President Xi Jinping’s invocation of the so-called “Thucydides Trap” during the recent hosting of Donald Trump was not a neutral geopolitical observation. It reflected a real and sharpening contradiction within the imperialist system: the contradiction between the dominant US-led capitalist bloc and the rising capitalist power of China.
According to the bourgeois theory of the “Thucydides Trap,” war becomes likely when an emerging power threatens the dominance of an established hegemon.
But Marxist-Leninists do not analyze international developments through the prism of abstract “civilizational conflicts” or vague geopolitical fatalism. The roots of the conflict lie in monopoly capitalism itself, in uneven capitalist development and in the struggle of powerful bourgeois classes over markets, energy routes, raw materials, technological supremacy and spheres of influence.
This is precisely what Lenin described in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
China’s transformation into a global economic and technological power over the last decades constitutes one of the most significant developments in the contemporary capitalist world economy. The country’s rapid industrial expansion, infrastructural growth and increasing international economic reach have profoundly altered the global balance of capitalist power.
The growing confrontation between the United States and China is therefore not a struggle between socialism and capitalism. Nor is it a confrontation between anti-imperialism and imperialism. It is a conflict between two enormous capitalist powers competing over the redistribution of economic, political and military power within the framework of world capitalism.
Contemporary China operates firmly within the framework of capitalist accumulation, regardless of the extensive regulatory and strategic role exercised by the state and the Communist Party apparatus. State intervention in the economy does not in itself negate the capitalist character of social relations. Giant monopolies, stock exchanges, billionaires, export of capital, brutal exploitation of labour power and aggressive penetration into foreign markets define the trajectory of contemporary Chinese development.
At the same time, the rapid expansion of Chinese capitalism has generated deep internal contradictions, marked by widening inequalities, intensified labour exploitation and the growing concentration of economic power in the hands of powerful corporate and state-connected interests. The emergence of vast urban wealth alongside hundreds of millions of precarious and highly exploited workers is not an accidental phenomenon, but a product of China’s capitalist transformation over the last decades.
Chinese capital today expands across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe not in the name of proletarian internationalism, but in pursuit of profit, strategic control and geopolitical influence. The so-called “Belt and Road Initiative” is not a project of solidarity among peoples. It is a mechanism for the export of Chinese capital and for strengthening the international position of the Chinese ruling class against its rivals.
Those who present China as an “anti-imperialist counterweight” to the United States deliberately obscure this reality. They reduce anti-imperialism to mere opposition to the West, replacing class analysis with geopolitical reflexes. In this way, sections of the international left end up politically adapting themselves to one imperialist pole against another.
But there are no “good” imperialists. This is not a question of intentions, political culture or national particularities, but of the objective laws of capitalist development itself. Under conditions of monopoly capitalism, every rising capitalist power inevitably seeks expanded access to markets, investment spheres, transport corridors, resources and geopolitical influence.
The working class has no interest in choosing between Washington and Beijing, between the declining hegemon and the rising challenger. The replacement of one dominant power by another does not abolish exploitation, wars, inequality or capitalist barbarism.
The slogan of a supposedly “multipolar world” is therefore deeply deceptive. A multipolar capitalist order remains exploitative and conflict-ridden. Competition between major powers does not bring peace for the peoples. It intensifies militarization, economic warfare, nationalist poison and the danger of wider imperialist confrontation.
This is precisely the essence hidden behind the rhetoric of the “Thucydides Trap.” The ruling classes of both the United States and China are preparing economically, politically and militarily for a prolonged struggle over the balance of power within the global capitalist order of the 21st century.
The real “trap” lies in the attempt to subordinate the peoples to the strategic interests of one side of the imperialist rivalry under the banner of “anti-imperialism.”
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
