China Changes Everything: A Book Review

By Steve Lalla – Dec 20, 2025

A new book edited by Kyle Ferrana, China Changes Everything, bills itself as an anthology by “social justice activists, journalists, and commentators” and brings together chapters about the People’s Republic of China written by prominent left-wing analysts, including Arnold August, Roger Harris, Radhika Desai, Carlos Martinez, Gerald Horne, Lee Siu Hin, Margaret Kimberley, Danny Haiphong, KJ Noh, Sara Flounders, and many more.

The publication covers a comprehensive range of subjects in the ongoing “China debate” and includes chapters on such hot topics as China’s relation to Palestine and China’s foreign affairs policies, its banking and healthcare system, its transportation infrastructure and the rail and air infrastructure that China has helped to build in developing nations, its achievements in green technology and poverty alleviation, China’s military expenditures and aims, its role in the “space race,” its alleged genocide of the Uyghurs, and the status of Taiwan and Tibet, among others.

The first entry—written by Sara Flounders and titled “A Fundamental Difference: China—Socialist or Imperialist?”—dispels the widespread myth prevalent among Western thinkers (and even among Western Marxists) that China’s economy is essentially capitalist. Flounders contrasts China’s economic system with that of the US and demonstrates how it is the essential differences in their respective economic structures that have propelled China’s economic growth since its liberation in 1949: “In the United States, nearly all resources are privately owned by a handful of billionaires. Even public forests, waters, and raw minerals are ripe for exploitation for private profit. In China, the overwhelming bulk of resources—oil, gas, coal, gold, gems, rare earth minerals, and water are socially owned and used for the development of the whole society.”

This chapter sets the tone for the entire book. The collection of essays functions as a primer for an English-speaking, primarily US-based audience that will allow the reader to contrast the economics, culture, and politics that they are familiar with, on the one hand, with the economics, culture, and politics of the People’s Republic of China. As such, it does not provide a detailed look at what life is like in China for everyday Chinese people, from a Chinese perspective, but instead functions as a guide for Western observers who seek to compare the achievements of the People’s Republic of China with those of the “developed” nations of North America and Europe since World War 2.

Public health: China vs. USA
Margaret Flowers’ essay on healthcare is titled “If China Can Provide Universal Healthcare, Why Can’t the United States?” The author compares the two healthcare systems and reflects how, in the US, “Hospitals are shuttering essential services such as obstetrics and pediatrics to open more lucrative specialty centers in orthopedics and cardiovascular interventions. Hospitals that don’t turn a profit, especially in rural communities and poor urban areas, are being closed down and either abandoned or converted into commercial spaces.” In contrast, a system that prioritizes public welfare instead of profit is able to provide superior, or at the very least, competitive services for only a fraction of the cost (China spends less than 3% of what the US spends per capita on healthcare).

“The Commonwealth Fund’s 2024 health insurance survey highlights some major failures of healthcare in the United States,” notes Flowers. “They found that only 56% of working-age adults had adequate health insurance. Of those who had health insurance without adequate coverage, 57% ‘avoided getting needed health care because of its cost,’ and 41% of these experienced a worsening of their health condition as a result. 44% of underinsured adults held medical or dental debt. In fact, in the US, medical illness is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, and about three-fourths of those who go bankrupt had health insurance at the start of their illness.”

Data like this will provide ample ammunition for our conversations with the China-haters who virtually all of us in the West can count among our coworkers, friends, and family. The book continues with this line of thinking, succinctly contrasting the facts of life in the US, Europe, or Canada with those in the People’s Republic, and confirms that the glaring differences exist precisely because China has not followed the capitalist path of prioritizing corporate profit over basic public needs.

“Health outcomes have dramatically improved over the past 76 years” in China, Flowers recounts. “The average life expectancy in China was around 43.5 years in 1950, and rose to almost 78 years in 2024. Life expectancy rose by almost seven years between 2000 and 2021, while life expectancy in the United States fell during that same period.”

China and the climate crisis
In a case of projection that is typical of knowledge production in the imperial core, the ubiquitous anti-China smear campaign portrays the People’s Republic as a fortress of smokestacks belching fumes of melting coal and plastic into the air, polluting at levels never seen in human history and ruining the environment for everyone. However, it is fairly common knowledge that China ratified both the Kyoto and Paris accords of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), while the US has never committed itself to either agreement.

In its section on green development, China Changes Everything provides ample details regarding China’s commitment to clean energy and sustainable development. China’s achievements in this realm are driven by the nation’s socialist principles and made possible through centralized planning.

Lyn Neeley, in a chapter entitled “China Outpaces the World in Energy Production and Green Technology,” recalls that China has produced “70% of the world’s electric vehicles (EVs) and 98% of the world’s electric buses”—although we’ll never see them on the road in North America. Because of state aid for green technology, the country produces electric cars at a fraction of their cost in the US, Europe, or Canada (a theme that is repeated throughout comparisons of costs for healthcare, housing, education, infrastructure, the military, etc.).

“Chinese EVs are cheaper and more advanced than EVs made anywhere else,” writes Neeley. “A Chinese EV now costs less than [USD] $10,000 because of the efficient manufacturing processes and an increase in the amount of government subsidies for EVs from [USD] $76.7 million in 2018 to [USD] $809 million in 2023.” Neeley notes that China produces over 80% of the world’s solar panels, is the world’s leading producer of hydroelectric power, accounts for up to 70% of the global wind turbine market, and in 2024 filed more than half of the world’s patents for clean energy.

China and Palestine
Danny Haiphong—in an essay titled “Is China’s Foreign Policy ‘Good Enough’?”—Danny Haiphong reflects on another criticism frequently leveled at China, particularly in the wake of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 which approved the US plan for the occupation of Palestine by a UN International Stabilization Force. China did not exercise its capacity to veto this resolution and abstained from the vote, giving rise to a common criticism of China heard in the West, even among purported leftists: that China has not done enough to aid the Palestinian cause.

Haiphong helps to put things in perspective: while the US and its vassal states carry out a livestreamed genocide, providing arms and diplomatic cover to the Zionist regime, “China has used its influence at the United Nations to not only condemn Israel’s brutality and call for an immediate ceasefire, but also to uphold the right of the Palestinian people to armed resistance. In 2024, China hosted a historic summit in Beijing that convened all major Palestinian political organizations with the aim of forging unity toward the establishment of a future Palestinian state.”

When the foreign policy of the People’s Republic of China is compared to that of the United States and its vassals in the imperial core, the differences are stark. “The horrors in Gaza are not of China’s making,” recalls Haiphong. “The US accounts for 70 percent of Israel’s arms imports, and wields a political and diplomatic shield over Israel that is arguably more powerful than that provided to any of its other so-called ‘allies’ around the world. The blame for Gaza’s plight rests at the feet of the US, the West, and of course, Israel. Moving attention away from this is as unhelpful as it is dangerous. Makers of US foreign policy have shown the world time and time again that they are willing to go to any length to protect what they see as their most important military asset in the region. Any unilateral action taken against Israel will be met with serious consequences. While the US empire is in marked decline and unable to arrest the development of a rising China and Global South, it has proven more than capable of spreading chaos and instability. The US and Israel would undoubtedly move to cut China off from the entire region if it were to carry out a boycott of Israel on its own, and the genocide would continue, but under even more hostile global conditions than currently exist. This isn’t to say that a boycott isn’t correct in principle, but to put the onus of responsibility for leading such a boycott on China, a developing country that is itself the target of US sanctions, moves the goalposts away from the US empire.” One only has to look at the economic blockade and recent US bombing of Iran to see how the US might treat China were it to go further in its support for Palestine.

China Explains Its Abstention in UN Gaza Vote

The book is a must for those who seek facts about the economic, political, and cultural development of China since 1949, particularly in comparison to that of the United States and particularly regarding the most hotly debated issues. China Changes Everything provides a wealth of information and constitutes a useful manual for those who seek to dispel the myths about China that are propagated in the imperial core.

Most of us are familiar with these often contradictory claims: “China is not socialist,” “China is capitalist,” “China is imperialist,” “China is the worst polluter,” “China is not a democracy,” “China is a Communist dictatorship,” “China only cares about its own development,” “China is a settler colonial Han supremacist nation,” “China is imprisoning dependent nations in debt traps,” “China is exploiting Africa and Latin America,” and finally, “the People’s Republic is not revolutionary.” In doing so, the book outlines a realistic vision for our future and provides hope for those in the West who are often disillusioned with all social and political projects.

 

 

OT/SL/JRE