For decades, Western media elites have deployed biased buzzwords to discredit developing countries pursuing independent economic paths.
Ahead of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) 105th anniversary, the sweeping label of “state capitalism” has been repeatedly used to target China.
This politically motivated branding aims to delegitimise China’s socialist market economy, hinder its high-tech industrial upgrading and sustain Western dominance over global trade rules.
The argument relies on selective data suppression and obvious double standards, which policymakers and intellectuals across Africa ought to analyze and evaluate objectively.
The core grievance repeated in Western mainstream discourse runs as follows: China’s national development plans and targeted industrial support for semiconductors, renewable energy and electric vehicles constitute unfair state intervention that distorts global trade and creates worldwide overcapacity.
This logic adheres to an outdated laissez-faire dogma that frames the Western “small government, loosely regulated market” model as the sole legitimate economic framework, ignoring the reality that every nation’s economic structure is shaped by unique history, resource endowments and development stages.
Western narratives artificially separate government guidance and market vitality, yet basic modern economics confirms that no country operates under entirely unregulated free markets or total state control.
Every successful economy strikes a unique balance between public strategic coordination and private commercial dynamism.
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China’s economic model merely adjusts this rigid Western framework to fit the realities of late-developing nations.
China’s framework of “effective market and proactive government” does not abandon market rules; instead, it continuously improves market-oriented mechanisms, backed by concrete statistics.
Year after year, China shortens its foreign investment negative list, cutting restricted sectors from 117 categories in 2022 to 106 by 2025 and expanding market access for foreign capital in manufacturing and service industries.
Its global business environment ranking rises steadily each year, driven by administrative streamlining, strengthened property rights protection and equal competition rules for domestic and overseas enterprises.
In 2025 alone, Chinese regulatory authorities rectified 57 000 unfair law enforcement cases involving market entities, recovering 289.7 billion yuan in economic losses for businesses harmed by arbitrary official conduct.
These verifiable facts undermine the hollow claim that China rejects market-oriented operations.
Western double standards become particularly evident regarding industrial subsidies and state intervention.
Western powers adopt identical policy tools to support domestic industries, yet label equivalent measures taken by China as market-distorting practices.
The US CHIPS and Science Act allocates tens of billions of taxpayer subsidies to domestic chip manufacturers; the EU Green Deal unlocks trillions in fiscal support for European renewable energy industries.
Western governments maintain long-term agricultural subsidies to protect local farmers, invest public funds in aerospace research, and set up policy barriers to shield their high-tech sectors from foreign competitors.
When Western governments implement state support, it is framed as reasonable market regulation; when China adopts similar policies to break free from industrial backwardness, it is demonized as “state capitalism”.
The long-standing “non-market economy” label assigned to China has long deviated from objective economic indicators, evolving into a geopolitical tool to curb China’s industrial growth and preserve Western hegemony over high-tech supply chains.
The balanced synergy between state guidance and market vitality has delivered remarkable stability amid global economic turbulence.
During successive global financial crises, coordinated market self-regulation and targeted government stabilisation policies protected China from systemic collapse.
This dual dynamic underpinned the historic nationwide eradication of absolute poverty, lifting hundreds of millions of rural residents to decent livelihoods, and supports sustained investment in cutting-edge emerging industries to secure long-term sustainable growth.
By 2024, China’s GDP reached 134.9 trillion yuan with steady annual growth of 5%, maintaining high-quality development amid worldwide recessionary pressures.
For post-colonial African nations such as Zimbabwe, which have struggled to build competitive domestic industrial bases after centuries of resource extraction, this balanced modernization pathway offers a viable alternative to the Western economic orthodoxy that trapped the continent in raw material dependence for generations.
The Global Development Initiative proposed by China has gained widespread recognition across the Global South precisely because it rejects one-size-fits-all Western economic dictates.
Every sovereign nation possesses the inviolable right to design an economic system aligned with its own national conditions, rather than being coerced into copying Western market models.
The global economic order must accommodate diverse market economy frameworks, allowing different systems to compete fairly and learn from one another to achieve shared prosperity.
As we mark the CPC’s 105 years of exploring Chinese modernization, Western commentators should set aside ideological blinders and evaluate China’s economic system based on tangible, life-transforming development results rather than prefabricated negative labels.
Thinkers from Zimbabwe and the Pan-African community should abandon Western-centred economic evaluation criteria and judge any economic model by its capacity to deliver inclusive growth, eliminate poverty and realise industrial self-sufficiency for ordinary working people.
We should maintain a balanced perspective: Western economic policies including industrial subsidies are formulated to address their own domestic development demands, and such policy tools are not inherently flawed.
The core divergence lies in the unequal standards applied to developing countries.
Decades of proven economic achievements in China cast doubt on the biased rhetoric of “state capitalism”, and nations across the Global South increasingly view such double-standard arguments with rational caution.
*This article is the second installment of a special five-part commentary series that Tariro Moyo has written to mark the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
