by Sydney Loving

This is an expanded version of an interview I gave to FightBack! News about the 2025 Friends of Socialist China delegation, which recently returned from a ten-day visit across five cities in China.

Traveling to China

The delegation was organized by Friends of Socialist China, a political project aiming to strengthen understanding and support for China on the basis of solidarity and truth. I repped Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the delegation included folks from Black Alliance for Peace, Workers World Party, Progressive International, the Communist Party of Britain’s Young Communist League, Black Liberation Alliance, Qiao Collective, Iskra Books, and others. We were invited by the China NGO Network for International Exchanges, and over ten days we visited Xi’an, Yan’an, Dunhuang, Jiayuguan, and Shanghai.

Traveling to a range of areas, we got to investigate how China is building socialism, saw the incredible advances they’ve made in seventy-six years of socialist construction, and had awesome dialogues about how we can better counter the negative narratives and Cold War-style lies we’re bombarded with in the West. Ultimately what we found was a country led by a forward-thinking party of the people, with the purpose of carving out a better future for everybody.

China’s Path of Development

To really understand how remarkable China’s development is, you’ve got to understand the history and what life was like for most people. Before the revolution in 1949, China was totally devastated by imperialism and foreign occupation, brutal feudalism, man-made famines, warlordism, etc. Life expectancy in the rural areas was as low as twenty-four years. In Xi’an, we went to some ancient historical sites, and the terracotta generals and statues of noblewomen there were plump—because mass starvation was a feature of society for centuries. So socialism had all this to overcome.

We went to Yan’an, which was really the cradle of the revolution from 1935 to 1947. The Red Army re-grouped there after the Long March, and the CPC held its 7th National Congress there, (sixteen long years after the 6th Congress, because they were fighting Japanese imperialism and the KMT) where Mao Zedong Thought was crystalized. They fought against dogmatism and made the decision to be the party of the masses of Chinese people. When they built these political structures and elected the representatives to the Congress, they used a system of bowls and beans so people who couldn’t read could vote for their chosen candidates.

Now, seventy-six years later, we saw a country with the largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity. Even smaller cities there are high-tech and increasingly green, life expectancy is over seventy-eight years, and of course, over 800 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty—and we’re not just talking by dollar amounts. We’re talking guaranteed food, clothing, housing, electricity and water, healthcare, and education. 

Capitalism is just not capable of that kind of project. They did it through central planning and mass mobilization. Every single city we visited showed how the Communist Party is guiding development that puts people first.

Differences in Daily Life

It really feels very different than cities in the U.S., even our biggest cities. The streets are clean, walkable, and well-organized despite how populous they are, to the point where moms and their kids would just walk across the intersections, confident that the cars would stop for them. There are lots of electric vehicles, and things are designed with the needs of the elderly, children, and workers in mind. Even at one of our hotels, the workers would all meet in the quad for a dance/exercise in the mornings. It was really peaceful but lively, with parks and gardens everywhere, and tons of free activities and access to culture and historical sites.  

In Xi’an and Dunhuang especially, we saw how thousands of years of civilization are being preserved as part of people’s living identity. And with internal tourism being a big deal, museums and sites were full of schoolkids, seniors, and families. To me it was clear that having history and culture belong to the people is part of the revolutionary spirit.

And unlike cities in the U.S., we saw almost no homelessness. In ten days, traveling around five cities, I saw just one person begging on the street with a QR code in the bottom of a pan. Compare that to San Francisco or New York, where you have entire neighborhoods of encampments. 

Also, the technology was unreal, from little robots that take the elevator to deliver food to your hotel room to the airports where you just stand in front of a camera and it displays all your gate and flight info. Our hosts advised against us taking the always-on-time bullet train because we Westerners were too slow with all our luggage and definitely would’ve been late, but the normal train was awesome, too. 

Touring Northwestern China

We went to Gansu Province, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, one of the most historically impoverished parts of China. But we were really blown away by what they’re doing there. 

In Jiayuguan, we visited JISCO, a state-owned steel company that the workers built the whole city around in the 1950s. Today, green areas cover 42% of the city, with ponds and parks. (Remember, this is the Gobi Desert.) It’s a testament to the level of development of the productive forces that now JISCO even has a dairy farm and a winery with the largest indoor wine cellar in Asia. (Yes, we tasted the wine—delicious.) We also toured the Dunhuang molten salt solar power plant, which can store energy at night, and a smart grid AI control center that helps reduce carbon output across the province. We asked a worker there about the difference between how their power grid works vs. how ours works in the U.S., and he modestly said, “well our grid never goes down.” That hit hard, being from Texas. 

There’s a big emphasis on ecological modernization. They’re really transforming a desert into a livable, sustainable place. It’s a testament to how poverty alleviation and environmentalism go hand in hand under socialism.

China is also proving that technology isn’t inherently anti-human. In Shanghai we went to a robotics facility where they demonstrated the advancements for surgery and industry, and a Lenovo factory where they showed off how they’re partnering with the school system to bring advanced tech into rural classrooms. The difference is who controls the technology, under what system, and for what purpose.

For China, development that leaves some folks behind means failure. That’s why they focus on balancing the regions, uplifting the west and northwest instead of simply letting wealth accumulate on the coast. So after the success of the massive poverty alleviation projects (which even the UN can’t deny) the next phase is “common prosperity”.  

The Electrical Grid

This is one place where the contrast with the U.S. really hits you. And it’s not just about the tech; In the U.S., the grid is fragmented and everything is profit-driven, so electricity is treated as a commodity instead of a public good that human life depends on. 

In terms of the grid, about 70% of transmission lines are past the lifespan they were built for. A lot of outages come from that—old poles and wires that nobody wants to pay to replace. The American Society of Civil Engineers actually gave our energy infrastructure a D+ in 2025. 

Then you add fragmentation, which is why Texas set up its own system, ERCOT, basically to dodge federal oversight. That caused big problems during Winter Storm Uri in 2021 because we couldn’t easily get power from other states. Generators froze, the natural gas supply failed, and they hadn’t spent the money to winterize the system despite warnings after the 2011 freeze. In some places you had people getting billed for $9,000 per megawatt-hour, because the public utility commission removed the price cap on electricity during the freeze. In my city, Dallas, I remember the power being off for days and even weeks longer in the poorer neighborhoods. It was outrageous. People froze to death. Officially, 246 people died.

Puerto Rico is a colony of the U.S., and Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 caused the longest blackout there in U.S. history. Some people didn’t have power for nearly a year. The grid was privatized after that, but did it fix the problem? Of course not. There are still significant blackouts and much higher electricity prices than in the U.S. mainland. In 2022, a single fire at a substation knocked out the grid for the entire island. There are the same issues of deferred maintenance and the profit-driven contracts. The U.S. grid is basically held together with duct tape and prayers, and we know climate change is going to bring more extreme weather patterns—in fact, they’re already here. 

Now contrast that with China. Their grid is overwhelmingly public, and run by two massive SOE’s: State Grid Corporation of China and China Southern Power Grid. They serve over a billion people, and because it’s state-planned, they can do things to a scale and level of coordination that’s difficult for us to imagine.

They built the largest ultra-high-voltage transmission system in the world. That means if you generate hydro in the southwest or solar in the northwestern desert, you can ship that power thousands of miles to wherever it’s needed without huge losses. They’re also rolling out the smart grids like the one we toured in Jiayuguan, that use AI to detect faults and reroute electricity in seconds. In Jiangsu province, their “self-healing” grid can restore power in under twenty seconds. Compare that to waiting hours, days or weeks after an outage in the U.S. 

China’s grid was tested recently, too, during the brutal 2022 heatwave and drought, when hydropower in Sichuan collapsed because reservoirs dried up. The system bent but it didn’t break, and they managed rolling shortages, prioritizing residential users while they stabilized supply. Imagine Texas in 2021, but instead of mass death and chaos you had a centralized response that kept the lights on for most people.

In China, the grid is literally planned as part of their five-year national strategy. In the U.S., it’s planned around whether private companies can make a profit.

And the numbers back it up. In 2024 alone, China added 373 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity. That’s almost the total installed capacity of the entire U.S. electricity system. By the end of the year, renewables made up more than half their grid capacity—they’re actually building the future grid at a breakneck speed. 

So when that worker in Gansu told us “our grid never goes down,” it wasn’t bragging, it was stating a basic fact. Socialism in action.

The role of the Communist Party in Daily Life

The Communist Party was everywhere. They just celebrated 100 million members (that’s up from about 4 million members in 1949, by the way). Villages, hospitals, schools, and factories all have Party branches. In Jiayuguan we passed one of the ‘party centers’, where our guides told us people can go and ask questions or get help from cadres, even childcare.

Again, it’s so different from political parties here. Local officials are graded on how well they serve the people, with the Party being a meritocracy in that sense. You can’t buy your way into leadership like you can in political parties here in the U.S.

Actually, to rise the ranks in the Party, you have to demonstrate your dedication and service to the people. One Party member who was a teacher and an impromptu tour guide on our bus summed it up by saying it’s a feeling of pride in how far they’ve come and in where they’re going. And for good reason. 

The CPC’s presence isn’t shadowy or abstract. It’s doctors giving free checkups, committees organizing street sanitation, and workers shoring up safety conditions. It proves why they were able to defeat Japanese fascism and the KMT: because they were, and still are, deeply rooted in the masses.

Lessons for Revolutionaries in the U.S.

We know that monopoly capitalism is a dying system, so one of the lessons for everyone is that socialism works. This is real life, so it’s not a utopia, and there are contradictions and improvements to be made in everything. But it’s doing the most important work there is, which is lifting up people’s lives and solving huge, complicated problems like poverty, climate change, and threats of war, with creativity and flexibility in changing times. If you get the chance, you should definitely visit and see for yourselves.

But it’s not enough to just admire China. For revolutionaries here, we have to understand our tasks. The biggest obstacle to a peaceful, dignified future for everybody is U.S. imperialism. The same system that bombs Palestine, blockades Cuba, funds coups in Africa, and would like to wage war on China. 

We are earning leadership in all the strands of the people’s struggle and building a revolutionary movement at home, to create a party of the working class, rooted in the people, with the same agility and clarity of purpose that China’s communists have shown for almost a century. That being said, there’s no copy-pasting of China’s path to development. We have to apply revolutionary science to our own conditions, time and place. Socialism is the future; in many respects, China is showing the way, but it’s true for all of us. People in every corner of the world deserve to live with dignity and peace. We will get there if we fight for it.

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Sydney Loving traveled to China as part of the 2025 Friends of Socialist China delegation. She is a member of the Central Committee of Freedom Road Socialist Organization and co-chairs the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.