My parents put me in out of convenience. My siblings were doing it, so they thought taking us all to one place would be easiest. I hated it at first because everyone played soccer in Oakville, where I lived—the suburban soccer capital of Southern Ontario. I was kind of embarrassed to go to ballet after school. I would wear big basketball shorts and pretend to be all sporty, and then I’d be like, “Ugh, off I go to ballet.”

What shifted?

In grade five, I started getting good. I played Clara in The Nutcracker at my little ballet school. One of my teachers, Mrs. Brown—who was so cool—suggested I audition for the National Ballet School. I just thought, “All right,” and didn’t give it much thought. I went to Toronto to audition, where I was amongst fifty little ten-year-old girls, each wearing a number, skipping and running around a big, beautiful studio. They’re looking at your body at that age to see if they could train it and mold it to be a successful dancer.

Were you aware of that at the time?

Not at all. I was like, “Woo-hoo!”

What did your parents think?

They were incredibly supportive, we all moved to Toronto so I could go. I don’t think they knew what to expect—sometimes, I wonder if they would have let me audition if they had. My mom has commented along those lines, but she also agrees that it was an incredible privilege and a wonderful way to grow up. I got to do what I love every day.

What did it look like when things didn’t go well?

If you had a really strict ballet teacher, you’d be getting yelled at in the studio every day—it’s incredibly discouraging. Then there’s the disappointment of not getting cast in a role or the setback of an injury.

Were there any other positive mentors?

Yes, there were a lot of great mentors, especially the artistic director of ballet school. I love her with all my heart; she’s one of the most amazing people in the world. She did her best to make ballet school a really supportive and, as best she could, safe place. She was looking out for people.

What parts felt unsafe?

It’s so competitive. Because you’re staring at your body in the mirror every day, I started thinking I was too fat when I was fourteen.

Did they have counselors?

They did. They had a nutritionist who came, but it’s complicated—I think even thinking about food too much is a lot for a young girl. We would also have therapists meet with our class as a group, but with a bunch of twelve-year-old, bratty ballet school girls, it didn’t really work as intended. Instead of using it to decompress and discuss our mutual difficulties, we would attack each other. All the competition and nasty classic high school girls’ stuff would come out. It’s hilarious in retrospect.

It’s wild to think that was your high school experience!

I went there from grade 6 to 12 and then another year after high school, which is the maximum amount of time. I had no friends outside of ballet because my entire life revolved around it. Our days started at 8 A.M. with academics—we’d spend the morning in our little uniforms doing schoolwork. After lunch, it was ballet until 6 P.M. or 7 P.M. Afterward, I’d go home, do my homework, and go to bed. There was just no time for anything else.

I was one of the only day students in my class—most classmates lived at the school, while I went home each night. It was such a sheltered environment, such a bubble. I think that’s why now, being outside of that world, I make such an effort to meet new people all the time—because I never had the chance for so long.

Do you feel like any parts of your life now are a reaction to that experience?

Whenever I try to psychoanalyze myself, everything goes back to ballet school. Trying to expand my world now feels like a massive rejection of living in that bubble for so long. It was an isolated environment; everyone around me was focused on the same thing. My sibling also went to ballet school, so my family was immersed in it, too.

I always joke that I’ve never seen a movie. All those classic films people watched during those years—there was just no time for them. So when I went to university, it was overwhelming to suddenly learn about the world and meet all these different kinds of people. I realized, “Oh my God, what have I been doing all this time?”

Can you talk about why you left ballet for university?

When I was eighteen, I moved to Mannheim, a small town in Germany. I was all alone. I ended up in this tiny, spider-infested apartment, living by myself. It was split between the school and the company, and a good landing pad where I could keep training and audition for ballet companies around Europe. I was so fragile back then, physically small, and had been struggling with injuries for the last two years of high school—I kept getting stress fractures in my feet. In the early days of ballet school, I was the best in my class, but then the injuries started catching up, and I began falling in the ranks. It was obvious to everyone, including me, what was happening, and it was a vulnerable feeling. But at the time, I was still convinced I’d make it in the ballet world and it felt like there wasn’t another option.

When I arrived in Mannheim, the director—who ran the school and the company—looked like a villain straight out of a movie. She was so thin, like a skeleton woman who had smoked two million packs of cigarettes in her life. She mostly only hired short, petite dancers. On the very first day, I went to class, and she pulled me aside and weighed me right in front of everyone. I’m 5’8”, so I was towering over everyone else, who were about 4’11”. In front of them all, she told me, “You need to lose 5 to 10 kilos before I cast you in anything.” She added, “It’ll take a gorilla to lift you.”

That’s horrible.

Of course, it was objectively ridiculous, but it affected me so much. Luckily, my best friend, Helen Clare, was in Düsseldorf, a four-hour bus ride away. On weekends, I’d visit her, get a bit of respite, and then return. But during the week, I was really trying to lose weight. One of the only moments of joy I had was when that director pulled me aside and said, “You’re losing a lot of weight. You’re looking good.”

I remember thinking, “Woo-hoo!” and literally jumping into the changing room. But the reality was that I was exhausted, weak, and really depressed. I did have a couple of good teachers, but I don’t know how they worked within an environment where all the favoured students were clearly not eating. I had never seen a ballet culture quite like that.

That sounds physically and psychologically exhausting.

Yeah, exactly. My ballet teacher there—I wish I remembered her name—was this Russian woman who only spoke German and Russian, so we had no solid way to communicate. But somehow, we got along, and I really liked her. I remember one day in class, I had been crying the entire time, staring at myself in the mirror, pinching at my body between every exercise. She pulled me aside and said, “You come in looking joyful on Monday. But by Friday, I see you disappearing.” She meant it literally—physically and emotionally. She was trying to give me a wake-up call… in Russian and German as best she could.

That Christmas, I returned to Toronto and told Mavis—the director I loved—about everything. She didn’t hesitate. She just said, “We’re getting you out of there.” She made one phone call to the director of a school in The Hague, and that was it. I returned to Germany, pretended I had a family emergency and left.

Wow, Mavis. What an icon!

Mm-hmm. She saved me.

Then what happened?

I injured my hip while there but kept dancing because I didn’t trust that I was hurt, so it got worse and worse. The injury meant I could no longer audition for companies, so my time in Europe ran out. I had to go back to Toronto—injured and jobless. It took another year before they finally diagnosed my hip injury. I really fought for a long time. When I first returned, I started training again at my old ballet school. I got cast in The Nutcracker with the National Ballet and told myself, “Okay, I’m going to do this. I’m going to make it.” But then the pain took over and I couldn’t do the shows.

I remember going to Mavis’s office. I walked in, and she sat me down and got me a glass of water. Every time you walked into her office—a beautiful room in this beautiful old building—she’d offer you water. I’d always say no, and she’d give it to me anyway. We sat in these two big, comfy chairs. We just looked at each other, and she already knew. She asked, “This is it?” and I said, “This is it.” That was the moment I knew—I couldn’t do it anymore.

What was your relationship with dance like right after your surgery? Did you try to ease back into it or step away completely?

Right after my surgery, as part of my recovery, I returned to ballet school and took classes with 10-year-old boys. It was one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had. They were so sweet. At that age, their bodies are entirely out of their control—they’re growing so fast and need specific training to keep up with themselves. And in a way, I was going through the same thing. My body felt brand new, unfamiliar. So, training alongside them actually helped me relearn how to move.

I was so scared of my hip. I was scared to do anything, so it was just back to the basics. It was nice, but it was also like, “What am I doing this for if I’m not going to dance?” So I just stopped, and then I focused on partying.

Did you stop completely?

Yeah, I think so. I was 21 at that point.

Did it feel like you were reliving your adolescence in a way?

Exactly—because I hadn’t really had the chance before. It was so much fun. But at the same time, I was still struggling with this deep feeling of failure. When that feeling was fresh, I was too embarrassed to keep in touch with anyone from ballet school. In that world, the biggest insult you could get was, “Oh, you’re just going to go to university.” And that’s exactly what I ended up doing.

I went to Concordia to study sociology and anthropology. When I applied to university, I had no idea what I wanted to do—I barely even knew what these majors were. Anthropology was the first one I saw… it started with the letter A.

Why Montreal?

Sometimes, I’d go there to party—I thought it was the coolest place in the world. I guess I just wanted change so badly. I was fresh out of hip surgery, and had been unable to leave my parents’ house for months.

So it made sense to me to go to school in Montreal. At first, I told myself, “I can’t stop dancing,” so I took a contemporary dance class at Concordia in my first semester. It ended up being the worst grade I’ve ever gotten—a C minus. My hip was hurting, and I started skipping classes. I couldn’t believe it. Another ego death.

How did your movement practice evolve after this point?

I would rent a studio and just go and do my own thing—it was really healing. I feel like the past ten years—basically since my surgery—have been me constantly workshopping my relationship with dance in different ways. First, I’m trying to rebuild a career, and then I’m just going to the studio to choreograph on myself with no real plan. Sometimes I’d collaborate on projects with people, but that didn’t feel right either—I still felt embarrassed that I wasn’t in a ballet company.

And yet, because I grew up in a classical ballet setting, I couldn’t shake this feeling of being a huge snob about dance. It’s this strange push and pull—being so hard on myself, feeling like a failure and the worst dancer in the world, and then secretly thinking I’m better trained than everyone else. I was constantly trapped between these two feelings. It’s been this massive identity crisis— I’m still in it.

How did you end up working at The Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal?

A lot of my classes had a social justice focus. Then, I took a few First Peoples Studies classes, and I felt, once again, embarrassed by how little I knew before. But then that feeling shifted to discomfort—sitting in a classroom full of well-off, white university students discussing issues like class and race struggles felt really gross and like I was in yet another elite bubble.

I remember talking to an acquaintance about that, and he mentioned he’d been volunteering at the shelter, so I just signed up. I was in my third year when I started volunteering there. I’d babysit the kids, and it was so fun.

Now, what is your role there?

Now, I’m a Family Care Worker, which means I get to work with Indigenous families in Montreal, mainly in the context of mothers who have had their children removed from their care by Youth Protection. I help them navigate the system and ideally work towards getting their kids back in their care, or help them keep their kids when they have them. It’s the best thing ever. One of the mothers I worked with today—who I’ve been closely involved with—her kids were the first ones I ever babysat when I started volunteering.

What aspects of dance do you still use in this job? Have you noticed any other parallels? I’m really curious about that.

I was actually thinking about this recently. This sounds annoying, but I learned to work incredibly hard—basically torturing myself for a goal. My job is truly exhausting—it takes everything out of me—but in a way, it’s nothing new. Instead of being physically drained at the end of the day, it’s more emotional exhaustion. I think I thrive under that pressure.

It’s strange because if I take a step back and think about it, my job can feel similar to my ballet school or private school experience, even though you’d imagine those fields could never connect. In reality, it gave me a lot of valuable tools that apply to everything.

You’re also teaching a community dance class now—where all ages and dance backgrounds are welcome, and there are no mirrors. Was that a deliberate choice?

No, but I’m really happy it turned out that way. If I had the choice, I would have made the same decision. As a teacher, having a mirror would help me see everyone, but as a dancer, I probably wouldn’t be teaching these classes if I had to see myself. Many people wouldn’t return if they had to see themselves either—it’s just the nature of mirrors.

What was your relationship with dance like before you started teaching these classes? Did you always feel open to returning to it?

While redefining my relationship with dance, I went through a phase of full rejection—wanting nothing to do with it. My old therapist had told me it sounded like it was time to officially close the door to dance so I decided I’d stop renting my studio and stop completely. That was probably the most recent phase before I started teaching these classes. So, the fact that people come in and actually enjoy it is wild to me. My most recent mindset was that ballet was the worst thing in the world, and now I see all these people showing up and saying, “This is fun,” and I almost can’t believe it. I had to break up with that therapist…

Ballet can feel exclusive and intimidating, but it is inspiring to see you reshape its context and history.

It feels really good to do. It’s nice to do it in baggy shorts and a baggy t-shirt with your hair all flopping around.

How has your understanding of movement changed since stepping out of traditional ballet?

I definitely learned that traditional ballet can be really hard on the hips! Now, when I teach these classes, there are moments where I catch myself thinking, “Oh God, this can’t be good for us.” I’ve had to adjust my expectations for my own body, but now I’m also thinking about other people’s bodies. It’s made me more aware—like, “Okay, actually, let’s not do that position,” because I can imagine the strain it could cause.

It’s funny because I feel so far from the body I once had—the classical ballet version of me and that whole mindset. But simultaneously, when I take a ballet class, it’s like my body just knows what to do. It’s so deeply ingrained, and it feels amazing. It’s surprising to realize how much of it is still there.

It’s also given me a new confidence in my body, dancing, and in myself, honestly. <spanclass =”highlight”>I’ve managed to let go of a lot of the embarrassment, sadness, and frustration and instead recognize, “Actually, I achieved a lot.”</span> And now, I get to share that with others. I feel fortunate to have gone through this shift.

What’s been the most fulfilling aspect of this new chapter in your life?

I feel so lucky that so much of my life is meaningful now. My job is really important to me and fulfilling. Still, I wouldn’t necessarily call it rewarding—there’s not a lot of tangible reward for the people I work with, who are facing so many barriers. But getting to know them and being part of their lives is the greatest privilege I could ever imagine. I also felt like dedicating myself to a career in classical ballet was an extremely selfish pursuit, so being able to dedicate myself to helping others feels like an intentional rejection of that.

And now, I have this ballet thing, which is meaningful in an entirely different way. It’s also a rejection of the selfish pursuit of a ballet career and a chance to share it with people who may not usually have access to it. I’ve finally bridged my two worlds—after going through that full-break identity crisis, the career-ending, the total despair of “Who am I?” For the first time in what feels like ten years, I’ve found this blend of dance-me, social-me, community-focused-me—and happy-me.

What advice would you give somebody going through an unexpected transition in their life?

There’s no rush. If you’re in a position where you don’t have to struggle just to survive, you can take your time to figure out what works. It’s worth it to go through trial and error and figure out what’s there because there are so many more options than we realize. For the first 21 years of my life, I thought there was only one path, but you can always pivot. It’s reassuring to know that life can have different phases, each with its own reality.

It feels so scary and weird when a door closes, but …one window opens?

[Laughs] I don’t know if that’s what they say. When one door closes, another one opens.

Or climb out the window.

Exactly—climb out the window.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lauren Spear.

Whither China? was the name of a widely circulated pamphlet authored by the respected Anglo-Indian Marxist author, R. Palme Dutt. Writing in 1966, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the throes of the “Cultural Revolution,” the pamphlet sought to shed light on the PRC’s tortured road from liberation in 1949 to a vast upheaval disrupting all aspects of Chinese society as well as foreign relations. To most people — across the entire political spectrum — developments within this Asian giant were a challenge to understand. To be sure, there were zealots outside of the PRC who hung on every word uttered by The Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, and stood by every release explaining Chinese events in the People’s Daily, Red Flag and Peking Review. A few Communist Parties and many middle-class intellectuals embraced the Cultural Revolution as a rite of purification. Yet for most, as with Palme Dutt, the paramount question remained: Where is the PRC going?

Today, forty-five years later, the question remains open.

I wrote the above thirteen years ago. I contend that the question remains open today. Much has changed, however. In 2011, China-bashing was widespread especially where jobs had disappeared in manufacturing, but largely tempered by a Western business sector anxious to exploit low wages and the Chinese domestic market.

But almost simultaneously with the 2011 posting, the Obama administration made official its “pivot to Asia,” directed explicitly at Peoples’ China. As the Brookings Institute ‘diplomatically’ put it, “Washington is still very much focused on sustaining a constructive U.S.-China relationship, but it has now brought disparate elements together in a strategically integrated fashion that explicitly affirms and promises to sustain American leadership throughout Asia for the foreseeable future.” More explicitly, they intend “to establish a strong and credible American presence across Asia to both encourage constructive Chinese behavior and to provide confidence to other countries in the region that they need not yield to potential Chinese regional hegemony.”

To be sure, the officially declared Obama administration hostility to the PRC was neither a reaction to job loss nor to deindustrialization. The Administration showed no interest in recreating lost jobs or restoring the industrial cities in the Midwest. The real purpose is revealed in the simple phrase “Chinese regional hegemony.” Clearly, by 2011, ruling circles in the US had decided that the PRC was more than an economic cherry ready to be plucked. Instead, it had developed into an economic powerhouse, a true, even the true, competitor in global markets; indeed, it had become a robust threat to U.S. hegemony.

With the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the anti-PRC campaign continued, though conducted in an accelerated, cruder fashion, employing sanctions, threats, ultimatums, and even legal chicanery (the detention of one of Huawei’s executives, the daughter of the company’s founder).

The subsequent Biden administration pursued the same approach, adding another level of belligerence by stirring conflict in the South China Sea and reigniting the Taiwan issue. To anyone paying attention, successive administrations were intensifying aggression against the PRC, a process fueled by the eagerly compliant mainstream media.

It has become commonplace on the left to explain the growing hostility to the PRC by the U.S. and its NATO satellites as the instigation of a new Cold War, a revival of the anti-Communist crusades strengthening after World War II. In the past, I have suggested as much. But that would be grossly misleading.

The original Cold War was a struggle between capitalism and socialism. Whether Western critics will concede that the Soviet alternative was really socialism is irrelevant. It was a sharp and near-total alternative, and the West fought it as such. The Soviet Union did not organize its production to participate in global markets, it did not compete for global markets, nor did it threaten the profitability of capitalist enterprises through global competition. In short, the Soviet Union offered a potent option to Western capitalism, but not the threat of a rival for markets or profits. Moreover, Soviet foreign policy both condemned capitalism and explicitly sought to win other countries to socialist construction.

The same cannot be said for the Western antagonism to the PRC. The West courted Peoples’ China assiduously from the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution through the entire Deng era. Western powers saw the PRC as either an ally against the Soviet Union, a source of cheap labor, an investment windfall, or a virgin market. But with China’s success in weathering the capitalist crisis of 2007-2009, the U.S. and its allies began to look at the PRC as a dangerous rival within the global system of capitalism. Chinese technologies more than rivaled the West’s; its share of global trade had grown dramatically; and its accumulation of capital and its export of capital were alarming to Western powers bent on pressing their own export of capital.

In contrast to the actual Cold War, even the most ardent defender of the “Chinese road to socialism” cannot today cite many instances of PRC foreign policy strongly advocating, assisting, or even vigorously defending the fight for socialism anywhere outside of China. Indeed, the basic tenet of PRC policy — the noninterference in the affairs of others, regardless of their ideologies or policies — has more in common with Adam Smith than Vladimir Lenin.

What the Soviet Union took as its internationalist mission — support for those fighting capitalism — is not to be found in the CPC’s foreign policy. Nothing demonstrates the differences more than the Soviet’s past solidarity and aid toward Cuba’s socialist construction and the contrasting PRC’s commercial and cultural relations and meager aid.

Accordingly, the PRC’s commercial relations with less developed countries can raise substantial issues. Recently, Ann Garrison, a highly respected solidarity activist, often focusing on imperialism in Africa, wrote a provocative article for Black Agenda Report. In her review of Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives — an account of corporate mining and labor exploitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo– Garrison makes the following commentary guaranteed to raise the ire of devotees of the “Chinese road to socialism”:

[The author of Cobalt Red] explains battery technology and the global dominance of battery manufacture by South Korean, Japanese, and, most of all, Chinese industrial titans. Huge Chinese corporations so dominate Congolese cobalt mining, processing and battery manufacture that one has to ask why a communist government, however capitalist in fact, doesn’t at least somehow require more responsible sourcing of minerals processed and then advanced along the supply chain within its borders. I hope that Kara’s book has or will be translated into Chinese. (my emphasis)

Predictably, rejoinders came fast and furious. In both an interview and response posted on Black Agenda Report, Garrison’s critics struggled to explain why PRC-based corporations were not contributing to the impoverishment and exploitation of Congolese workers. They cited Chinese investments in infrastructure and in modernization; they noted huge increases in productivity wrought by Chinese technology; they reminded Garrison of the corruption of the DRC government and local capitalists, and even blamed capitalism itself. How, one critic asked, could the PRC be singled out, when other (admittedly capitalist) countries were doing it as well?

Yet none even made a feeble attempt to explain how the extraction of one of the most sought-after minerals in modern industry could leave the people of the mineral-rich DRC with one of — if not the lowest — median incomes in the entire world. This striking fact points to the enormous rate of exploitation engaged in cobalt, copper, and other resource extraction in this poverty-stricken African country (for a Marxist angle on this question, see Charles Andrews’s article, cited by Garrison, but seemingly misunderstood by her).

In their zeal to defend the PRC’s Belt and Road initiative, these same defenders of the penetration of Chinese capital in poor countries often cite the frequent Chinese concept of “win-win” — the idea that Chinese capital brings with it victory for both the capital supplier and those ‘benefitted’ by the capital. Theorists of the non-class “win-win” concept are never clear exactly who the beneficiaries are — other capitalists, corrupt government officials, or the working class. Nevertheless, within the intensely competitive global capitalist system, this “win-win” is not sustainable and is contrary to both experience and the laws of capitalist development. Theoretically, it owes more to the thinking of David Ricardo than Karl Marx.

The PRC’s vexing relationship to capitalism has produced contradictions at home as well as globally. The ongoing collapse of the largely private construction/real-estate industry is one very large example. Once a major factor in PRC growth, overproduction of housing is now a substantial drag on economic advance. Monthly sales of new homes by private developers peaked late in 2020 at over 1.5 trillion yuan and fell to a little more than .25 trillion yuan at the beginning of 2024.

With the private real estate sector on the verge of bankruptcy and a huge number of residential properties unsold or unfinished, the PRC leadership is caught in a twenty-first-century version of the infamous scissors crisis that brought the Soviet NEP — the experiment with capitalist development of the productive forces — to a halt. If the government allows the private developers to fail, it will have harsh repercussions throughout the private sector, with banks, and foreign investors. If the government bails out the developers, it will remove the market consequences of capitalist excess and put the burden of sustaining capitalist failure on the backs of the Chinese people.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the government, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is considering placing “the state back in charge of the property market, part of a push to rein in the private sector.” The WSJ editors construe this as reviving “Socialist Ideas” — a welcome thought, if true.

The article claims that in CCP General Secretary Xi’s view, “too much credit moved into property speculation, adding risks to the financial system, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and diverting resources from what Xi considers to be the ‘real economy’ — sectors such as manufacturing and high-end technology.…”

Putting aside the question of how the private real estate sector was allowed to create an enormous bubble of unfinished and unsold homes, the move to return responsibility for housing to the public sector should be welcome, restoring price stability and planning, and eliminating speculation, overproduction, and economic disparities.

Unfortunately, there will be uncertain consequences and difficulties for banks, investors, and real estate buyers who purchased under the private regimen.

It is worth noting that no Western capitalist country or Japan has or would address a real estate bubble by absorbing real estate into the public sector.

Under Xi’s leadership, the direction of the PRC’s ‘reforms’ may have shifted somewhat away from an infatuation with markets, private ownership, and foreign capital. The former “enrich yourselves” tolerance for wealth accumulation has been tempered by conscious efforts at raising the living standards of the poorest. Xi has made a priority of “targeted poverty alleviation,” with impressive success.

Western intellectuals harshly criticize the PRC’s ‘democracy’ because it rejects the multi-party, periodic election model long-favored in the West. These same intellectuals fetishize a form of democracy, regardless of whether that particular form earns the trust of those supposedly represented. The mere fact that a procedure purports to deliver democratic or representative results does not guarantee that it actually makes good on its promise.

If China-critics were truly concerned with democratic or popular outcomes, they would turn to measures or surveys of public confidence, satisfaction, or trust in government to judge the respective systems. On this count, the PRC is always found at or near the top in public trust (for example, hereand here). Moreover, Chinese society shows high interpersonal or social trust, another measure of success in producing popular social cohesion by a government.

It’s telling that with the Western obsession with democracy, there is little interest in holding bourgeois democracy up to any relevant measure of its trust or popularity. When it is done, the U.S. fares very poorly, with a six-decade decline in public trust, according to Pew. As recently as February 28, the most recent Pew poll shows that even people who do respect “representative democracy” are critical of how it’s working. Their answer to their skepticism may be found “if more women, people from poor backgrounds and young adults held elective office”, say respondents. Those elites who so glibly talk of “our democracy,” in contrast to those including the CCP that they call “authoritarians,” might pause to listen to the people of their own country.

The PRC has shocked Western critics with the breakneck pace of its adoption of non-emission energy production. In 2020, the Chinese anticipated generating 1200 gigawatts of solar and wind power by 2030. That goal and more will likely be reached by the end of 2024. Overall, the PRC expects to account for more new clean-energy capacity this year than the average growth in electricity demand over the last decade and a half. This means, of course, that emissions have likely peaked and will be receding in the years ahead– an achievement well ahead of Western estimates and Western achievements, and a victory for the global environmental movement.

At the same time, the PRC’s successful competition in the solar-panel market makes it the target of global competitors, a brutal struggle that undermines the espoused “win-win” approach. Despite the benign tone of “win-win,” market competition is not bound by polite resignation, but aggression, conflict, and, as Lenin affirmed, ultimately war. That is the inescapable logic of capitalism. PRC engagement with the market cannot negate it.

Western leftists too often simplify the ‘Chinese Question’ by making it a parlor game revolving around whether China is or is not a socialist country, an error confusing a settled, accomplished state of affairs with a contested process.

As long as capitalism exists and holds seats of political power, the process of building socialism remains unstable and unfinished.

The 1936 Soviet constitution declared in Article One that the USSR was “a socialist state of workers and peasants,” a status that was under great duress over the subsequent following decades. The 1977 constitution stated even more boldly that the USSR was “a socialist state of the whole people…,” a state without classes and, by implication, class struggle. A decade and a half later, there was no USSR. Building socialism is a fragile process and one prone to reversals and defeats.

Thus, we should follow Palme Dutt’s sage advice and observe developments in the PRC with vigilance and a critical eye. If building socialism is a dynamic process, we should attend to its direction, rather than pronouncing its summary success or failure. The PRC is a complex creation with a complex — often contradictory — relationship with other countries as well as the socialist project. The cause of socialism is ill served by either ignoring or exaggerating both missteps and victories in the PRC’s revolutionary path.

The post Peoples’ China: What Lies Ahead? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/11/peoples-china-what-lies-ahead/feed/ 0 463341 https://grist.org/energy/biden-liquefied-natural-gas-pause-coalition/ https://grist.org/energy/biden-liquefied-natural-gas-pause-coalition/#respond Thu, 08 Feb 2024 09:45:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=629544 Environmental activists and community organizers on the Gulf Coast have spent years pressuring the Biden administration to halt the construction of terminals that export liquefied natural gas, or LNG. As U.S. production of natural gas skyrocketed over the past few decades, energy companies began building massive coastal facilities to liquefy the fossil fuel and transport it by ship to Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. In response, activists staged protests, organized sit-ins, wrote to members of Congress, and broadly made the issue Biden’s “next big climate test.”

When the administration announced that it would pause its approval of new LNG terminals late last month, the climate movement and its allies were largely credited with the victory. Bill McKibben, the renowned founder of 350.org (and a former Grist board member), began his blog post about the news by saying, “Um, I think we all just won.” The decision reportedly came about after senior administration officials, including White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi, learned that young activists on TikTok were drawing millions of views elevating LNG as a major climate issue.

As if to prove the president was listening, the White House has collected dozens of quotes from climate advocates praising the decision. (In some ways, the activists’ celebration belies the reality that the climate impact of constricting LNG exports is far from certain, and the devil is in the details: While a broader buildout certainly has the potential to promote unnecessary fossil fuel use, it may also speed other countries’ transition away from other, more harmful fossil fuels like coal.)

But a broader, less-climate-concerned coalition, representing thousands of manufacturers, chemical companies, and consumer advocates, has also been quietly pushing for the pause — and stands to benefit if Biden curbs LNG exports. The more American natural gas that’s available to be shipped overseas, they argue, the more unpredictable the price of the fuel will be stateside. If, for example, an unexpected gas shortage in another country means U.S. gas companies can make more money selling their product overseas than they can at home, prices will rise as the supply is stretched thin. This volatility would hurt not only households who heat and power their homes with natural gas, but also the profit margins of big companies that rely on the fuel.

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“LNG exports put pressure on domestic markets, which also result in higher energy costs,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the ​​National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, an organization representing state officials who administer federal energy assistance programs, which help low-income households pay energy bills. “There’s an impact on families that are benefiting from these lower prices. That needs to be taken into account.”

Wolfe said that home heating prices have risen more than 16 percent since March 2020, driven in large part by higher natural gas prices. (Hotter summers also mean utilities need more fuel to power a grid stretched thin by air conditioning in the summer, and therefore have less natural gas for heating in the winter.) The result is that one out of six households nationwide are behind on their energy bills.

“If the administration wants to approve these facilities, they should do it in the context of saying, ‘How do we help families pay their bills?’” Wolfe added. 

It’s not just cash-strapped families that might benefit if LNG exports are limited: The Industrial Energy Consumers of America, or IECA, a trade group representing more than 11,000 manufacturing facilities nationwide, has also been arguing against LNG exports. IECA’s members include fertilizer companies, aluminum smelters, and glass manufacturers, among others. These industries are heavily dependent on natural gas either as feedstock for production or to fuel their operations. As natural gas prices rose in 2022, heavy industries that require large amounts of natural gas or electricity — such as fertilizer production and aluminum smelting — saw their costs skyrocket. That year, multiple steel mills as well as the country’s second-largest aluminum smelter paused operations in the face of unsustainable costs. 

Paul Cicio, IECA’s president, has been imploring the federal government to curb natural gas exports since the Obama administration. The last three presidential administrations “have just ignored consumers’ interests,” Cicio told Grist. 

Biden’s team seems to hope to change this perception. In announcing the pause last month, senior administration officials said that the relationship between exports and domestic prices is one of the main topics they plan to study, in addition to climate and environmental impacts, as they consider whether to resume permitting more export terminals. 

In a call with reporters, Zaidi said that the decision reflected Biden’s “aggressive approach to cutting costs for consumers.” He noted that manufacturing groups like IECA had been pushing the administration for price relief, making common cause with climate advocates.

“You saw, even today, different manufacturers from around the country who represent a diversity of manufacturing interests here in the United States, raising concerns, asking the department to study the impact of expanded exports on reliability and on prices,” he said. 

In an interesting twist, many of the manufacturers who would benefit from a permanent halt to the LNG buildout have themselves been the target of campaigns by the very same Gulf Coast activists who pushed the pause. IECA member companies Mosaic and CF Industries operate some of the nation’s largest fertilizer plants in the polluted Louisiana region known as “Cancer Alley,” and they have been accused by environmental activists of harming nearby communities with toxic emissions. Natural gas is a key ingredient in fertilizer production, so these companies would take a direct hit if gas prices rise. As members of IECA, they’ve found themselves on the same side of the LNG debate as environmental groups like the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which coordinated several protests against gas export terminals.

The United States has only been exporting LNG in large quantities for about eight years, but a growing body of data shows that these exports do influence domestic natural gas prices. The Energy Information Administration, for instance, has found that increasing LNG exports “results in upward pressure on U.S. natural gas prices.” The agency projected that, if additional LNG terminals are built and exports increase, domestic prices could increase by 25 percent by 2050. 

This has not always been the dominant point of view. In approving past LNG terminals, the Department of Energy assessed whether the facilities would promote the public interest. Over the years, the agency has commissioned a series of reports addressing the issue and repeatedly come to the conclusion that more exports would actually improve consumer welfare. An analysis conducted during the Trump administration found that, as exports increased, domestic production of natural gas also rose, mitigating the harm of supply shortages and ultimately resulting in more jobs and higher wages. The study also concluded that households that held shares of stock in LNG companies stood to benefit from their profits.

“These additional sources of income for U.S. consumers outweigh the income loss associated with higher energy prices,” the report noted.

That study, however, has been criticized for making faulty assumptions about families’ investments in natural gas exporters, and the Energy Department is expected to undertake a new round of analyses assessing both the climate and economic impacts of exporting LNG.

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To be sure, domestic prices won’t automatically and permanently increase as a result of U.S. exports. Rather, price trends in Europe and Asia will have a much stronger influence on prices stateside than they once did. This has always been the case in the oil market, which is why political decisions in the Middle East can cause gasoline prices to rise or fall in the United States — but it hasn’t been the case for natural gas until now. 

Tyson Slocum, an energy director at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, refers to this as “importing volatility.” By allowing gas producers to ship a substantial share of American supply overseas, the United States is signing up for a much more volatile and unpredictable energy market. If prices rise in Europe or Asia as a result of a war or political disruption, heating bills and manufacturing bills in the United States will rise as well.

“All it takes is one mishap, one outage, one issue, and you will experience significant price volatility during those moments,” said Slocum.

For example, when an explosion in the summer of 2022 shut down Freeport LNG, one of the nation’s largest export terminals, the loss of export capacity helped weigh down domestic gas prices and prevented high energy bills the following winter. Each time the company announced it was moving toward restarting the terminal, the cost of purchasing natural gas on the market rose; with every delay in the restart, it fell again.

Limited pipeline capacity is one reason for the price crunch. Large-scale natural gas buyers typically purchase capacity in a pipeline, locking in the transportation infrastructure needed to move natural gas from oil and gas fields to their facilities. As a result, utilities and manufacturing companies are often competing with LNG terminals for pipeline capacity. 

“LNG terminals have market power over us,” said Cicio, the manufacturers’ representative. “They get 20-year contracts from countries like China, and they lock in firm pipeline capacity for 20 years.”   

That means that even if natural gas production is at an all-time high, pipeline capacity can prove to be a bottleneck. With fewer pipelines being built, manufacturers are increasingly struggling to compete with LNG companies, Cicio added.  

These restrictions are leading to higher costs for consumers, analysts have found. Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank, looked at long-term natural gas prices and compared them against the prices since the pandemic. He found that U.S. consumers — including homeowners, utilities, and industrial customers — would have spent about $111 billion less on natural gas between September 2021 and December 2022 absent the price spikes that resulted from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when European countries abruptly ditched their Russia-provided gas and desperately sought it from elsewhere, including from U.S. exporters. 

“This is a way for the industry to siphon money out of consumers’ wallets and into the gas industry within the U.S.,” said Williams-Derry.

Critics of Biden’s pause argue the decision may affect international energy security, especially for America’s allies — like the NATO members who faced energy shortages after the sudden loss of Russian gas. “The Biden administration’s freeze on LNG projects is a gift to Putin,” Mike Sommers, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil and gas trade group in the U.S., wrote in a recent column. But the benefits of the LNG export industry’s growth to American national security, and international energy security, are growing outdated. 

For decades, Europe has imported cheap and abundant gas from Russia via pipeline. The energy relationship between the two geopolitical powers has given Russia political leverage over Europe — a dynamic that was thrown into particularly sharp relief when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Europe could only punish President Vladimir Putin so much for starting an unprovoked war, given that it continued to rely on Russian gas to heat its homes.

The LNG export industry, and even Biden himself, advocated for using natural gas exports as a bludgeon to beat back Russian influence in Europe. But since then Europe has been diversifying its gas resources, building out LNG import infrastructure, and stockpiling natural gas thanks to ever-larger imports of American gas. Its position now is far less precarious than it was in the early 2000s, or even than it was a couple of years ago. Last month, a long list of left-leaning European lawmakers signed an open letter to Biden, saying that Europe’s LNG demands are already being met by existing import infrastructure

“Europe should not be used as an excuse to expand exports that threaten our shared climate and have dire impacts on U.S. communities,” the European members wrote.

U.S. Representative Sean Casten, a Democrat from Illinois, is suspicious of industry claims, particularly as they apply to Europe in 2024. “We know that the forward contracts for the new gas that’s going in are primarily going to Asia, not to Europe,” he told Grist.

South Korea, Japan, India, and China are all growing gas markets for American LNG exporters. The industry’s chief focus isn’t international energy security — it’s making sure it has somewhere to sell its product, particularly as the U.S. continues to pivot to renewable sources of energy. (Representatives for the Natural Gas Supply Association and the Center for LNG, which represent LNG exporters, did not respond to a request for comment.)

“For the producing industry to survive, they have to export,” Casten said. “Their success depends on access to export markets.”  

While natural gas producers stand to benefit from more exports and price spikes, low-income American families bear the brunt of market expansion and volatility. Wolfe, the executive director of the ​​National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, said families signed up for energy assistance in record numbers over the last few years, and a record number are in debt to their utilities. In fiscal year 2023, 7.3 million households received some form of energy assistance — a 25 percent increase from the previous year.

“We’re worried,” said Wolfe. “The nation needs a better strategy to help families.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The unlikely coalition behind Biden’s liquefied natural gas pivot on Feb 8, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

]]> https://grist.org/energy/biden-liquefied-natural-gas-pause-coalition/feed/ 0 457526 https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/26/biden-administration-pauses-massive-gas-export-expansion-in-climate-pivot/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/26/biden-administration-pauses-massive-gas-export-expansion-in-climate-pivot/#respond Fri, 26 Jan 2024 13:37:36 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/biden-administration-pauses-massive-gas-export-expansion-in-climate-pivot

Hours after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) announced its preliminary ruling in a case brought by South Africa, ordering Israel to stop acts of genocide in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Public Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced it had fired 12 of its 30,000 workers after the Israeli Foreign Ministry called for "an urgent investigation by UNRWA regarding the involvement of its employees in the terrorist events of 10/7."

"The Israeli authorities have provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel on October 7," Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the agency, said in a statement.

Lazzarini said the agency was opening a thorough investigation into the allegations, while the U.S. State Department quickly released a statement saying it had "temporarily paused additional funding for UNRWA" while the investigation takes place.

As The New York Times reported Saturday, "it's not entirely clear" what Israel's precise allegations are, how the employees were allegedly involved in the attack on southern Israel, or "what kind of work they did or how senior they were" at UNRWA.

The agency is almost wholly funded by donations from U.N. member states. After the State Department announced its suspension of some of its funding, countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, Finland, Australia, and Italy said they were following suit.

Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, toldSky News that the decision by several countries to slash funding for the UNRWA "on the basis of allegations, not proven claims," was "a disgrace."

"The rest of the world is looking at this—they are aghast quite frankly," said Doyle. "How has the U.S. reacted to these allegations against UNRWA? It suspended funding. How has the U.S. reacted to the International Court of Justice ruling that there are plausible grounds that Israel is committing genocide? Nothing. Did the U.S. say it would be suspending the sale of arms, the massive bombs that have been used in the Gaza Strip to destroy civilian infrastructure, as part of [what] might constitute genocide? Not a bit. Is it continuing? Yes."

UNRWA is one of the largest employers of Palestinians in Gaza—where nearly half of adults are unemployed—and operates schools, medical clinics, and shelters while administering housing assistance, emergency loans, and overseeing other operations.

Lazzarini said Saturday that the suspension of funding would "threaten our ongoing humanitarian work across the region including and especially in the Gaza Strip" and said it was "shocking" that countries would halt funding even as the workers in question were fired—particularly since Israel and other countries were long aware of all the employees working for UNRWA:

UNRWA shares the list of all its staff with host countries every year, including Israel. The Agency never received any concerns on specific staff members.

Meanwhile, an investigation by OIOS into the heinous allegations will establish the facts. Moreover, as I announced on 17 January, an independent review by external experts will help UNRWA strengthen its framework for the strict adherence of all staff to the humanitarian principles.

I urge countries who have suspended their funding to re-consider their decisions before UNRWA is forced to suspend its humanitarian response. The lives of people in Gaza depend on this support and so does regional stability."

Cutting funding to the agency is akin to accelerating "genocide by collective punishment, cutting desperately needed relief aid," said historian and former British ambassador Craig Murray.

Doyle wasn't alone in noticing the contrast between the U.S. responses to the ICJ and to Israel's allegations.

"It took [U.S. Secretary of State] Antony Blinken about three seconds to suspend UNRWA aid based on mere allegations that 12 employees [were] linked to Hamas' attack, but despite concrete evidence that the Israel Defense Forces has indiscriminately and deliberately massacred tens of thousands of Palestinians—plausibly a genocide, ICJ said—ZERO suspension of Israel military aid," said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now.

Following the ICJ ruling, U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.), who have led lawmakers in a call for the U.S. to demand a cease-fire since October, released a statement arguing the court's findings put "the U.S. government on notice for enabling violations of the Genocide Convention."

"The Biden administration must not only affirm the legitimacy of this ruling and facilitate an immediate cease-fire—it must comply with federal and international law by suspending military assistance to the Israeli government," said Tlaib and Bush.

Like Israeli officials, the Biden administration has dismissed the findings of the ICJ, with National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby saying Friday that the court did not find Israel "guilty" of genocide.

Journalist and rights advocate Daniel Denvir pointed out that hours after the ICJ said South Africa's claim that Israel is committing genocidal acts in Gaza is "plausible," the news was dwarfed at the Times by its coverage of the UNRWA allegations.

"Israel has killed 101 UNRWA workers in Gaza and has bombed its schools and camps. Guess what you get when you google UNRWA & Israel now?" said Al Jazeera's Sana Saeed.

Historian Remi Brulin noted that Israel has previously designated Palestinian civil rights organizations as terrorist groups "on wholly spurious grounds."

"None of this necessarily means that the specific allegations about these 12 UNRWA members are untrue," said Brulin. "But evidence needs to be provided. And it is quite remarkable that the U.S. could decide so quickly that cutting all funds to UNRWA was the correct, necessary measure here."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The post Can Jerome Powell Pivot on Interest Rates, Again? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.