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This chapter describes the Chinese reemergence on the world stage in the 1970s, particularly following their entry into the UN in 1971, and China's attempt to put itself at the head of a rising Third World movement. In order to rebuild its global standing in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, China sought help from the Third World, which blamed the developed nations for economic injustice. The mantle of “Third World unity” in the struggle for economic justice against the “two superpowers” (USA and Soviet Union) provided China with exactly the platform it needed. The Soviet Union answered this reemergence by creating a “natural alliance” between the developing world and the socialist camp against the West. This policy was successful and ultimately situated the Soviet Union as the main champion of the revolution.

This chapter assesses social, racial, and economic injustice. The marginalization of communities of color in the United States is of unique concern, particularly the marginalization of Black Americans. While it is true that many communities of color have suffered from deep-seated structural injustice, it is Black Americans who have, since before the country's founding, been the group most vulnerable to racial injustice. The emergence of some excellent scholarship in the past few years that has highlighted the place of anti-Blackness specifically as a detrimental force that influences health cannot, and should not, be swept up into broader generalizations around the pernicious influence of racial injustice overall. COVID-19 revealed how the institution of slavery has, over hundreds of years, continued to shape racial injustice and consequent poor health for Black Americans. Before changes to this status quo can be achieved, movements must change public opinion around issues of injustice. Once we understand injustice, we have a responsibility to not look away, to fix the racial, social, and economic inequities which generate poor health. But the path to justice does not end with changes in public attitudes and the passage of civil rights legislation. Achieving this goal takes pursuing not just social, but economic justice.

Beyond the political maneuvering in Richmond, some Virginians kept alive the notion that government could play a positive role in resolving complex social problems. That belief was founded on an even more basic assumption: that social and economic injustice existed, one which mainstream media could not accept in the era of the NASDAQ miracle. The Virginia Organizing Project (VOP) was only one of these groups, but its multi-issue focus made it a particularly prominent fixture on the landscape of progressive reform in Virginia. The VOP began to address the need for a multiracial movement focused on social democratic reform. It raised questions that Virginia business leaders and political elites preferred to ignore. Fostering collective possibilities, it sought to alleviate the sense of fragmentation that afflicted American society in the years after the activist 1960s.

There is a huge financial difference between the citizens of Haiti and the United States. This chapter thus points out that there is a need to be vigilant about the methods used by first world countries as well as international financial institutions which are contributing to political destabilization and may even result in violence and terror in third world countries. The chapter asks the question: what factors contributed to the destabilization of Haiti in its bicentennial year? The chapter proposes an interdisciplinary approach for understanding pressing capitalist development issues with the help of literary forms of representation reflecting on the experiences of poverty and economic injustice.

Gandhi rejected the central idea of the 1948 Declaration that human rights belong to human beings simply in virtue of their humanity. This may appear odd, given Gandhi’s central role in the historical struggle for basic equality and freedom for the oppressed and most vulnerable in society. This chapter reconstructs Gandhi’s position on human rights, his insistence on duty, non-violence or ahimsa, and local and concrete engagement with social, political, and economic injustice. It is evident that Gandhi’s own specification of what justice requires was similar to the UDHR; Gandhi opposed human rights discourse only because he did not accept the presuppositions of the early liberal conception of human rights set forth in the UN Charter. It shows that Gandhi’s position can be understood as involving unilateral duties towards others while justice as satyagraha requires non-violent resistance.