The United States government is trying to choke off China’s supply of the most advanced computer chips and the machines that make them. The target is artificial intelligence, which China is putting to work in its factories, hospitals, railways and schools so that the same labor produces more.
Imperialism did this once before. It blockaded the Soviet Union out of the computer revolution, and that helped bring the Soviet Union down. China, a socialist country that has let in markets and private capital, now faces the same test: master a new technology while the strongest imperialist power bars the door. The blockade that worked against the Soviet Union is running into limits in China.
The first blockade
In the global class war between imperialism and socialism, production is decisive. The productive forces are the factories, machines, technology and skills a society works with. The class question is who owns and directs them.
A socialist country under imperialist pressure has to build up its productive forces fast enough to withstand that pressure without draining the rest of the economy or distorting socialist development.
For the Soviet Union, the pressing question was how much of what its people produced had to go to defense just to survive, and how little that left for catching up in computer technology.
Imperialism never fought the Soviet Union with weapons alone. Starting in 1949, the United States organized the Western powers into a committee known as CoCom that barred the sale of advanced machinery, electronics and computers to the Soviet Union and its allies.
The blockade came with a nuclear threat behind it. In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Japan was defeated but had not yet surrendered. The bombs were a message to the Soviet Union. The State Department’s own history admits it: “Some U.S. policymakers hoped that the U.S. monopoly on nuclear technology and the demonstration of its destructive power in Japan might influence the Soviets to make concessions.” Within months, United States military planners had picked 20 Soviet cities to destroy with atomic bombs.
Some of the scientists who built the bomb feared what a United States monopoly would mean. Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, both working at Los Alamos, passed design information to the Soviet Union. In August 1949, the Soviet Union tested its own bomb, and the monopoly was over. The threat was not. That same year, a United States war plan code-named Dropshot called for about 300 atomic bombs on 100 Soviet cities.
For the next four decades, the Soviet Union lived under blockade, ringed by hostile military bases and targeted by thousands of nuclear warheads. It had to keep pace in nuclear weapons with an enemy that was far richer and could draw on the wealth of the whole imperialist world. Missiles, bombers, submarines and nuclear warheads took workers, machines, scientists, raw materials and energy that could have gone to producing more for the Soviet people and raising their living standards.
Sam Marcy, whose 1990 book “Perestroika: A Marxist Critique” analyzed the Soviet reforms as they unfolded, wrote in 1992 that the most important immediate cause of the Soviet collapse was a sudden advance in the technology of United States capitalism. Beginning in the late 1970s, the corporations brought computers and robots into the factories and offices. They used the new machines against their own workers first: to cut jobs, close plants, break unions and drive down wages while each worker produced more. The same technology then spread to Japan and Western Europe and went into a new generation of weapons. That raised the level the Soviet economy had to match. The Soviet Union, already locked in the arms race, was pulled into a second race, this one in computer technology.
The Soviet Union came to computers late and underestimated them. In the late 1960s, its planners chose to copy IBM mainframes rather than keep developing their own designs, and the blockade kept the newest Western technology out. The Soviet plan could not shift resources that quickly without disrupting existing production. Two races at once, with the Reagan buildup driving the arms race harder, took a heavy toll on the Soviet economy.
In 1985, the Soviet leadership agreed that the central task was to modernize the country’s technology and industrial equipment. Two years later, the Gorbachev leadership dropped that task. Instead of using the plan to master the new technology, it abandoned the planned economy itself. A 1987 law began to dismantle the plan’s control over Soviet enterprises. A 1988 law legalized private businesses. Then came the market itself. These steps opened the road back to capitalism.
AI as a productive force
China faces a different problem than the Soviet Union did. It is putting a new technology to work to build up its whole economy, while imperialism tries to keep that technology out of its hands.
China’s Five-Year Plan, adopted in March 2026, treats AI as a tool of production. Its “AI Plus” program, begun in 2024, aims to change how work is done and get more from each hour of labor in every industry. By the end of 2025, more than three in 10 of China’s larger manufacturers were using AI. It is at work on factory lines and in inspection, developing medicines, moving freight and passengers and in hospitals, schools and elder care. Planners expect AI-related industries to be worth more than $1.4 trillion by 2030.
The plan calls for breakthroughs in chips, machine tools, advanced materials and basic software, and for a national network linking data centers across the country. On Sept. 7, 2026, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology set a target to more than quadruple the country’s AI computing power by 2030, with more than half a trillion dollars going into communications and computing networks.
The People’s Liberation Army uses AI, as every modern army does. China’s national AI program extends across the civilian economy. The Five-Year Plan, government investment and state-directed research are putting AI to work in production, transportation, health care, education and other fields to raise productivity.
The blockade shifts to a new target
Since October 2022, when the Biden administration imposed the ban, the United States Commerce Department has barred the sale to China of the most advanced AI chips and the machines that make them. The Trump administration now permits limited sales of an older generation of Nvidia chips and collects a 25% tariff on them. The newest chips stay banned. China’s government has restricted purchases of the permitted chips and steered its companies to chips made in China.
This is the weapon that was used on the Soviet Union, now turned on a very different economy. The imperialist powers could blockade the Soviet Union without wrecking their own supply lines, because the Soviet economy stood largely outside the capitalist world market. China is deep inside it. It is the world’s largest exporter of goods, with about one-seventh of the world total, and its factories make parts and products that United States and European corporations depend on. China cannot be cut off without shaking production around the world.
China also has the factories, engineers and skilled workers to develop for itself what it is denied. Each ban slows China’s access to the newest technology and at the same time pushes it harder to build its own. The chip blockade has done both. The hardest machine to replace prints the finest circuits. Only one company, in the Netherlands, makes it, and that company is barred from selling it to China. Chinese engineers have reportedly built an operational prototype of their own, though it has not yet produced working chips.
China’s use of markets and private capital creates contradictions inside its socialist economy. In the technologies it considers decisive, national plans and public institutions direct investment, credit, infrastructure and research. Private capital operates within that framework. The Gorbachev leadership went the other way. It weakened central planning and gave the market more room.
Behind the chip, the power plant
AI is built out of physical things: chips, servers, data centers, power stations, transmission lines, cooling systems, and the construction and industrial equipment to put them up. The International Energy Agency projects that China’s data centers will use nearly three times as much electricity in 2030 as they did in 2024.
That demand lands on a power system that is already growing to electrify factories, railways, cars, industrial processes and homes. China’s 2026 investment plan lists power grids and computing next to education and health care as key areas of construction. AI is one large part of a much wider program of building up industry.
China is building nuclear power faster than any other country. Nuclear plants run day and night, as data centers do, without burning coal or gas. Nearly half of all reactors under construction worldwide are in China, and its government approves more every year. They are built for the national power system.
In the United States, Microsoft signed a 20-year agreement in 2024 to buy the power from a shut-down reactor at Three Mile Island that is being restarted. The plant will feed the regional grid, but it is being brought back because a private technology monopoly wants the electricity for its data centers.
Electricity is to computing what steel, railroads and machine tools were to earlier stages of industry.
Pressure from outside
China spends less than 2% of its economic output on its military, a share that has hardly changed in a decade. The United States spends nearly three times as much in dollars and close to twice the share of its economy. China has avoided the burden that bled the Soviet Union.
China’s building drive comes from its own needs. The pressure from the United States pushes on it from outside. The chip plants, power grids, reactors and computing centers China is building add to what its economy can produce. The military can use them too.
The blockade also puts greater pressure on contradictions already inside the Chinese economy, as imperialist pressure did in the Soviet Union. China faces a long decline in property construction, local governments deep in debt and the strains of an aging population, while the government works to raise household incomes and spending. The blockade aims to slow the development of the productive forces China needs to deal with these contradictions.
Who organizes the productive forces
China’s test is to build the chips, computing power, electricity and industrial equipment needed to break the blockade while continuing to raise workers’ living standards. That depends on who controls these productive forces and what they are built for: private profit or society’s needs. China’s ability to plan its development rests on the socialized ownership created by the 1949 Revolution and the workers’ state that protects it.
The Soviet Union fell behind in the computer revolution while carrying the enormous burden of an arms race imposed by imperialism. Its leaders then turned away from socialized ownership and planning. China is taking a different road. It is using planning to put AI into civilian production and build up its industrial base. In the United States, a handful of monopolies are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers.
That is the choice behind the new technology. Under capitalism, the monopolies own it and direct it toward profit. Under socialism, socialized ownership and planning can direct it toward raising production and improving people’s lives. The blockade and the arms race helped bring down the Soviet Union after its leaders retreated from that road. China has so far kept its military burden light. It is using socialized ownership and planning to build the productive forces needed to break the blockade.
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