After nearly half a century of market reforms – with billionaires, stock exchanges and world-famous private brands – can China seriously still be described as a socialist country?

This video examines the case against – billionaires, inequality, private capital and exploitation – and the record any serious analysis must explain: the elimination of extreme rural poverty, life expectancy overtaking the United States, the rise of the world’s first green-energy superpower, and a foreign policy overwhelmingly based on peace and development.

It then turns to the structures behind that record: public ownership of the commanding heights, five-year plans, and above all the political question the sceptics too rarely ask – which class holds state power?

Along the way: China’s theory of the primary stage of socialism; Lenin’s New Economic Policy; the Four Cardinal Principles; the direction of travel under Xi Jinping – common prosperity, platform-worker protections, ecological civilisation and the reaffirmation of Marxism; Michael Parenti on “pure socialism”; and why the answer matters so much for the left in the West.