | more…

New this week!
Chávez and the people (Kael Abello)

A Special Issue on Communes in Socialist Construction

Inspired by the Venezuelan project of building socialism via the commune, this special issue looks at attempts to use communal models in socialist projects in a range of different contexts, as well as the theoretical bases for such an endeavor. In their introduction, guest editors Chris Gilbert and Cira Pascual argue that the theme of Communes in Socialist Construction is an important opportunity for engaged Marxist reflection of a kind that offers valuable contributions to the universal body of socialist thought. | more…

Communal Governance and Production in Rural China Today

This article will be released in full online August 25, 2025.

Sit Tsui and Lau Kin Chi elucidate the history of China’s People’s Communes as told through the lens of three present-day rural villages. In these villages, they observe the effects of the project’s dismantling and diminishing collective ownership and land management, with the conclusion that a return to collectivism is vital for carrying forward the socialist project. | more…

Inside a People’s Commune: Report from Chiliying (Excerpt)

This article will be released in full online August 25, 2025.

Inside a People’s Commune is a short 1974 book documenting life in the Chiliying Commune, one of the earliest in revolutionary China. The text explores the commune’s organization, challenges, achievements, and mass-based character. Hugo Chávez later drew inspiration from the book, citing it when launching Venezuela’s communal project. Today, it continues to serve as a pedagogical tool for Venezuelan communards working to build a unified system of socialist self-government. | more…

Blister packs of pills

Big Pharma and Monopoly Capital: Four Dynamics in the Decline of Innovation

In an age of cutting-edge medical science, how do the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies stifle innovation in order to juice profits and remain competitive in the international markets? The answer, Jia Liu writes, can be found in the concept of monopoly capitalism. This brand of “intellectual monopoly capitalism,” she notes, contributes to “a logic of expropriation and rent-seeking,” leading in turn to “closed science and declining medical innovation.” | more…

The "Long Live the Overall Victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" Cultural Revolution Stamp (Second Draft) canceled and issued by the People's Republic of China

China’s “Triple Revolution Theory” and Marxist Analysis

In this contribution to the further development of socialism with Chinese characteristics Cheng Enfu and Yang Jun offer their “Theory of Triple Revolution,” enumerating the historical stages of the Chinese Revolution and analyzing its current trajectory. A complete revolutionary view of Marxism in China, they conclude, “will advance the spirit of the revolution to its completion….[moving] forward along the correct track of Marxism, such that a powerful revolutionary vision will open up before us.” | more…

China Ecological Civilization display from COP15

The Dialectics of Ecology and Ecological Civilization

What is ecological civilization? In this article, Chen Yiwen presents a dialectical analysis that illuminates the theoretical and practical elements of ecological civilization, particularly as it develops in the context of China. In China, he notes, significant progress has been made, but there remain outstanding questions that must be resolved during the transition to an ecologically harmonious society that promotes global equality and human flourishing. | more…

View of the Nam Ou from the Pha Daeng Peak Viewpoint

Lao Socialism with Buddhist Characteristics

Yumeng Liu takes a deep dive into the history of Laos, the only socialist nation among the Theravāda Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, examining how the country has developed its own particular approach to socialism, influenced by both local Buddhist beliefs and Marxist ideology. Liu also explores the historical and present-day tensions inherent in this uniquely Lao approach to socialist development. | more…

The Communist Revolution in Gansu

Chinese-Style Modernization: Revolution and the Worker-Peasant Alliance

Since the 1980s, writes Lu Xinyu, a division between industrial and agricultural labor has grown in China, reflected in the fractured relationship between urban and rural areas. China’s successful navigation of the issue, Lu concludes, relies on creating a vigorous alliance between the rural peasantry and urban workers that aids in the ultimate delinking of China from the imperialist, world system. Chinese-style modernization, Lu concludes, represents a path that, while developed in a Chinese context, “represents the aspirations of the Global South to break free from worldwide Western hegemony.” | more…

The authors, interviewees, and other attendees at the PARC Symposium

Emerging Oceanic Struggles for No-Nukes in Japan

In this deeply stirring account, Sit Tsui and Lau Kin Chi share their field research, conducted over years of travel and relationship-building, into the Japanese antinuclear movement. As the people and environment of Fukushima continue to be impacted by the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in March 2011, the No-Nukes movement has grown in response, encompassing aspects of society ranging from artists and monks to fisherfolk and intellectuals. | more…

Screen capture from "A glimpse into Ningxia"

Some Preliminary Theses on the Concept of Eco-Civilization

In this talk given at Peking University in October 2024, John Bellamy Foster shares ten theses describing both the roots and contemporary manifestations of the idea of ecological civilization. Relating the concept’s origins in the writings of Marx and Engels to its expression today in Chinese society, Foster reveals the inherently socialist nature of eco-civilization and the necessity of a worldwide ecological revolution to shift toward sustainable human development. | more…

Workers in a fiber optic cable factory

The Classic Transcending Borders and Ages: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of ‘Labor and Monopoly Capital’

What was the impact of Labor and Monopoly Capital in its day, and what is its resonance in ours? Kuang Xiaolu, Li Zhi, and Xie Fusheng take stock of Harry Braverman’s influential scholarship over the last half-century. In sum, they write, “with the global expansion of the capitalist mode of production, the significance of Labor and Monopoly Capital has long surpassed narrow national boundaries and the era in which Braverman lived.” | more…

Monthly Review | Tel: 212-691-2555
134 W 29th St Rm 706, New York, NY 10001