Conclusions arising from China’s Global infrastructure on the world stage are still difficult to assess. Do Chinese world policies create a new form of Imperialism as part of the anti-China rhetoric suggests?

That the USA resents the rise of China as a contender for world power is obvious. China is different as a contender state when compared to Germany before 1914 and the USSR after 1945. It is worth our time to consider these large questions?

Chinese foreign policy in the period from 1949 to 2000 was largely defensive and determined to maintain the revolution. Only after the Chinese treasury was replete with US dollars, and after they began to accommodate American and other western global companies, could they begin to develop a global policy. This was part of the story; the other vital aspect was the lesson they learned from the Soviet collapse in 1991.

China created coherent development strategies from 1949 onward. She opened her economy to the rest of the capitalist world after the end of the 1970s – a point in history when the capitalist world was beginning to develop its own 'neo-liberal' system of globalisation . This was just at the time when the West created the conditions for the free movement of capital. Neo-liberal policies were consciously intended to allow Western corporations to move their factories to where labour was cheap. At the same moment in history, China was opening her doors to receive Western companies who wished to use the cheap labour of China, spare resources, and industrialisation: the build-up of spare capacity.

The issue that has undermined western Chinese analysis is Mao. During Mao's period, China was a closed society, relatively speaking. Mao struggled with the central issue of the Communist Party: how to create an industrial revolution, without becoming dependent on western economies. The period of his rule was turbulent. Western assumptions that there was a lack of growth during Mao’s time have been shown to be false. In fact, between 1970 and 1979, China’s GDP growth rate was 6.8% per annum. That statistic implies a continuous growth rate every year in fact for 70 years. If we examine capital accumulation, i.e., the growth rates of productive capital stock, capital equipment, machinery, tools, industrial buildings, excluding residential buildings and the value of land, there was an annual growth rate of 10.3% from 1952 to 2015.

Mao knew about the English agricultural revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries, and he knew about the industrial revolution in the 18th century too. He was aware of the need to transform China.

Mao’s heritage has caused huge debate and disagreement, particularly across Western intelligentsia. Mao made serious mistakes at the end of his life. By the 1960s, he was in a hurry. He also wished to show the Soviet Union that China was independent of their advice.

Mao created the Hundred Flowers Campaign; the Great leap Forward; and the Peoples Commune. All these vast initiatives came under the rubric of the Cultural Revolution.