Neoliberalism: Global Theft

China’s Model vs. America’s Decline

“Trump’s Reality”

How the Rich Stole the World

Neoliberalism, birthed in the Chicago School and evangelised by Milton Friedman, promised liberty through markets, efficiency through deregulation, and prosperity through privatisation. Instead, it delivered the opposite: a global order governed by capital, not democracy. It began with the brutal experiment in Pinochet’s Chile and spread through Reaganomics and Thatcherism, dismantling unions, gutting welfare, and selling off public goods to private profiteers. In the Global South, it arrived through the IMF and World Bank as a structural adjustment program that promoted austerity, debt slavery, and economic recolonisation. Across continents, public health, education, housing, and even water were commodified while billionaires amassed wealth and inequality skyrocketed. This was not a failure of policy; it was a policy project designed not to liberate but to entrench power in the hands of markets and those who control them.

In 1976, Milton Friedman received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, a decision that validated a doctrine with devastating global effects. What was praised as intellectual brilliance in theory translated into a practical blueprint for a worldwide order marked by inequality, austerity, and repression, an order that continues to this day. Friedman’s ideas were forcefully enacted through economic shock therapy, which saw public assets privatised, dissent violently suppressed, and markets idolised while the masses faced hunger. The Nobel Prize, far from being just an honour, provided ideological support for a project that undermined democracy in pursuit of profit.

Neoliberalism as Class War

Neoliberalism was not born in the free market; it was forged in violence. It emerged not from academic debate alone, but from live experiments on the bodies of the poor under military dictatorship. In Chile under Pinochet and in Argentina under Galtieri, the Chicago School’s doctrine was enforced at gunpoint, turning entire nations into laboratories for market extremism, where economic theory was implemented with electric batons and disappearances. Public systems were dismantled, state industries were privatised, union power was weakened, and prices were deregulated. The result was catastrophic: poverty soared, unemployment exploded, and entire social fabrics collapsed. Tens of thousands were disappeared, tortured, or murdered in the name of “order,” while foreign investors applauded.

“Death Squads & Diplomacy”

What began as a theory metastasised into a doctrine. With Reagan and Thatcher as its chief enforcers, the Chicago model was exported globally through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, not as development, but as discipline. Austerity, privatisation, deregulation, and the erosion of worker protections were never reforms; they were weapons in a global class war. The project was not about efficiency or growth. It was about control, disempowering the working majority and securing the rule of markets over the ruins of democratic resistance.

Beneath their internationalist façades, the IMF and World Bank have never been neutral institutions of development. Anchored in Washington, controlled by the U.S. Treasury, and structured to enshrine American dominance, they became the empire’s financial enforcers. From their inception at Bretton Woods, their purpose was to stabilise global capitalism under American leadership, not to uplift the Global South. Under the euphemism of “development,” they installed economic regimes that hollowed out public infrastructure, sold off essential services, and opened domestic markets to predatory foreign capital.

Structural adjustment was not aid; it was conquest by contract. It achieved with spreadsheets what colonial armies once sought with rifles. These institutions did not alleviate poverty; they engineered new forms of dependency, stabilising the conditions for capital extraction and concentrating wealth upward. Where bombs could not be dropped, debt was delivered. Where tanks could not roll in, consultants arrived with ultimatums. Development became a euphemism for surrender: freedom, a footnote in the loan agreement.

This was not economics. It was imperialism, remade for the late 20th century: clean, technocratic, and lethal.

The False Promise of Privatisation: Global Case Studies of Public Plunder

“Takers Not Makers”

According to Oxfam’s 2025 Takers Not Makers report, 204 new billionaires were created in 2024 alone, even as billions of people faced overlapping crises of hunger, poverty, and climate collapse. This surge in extreme wealth is no longer driven by innovation or productivity, but by inheritance, monopolistic control, and political cronyism, revealing that the neoliberal economy is rigged for extraction rather than creation.

What were once considered fundamental human rights, access to healthcare, education, water, housing, and social care, have been systematically privatised, not to improve services but to generate profit. The logic of neoliberalism did not enhance public welfare; it commodified it, turning essential needs into revenue streams for the few.

Under structural adjustment, education was no longer treated as a universal right but as a cost to be offloaded. User fees were introduced, public funding was slashed, and for-profit institutions flooded in. In Ghana during the 1980s, the IMF and World Bank pushed for education “cost recovery.” School fees skyrocketed, and attendance among poor children, especially girls, plummeted, resulting in rising illiteracy and entrenched inequality. In Pakistan, World Bank reforms promoted the establishment of low-fee private schools. A two-tier system emerged: well-funded institutions for the elite, crumbling classrooms for the poor, and a proliferation of unregulated, low-quality schools exploiting cheap female labour.

Healthcare was similarly carved up for corporate profit. The sick became consumers, and care became a luxury. In Zambia, structural adjustment led to the introduction of user fees in hospitals. Child mortality increased, and people died at the gates of clinics they could no longer afford. In India, as the state retreated, predatory private hospitals proliferated. Rural populations were left to suffer in collapsing public facilities while urban hospitals became unaffordable even for the middle class.

Water, the most essential element of life, was privatised with devastating consequences. In 1999, Bolivia sold the water rights of Cochabamba to Bechtel under a World Bank-backed plan. Prices tripled, the poor were cut off, and even collecting rainwater was criminalised. A mass uprising, known as the Cochabamba Water War, eventually led to the cancellation of the deal. In South Africa, water was commercialised under IMF pressure in the post-apartheid era. Millions were disconnected for non-payment, leading to deadly cholera outbreaks. Prepaid meters turned access into a rationed commodity.

Care economies were also sacrificed. In the United Kingdom, Thatcher slashed public childcare funding, pushing women out of the workforce and forcing low-income families into unregulated, unaffordable alternatives. In the United States, Clinton’s welfare “reform,” driven by neoliberal think tanks, replaced guaranteed support with punitive workfare programs. Corporate childcare chains expanded, pricing out the working poor.

Public housing was commodified and treated as a financial asset rather than a human right. In Brazil, IMF-backed austerity gutted urban housing projects, pushing millions into favelas. Land speculation surged, and the poor were criminalised for occupying land they could afford. In Eastern Europe, post-Soviet privatisation resulted in the loss of public housing stock. Countries like Hungary and Poland saw millions priced out of the market as Western investors flooded the property market.

Even energy was sold off, often to foreign firms. In the Philippines, the IMF pressured the government to sell the national grid. Blackouts increased, bills soared, and corruption plagued the sector. In Argentina, the Menem government’s utility sell-off removed price controls and handed profits to multinationals. The result was skyrocketing costs and, eventually, the economic collapse of 2001.

The Marketplace of Misery

Across the Global South and increasingly in the North, essential services were sacrificed on the altar of profit. What was once a shared responsibility of the state has become the playground of private capital. Corporations were not more efficient, except at extracting wealth and funnelling it into offshore accounts. Market logic did not improve education, health, water, or housing. It pillaged them.

This was not reform. It was theft, dressed in the language of development.

Neoliberalism has been exposed for what it truly is: not a path to shared prosperity, but a global project to further enrich the top one per cent at the expense of the many. The number of billionaires multiplied. Global poverty and inequality surged. The “trickle-down” theory, the idea that tax cuts and deregulation would lift all boats, proved to be a lie. Nothing trickled. Wealth flowed upward and stayed there, hoarded in tax havens and asset bubbles. The rich got richer not by creating value, but by extracting it from labour, from public assets, and entire nations, locking them in cycles of debt and austerity. Neoliberalism sank most boats while the yachts grew bigger.

From Exploitation to Cooperation: Why the World Needs the Chinese Model, Not the American One

“The China Model”

The American neoliberal model, built on private greed and enforced by military domination, has failed. It has failed its citizens and the world. Market fundamentalism, deregulation, and blind faith in private capital have led to instability, inequality, and perpetual war. America cloaks its foreign policy in the language of “defence” and “freedom,” but its trillion-dollar war budget and 800 military bases reveal the truth. This is warfare, not defence. America exports conflict, not cooperation.

Within its borders, it has gutted public infrastructure, destroyed unions, and entrenched poverty, all while billionaires accumulate obscene fortunes. Abroad, it has weaponised the IMF and World Bank, forcing austerity and debt dependency under the guise of aid. For the Global South, this is a familiar pattern: loans offered with punishing conditions, assistance leveraged for regime change, and resources extracted in the name of “stability.” This is not development; it is looting, in the language of aid, conquest dressed as compassion.

In contrast, China offers a different model: one rooted in diplomacy, infrastructure, and mutual respect. While America dropped bombs, backed coups, and exported surveillance, China built railways, roads, ports, and hospitals. Over the past four decades, China has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty, marking one of the most outstanding anti-poverty achievements in human history. This was not done through trickle-down theory, but through state ownership, strategic planning, and national development.

There are no Musk, Bezoses, or Zuckerberg pulling the strings. Billionaires do not drive China’s approach; instead, it is directed by long-term public strategy. Its state-owned enterprises manage vital resources not for dividends or stockholder returns, but for stability, national sovereignty, and broad-based inclusion. Its development loans do not come wrapped in regime-change conditions or IMF austerity traps. Instead, they reflect a principle the West has abandoned: cooperation over control, partnership over plunder. In a world exhausted by war economies and tech oligarchs, China’s model offers a reminder that development need not be dressed in imperial uniform

Nowhere is this more evident than in BRICS, which began in the 2000s with Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. It was created as a counterweight to Western financial dominance and has evolved into a development-oriented, reform-minded coalition. As of July 2025, the BRICS has expanded to ten full members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia.

The bloc has also launched BRICS+, an outreach initiative involving Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, and Uzbekistan. This larger network signifies a global movement in favour of multipolar cooperation, trade equity, and autonomy from Western financial control. BRICS is not a military alliance; it is an economic and diplomatic coalition aimed at building an alternative to Western hegemony. Through institutions like the New Development Bank, BRICS members gain access to credit without the destructive neoliberal strings that once tied them to Washington’s economic war machine.

Likewise, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has reshaped development in over 150 countries. From Kenyan railways to Sri Lankan ports and Pakistani power plants, BRI projects offer tangible, long-term gains that Western financiers rarely delivered. These projects create local jobs, build infrastructure, and enable sovereign development. Critics call it “debt-trap diplomacy,” but these accusations come from the same nations that enforced debt servitude through structural adjustment. For much of the Global South, China represents the first real alternative to a Western-dominated order of extraction and coercion.

Where America sees markets to exploit, China sees partners to build with. Where America sees threats, China sees opportunities. This is not to ignore China’s supposed flaws, but to acknowledge that its development model has delivered more uplift, stability, and autonomy to the Global South than the United States has in fifty years.

The world does not need more aircraft carriers or austerity. It requires hospitals, power grids, railways, and schools. It needs sovereignty, not servitude. It needs an end to neoliberal dogma and the courage to reject the myth that the American way is the only way.

“The American Model”

The Chinese model, built on public ownership, diplomatic partnership, and infrastructure investment, offers a real exit from neoliberal ruins. It does not enforce ideology. It does not demand obedience. It provides development without domination, and that is why it frightens an American empire that preaches freedom while delivering bombs.

America represents the past of war, greed, and imperial hegemony. China, on the other hand, represents the future: cooperation, sovereignty, and the right to build a different world.

In China, Trump’s America has been watched with a mixture of disbelief, cynicism, and dark amusement. On social media, he was mockingly dubbed “Chuan Jianguo,” a reference to Trump, the builder of China, for his apparent success in accelerating American decline. His erratic leadership, racial demagoguery, and trade belligerence were seen not as aberrations but as symptoms of a collapsing system. For many Chinese, Trump revealed the rot beneath the rhetoric: a democracy corrupted by spectacle, a superpower unravelled by narcissism. State media cast him as the chaotic embodiment of Western hypocrisy, proof that Washington’s lectures on governance, human rights, and order were nothing more than propaganda from a house on fire.

There is much more to be said about the rise of China and the scale of the challenge it now poses to American hegemony. What has been offered here is only a broad overview, but even at a glance, the contours of China’s transformation are unmistakable. Over the past four decades, China has modernised at a pace unprecedented in human history. It has become the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, producing not just low-cost goods but increasingly high-value technology, electric vehicles, green infrastructure, and advanced digital systems. Its high-speed rail network is the largest in the world. Its cities are expanding, its internal markets are growing, and its industrial strategy is coordinated, deliberate, and long-term. China’s economy is not a speculative bubble but a strategic engine, driven by planning and investment. Its wealth is not accumulated in the hands of a small group of oligarchs; it is spent on improving the lot of its citizens through infrastructure, healthcare, education, housing, and long-term national development. While the United States sinks deeper into political dysfunction, social decay, and economic fragility, China continues to build, trade, and grow.

Its people live in peace, without the daily mass shootings, crumbling healthcare systems, and collapsing public infrastructure that plague American life. While America fixates on expressions of greatness, it lives with the lies and deceit of its leaders and elites. China quietly achieves; it does not need to declare itself exceptional; it proves it through roads laid, power grids constructed, factories opened, and poverty reduced. The Western press tells another story, one of threats and hostility, but to see the truth requires looking beyond the headlines. China is not a threat to world peace. America is. It is the United States that maintains more than 800 military bases across the globe, that spends over a trillion dollars annually on its war machine, that surrounds rivals with missiles and uses economic blockades to strangle entire nations. It is America that overthrows governments, imposes sanctions, backs dictators, and sells weapons while preaching democracy. The actual threat is a decaying empire that cannot accept the emergence of a multipolar world. As the Global South turns toward partnership instead of subservience, toward construction instead of conquest, the world must confront a reality that has long been obscured by power. The future is not being scripted in Washington. It is being built in Beijing.

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