Whenever I tell Chinese people that I am an American Marxist, their heads turn and a look of shock comes over them. I typically respond with, "How could I not be?"

It's a question I kept returning to while reading Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, because it gave language and direction to the struggles I had lived through and showed me what freedom can look like when it becomes a project rather than a slogan.

In the United States, millions of people in my own community suffer long hours, low wages, and a lack of health insurance — people who fork over most of their paycheck to pay rent, who live in massive debt, and whose children go hungry and can't get the care and education they need. This is not to mention the intensified state violence against those standing up for their rights, the violence of poverty against undocumented immigrants and Black people, and the colonial violence my country has perpetrated all over the world.

For me, it was unconscionable to see this and do nothing. I dropped out of my undergraduate studies to join a labor union. We went on strike, and we won pay raises, free childcare, and the best healthcare plan in the service industry.

What I learned from these experiences is that "political" is not a passive term. It doesn't just happen in boardrooms, parliaments, and offices — it's the struggle all around us, and it must be studied in a way that puts the people first. That's why I began to study dialectical materialism and came to see Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and President Xi Jinping as pioneers in the unity of theory and practice.

That unity is not abstract — it is expressed in governance and can be seen in President Xi's six "musts" at all levels of society. In the US — the richest country in the world — I didn't see a single hospital organized for health rather than profit, a housing complex not used for speculation, or a national official concerned with anything but donors and re-election. Here in China, everything is the opposite. The people here — unlike Black and other impoverished communities in the US — do not fear the police; instead, the police are core to the community and to conflict resolution. At work, people have power, and financial security is guaranteed. City and village committees do not bend, deregulate, and impoverish their people to meet the needs of investors. Instead, they own and lease land for jobs and economic development. As a result, you get a country whose people are prosperous, whose cities are beautiful, and whose successive generations live better than the last, with a government that has a harmonious relationship with its people.

I heard my whole life that the US was the "beacon of the free world", yet "freedom" was always just a slogan — never a project. The greatest realization I have made in my brief time discovering China is that freedom is being made real. Every new bridge, new job, community art project, each new technology, and every new tree planted is not developed blindly for profit. Instead, Marxism and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era synthesize and guide brilliant minds and the labor force to put the people first. Freedom is greater convenience, fewer hours mired in poverty, cleaner air, and the ability to fulfill one's dreams at no one else's expense. That is not only the beauty — but the science — of the Chinese dream that I see every single day.

China makes me proud to be a freedom-loving socialist and gives me hope that all nations can learn from its path — not only toward national rejuvenation, but toward blossoming into a country humanity itself can be proud of.

Written by Austin Hicks, a journalist and former trade unionist from the US, now a graduate student in the School of Politics and International Relations at East China Normal University in Shanghai. His research focuses on the role global labor aristocracy and unequal exchange play in the development of monopoly capitalism.