China and the transformation of global capitalism
In 2006, when the panel at the American Sociological Association that eventually gave rise to this volume took place, the world and China’s place within it seemed a slightly different place than it is today. Now, as most of the developed world pursues a largely-self inflicted crisis of austerity following the crisis of under-regulation, China’s forward progress towards a high-level of economic development seems less certain and the social stresses of transformation and increasing labour market agitation and protest threaten the stability and rule of the Communist Party. From the world-systems perspective on which this collection is broadly based it would have been interesting to read the thoughts of the authors on the meaning and import of a negative movement. Instead, we can at least observe their thoughts on the continued ascent of the country. Taking different approaches, as tends to be the way with edited collections, the authors generally agree that China’s development has made significant changes to the global capitalist system and have the potential to do much more.
Editor Ho-fung Hung begins with an introduction that sets the scene for large-scale structural change by identifying three significant developments since the 1970s, during which period the opening of China to the outside world was being considered: the advent of a new international division of labour, the decline of US hegemony and the Cold War order and, finally, the general decline of antisystematic movements in the form of working-class-based, state-oriented mass politics.
In this situation, space is opened up in the international order for a new power to occupy some of the vacated positions. This conception follows the work of Giovanni Arrighi, who is given the position of honour of first paper in the collection and whose ‘Adam Smith in Beijing,’ as awareness of its views emerged, was engaging a great deal of attention. Hung continues with an outline of the nature of the creation of the contemporary system of international capitalism and the movement of the centre of economic growth to the east. This sets the scene for the remainder of the book, in which the different aspects of the means by which China might have been described as moving from the periphery of the world system towards the centre or core are analysed. Arrighi then follows with a paper entitled ‘China’s Market Economy in the Long Run,’ which is the first to mention Kaoru Sugihara’s description of China’s ‘industrious revolution’ that helped establish a distinctive path towards capitalism. It is important to him, it seems, to emphasise the separate path that China is taking not just from western countries but also from other East Asian states that industrialized during the post-Korean Civil War period. Arrighi’s historicization is followed by Alvin Y. So’s ‘Rethinking the Chinese Development Miracle,’ who uses David Harvey’s definition of neoliberalism as a means of analysing the Chinese development model before concluding that while the country may have begun following that approach, it has subsequently undergone ‘a transition, not a rupture or revolution’ to something closer to the East Asian model. This has been achieved through strengthening state capital at the expense of ‘weak and dependent’ Chinese capitalists and building both a ‘new socialist countryside’ and a reinvigoration of research and development and the production of scientific knowledge. Richard P. Applebaum’s ‘Big Suppliers in Greater China: A Growing Counterweight to the Power of Giant Retailers’ broadens the discussion in terms of emphasising the role of non-state actors through the agency of international business operators.
This is an important point to include since it is too often overlooked that Chinese interactions with other countries are largely conducted through the means of corporations of different sorts. To a certain extent, this discussion is furthered by Paul S. Ciccantell’s ‘China’s Economic Ascent and Japan’s Raw-Materials Peripheries,’ in which a struggle is portrayed between the economic agents of those two countries to secure exclusive access to raw materials: this struggle is elucidated through the strategically important industries of coal and steel. This analysis tends towards a realist China versus Japan struggle without considering the extent to which corporations have escaped from the constraints of being chained to the state. It has been characteristic of the East Asian development model in its various manifestations, after all, that its early stages required the use of corporations to enact state-level developmental goals by virtue of which those corporations were able to internationalise themselves and renegotiate the terms of their relationship with the state. Two other papers requiring special mention relate to labour issues. First, Stephanie Luce and Edna Bonacich, in ‘China and the US Labor Movement,’ provide a fascinating overview of the relationship between Chinese and American workers, back to anti-Chinese migrant worker popular campaigns and legislation passed in the nineteenth century through to a consideration of the extent to which rhetoric in contemporary political discourse blaming the Chinese, more or less as a whole, of taking away American jobs can be justified. Second, Beverly J. Silver and Lu Zhang, in ‘China as an Emerging Epicenter of World Labor Unrest,’ discuss the possibility of Chinese workers reversing the last of the three large-scale changes previously identified by the editor as characterizing contemporary global capitalism. The authors investigate this according to the thesis that ‘where capital goes, labor-capital conflict shortly follows.’ That these two phenomena regularly coincide is undoubted but there might be a little more precision employed in the relationship between them.
In any case, the mobility of capital in our advanced capitalist system mitigates the possibility of labour gaining long-term power and authority because the possibility of the ‘spatial fix,’ to return again to the terminology of Harvey, will retain its power for the foreseeable future while longer-term interactions between capital and workers in a specific location has the tendency of changing the latter so that their interests and intentions no longer reflect what was previously the case. There is an unavoidable sense of pessimism about this conclusion. Overall, does the volume constitute more than the sum of its parts? It is certainly true that the role of China in the transformation of global capitalism is approached from a variety of different approaches, although other (e.g. environmental, intellectual and cultural) might have received more attention. Nevertheless, all the papers are to the point and contribute to a useful and important contribution to the understanding of the rise of China and how this should be understood. John Walsh, Shinawatra University, jcwalsh@siu.ac.th