China and Global Capitalism

Reflections on Marxism, History, and Contemporary Politics

L. Chun

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349453450, 9781137301253
• eBook ISBN: 9781137301260
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Inthis concise historical and conceptual analysis of China's evolving position in a world defined predominantly by global capitalist development, Lin offers a critical review of relevant debates and discusses the imperative and feasibility of a socialist Chinese model, reconstructed, as an alternative to standardized modernity at an impasse.

Part I

1

Positioning China in World Capitalist Development

The question of how to view the position of China in the world in general and with respect to the development of capitalism as a world system in particular is certainly not one of a fixed place of a static entity in a predestined global order. It rather is one of how China has evolved while interacting with other cultures and nations in the modern era dominated by the rise and decline of global capitalism.

What is China? What does zhongguo or the “Middle Kingdom” signify? This question, asked by generations of scholars inside and outside China, admits of no definitive answer. Yet a few common sense premises apply. Above all, the (self) identity of China is intrinsically plural and always in flux. This is especially so with respect to its more recent history, a history of immensely complicated revolutionary and developmental experiences undergone by a multiethnic, multiregional, and multifaceted people transforming one of the world’s oldest and largest civilizations or states. Then, given those monumental transformations, given China’s vast internal diversity and diverse external influences, and given the country’s traditionally competitive local powers, neither the Chinese state nor Chinese society can ever be treated as a coherent monolith—there is never anything like a singular, authentic “Chineseness” to speak of. Even at its material cultural origin, what later came to be known as Sino civilization was based on an intricate interweaving of a variety of prehistorical cultures. With a written record of social, political, and technoeconomic developments over four to five millennia, China is, as always, one country of many worlds.

This propensity to elasticity and formidability of both national outer boundaries and inner delineations is certainly not unique to China, nor is the local tendency of “territorialization within the state” (Cartier 2002). Our concern here with respect to China is with “which China” and with who speaks for it, and why in the necessary language of class and power as related to political predominance and ideologically charged contestation for “discursive hegemony” (Gao 2008: chs.7 and 8; Vukovich 2012: 15–16). The everincreasing intensity and extent of communication and mass migration in the ongoing transitions in China, as in the world, only impart to personal and collective identities a permanent sense of fluidity.

In a corrective bifurcation of linear national history, China, and along with it modern Chinese nationalism, is in an influential scholarship viewed as a “false unity” of study to be “decentered” (Duara 1997). By contrast, provincial narratives informed by regional and global trends have flourished. This fruitful “localist turn,” however, should be tempered so as not to undermine perspectives regarding the structural integrity of China’s modern project of national and social liberation. After all, the historical significance and contemporary relevance of that overall project are certainly not antithetical to the multiplicities of the Chinese situations. Their theorized synthesis is the real “object” absent from the intellectual paradigms of area and postcolonial studies, in which the totalizing force of capital and capitalism is downplayed (Harootunian 2002: 153). “Decentering national history” could also backfire when a positivist mode of investigation prioritizes the local and particular over the national, however bifurcated the analysis might, as it should, be. Without an appreciation of both the complexity and the entirety of modern Chinese developments, the very meaning and analytical insight of locality and unevenness would be lost.

There are intrinsic difficulties in attempting to grasp the idea of China in familiar social science language.¹ Not even postimperial China fits the model of nation-state well. The model was born of the emergence of modern capitalism in Europe, requiring a unified national market and government initially achieved through financial-military means. The modern Chinese state has also never conformed to the received nationalist logic that “the political and the national unit should be congruent” (Gellner 1983: 1). The sinological notion of tianxia represents a nonspatial cosmology that claims “all under heaven” to embrace races and cultures, including intermittent minority rule over the empire and its constant amalgamation. It was the rise of revolutionary nationalism after the first Opium War of 1840 which forced China to be integrated into the world market, indeed along with it internationalism of alliance with oppressed peoples within and without China proper, that conferred on the modern Chinese identity a cohesive self-consciousness. This new and superseding sense of collective identity came into being in terms of the “Chinese nation” and the “Chinese people” through China’s twentieth-century revolutions. The replacement of the last dynastic court with China’s first republican government resulted from the republican revolution of 1911 was the outcome of a unique “historical compromise.” It was achieved, following the events around an armed uprising, by political incorporation among the revolutionaries, constitutionalists, army strongmen and imperial reformers (Zarrow 2005: ch.2).² China’s territorial integrity had heretofore been preserved under the revolutionary banner of a unified “republicanism of five nations” (Han, Hui, Mongo, Tibet, and Manchu).

The communists continued to struggle for national independence, but their revolution was also simultaneously and radically a social one. The enemies of the communist revolution were defined in the party program as “imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism” in reference to what was formulated as China’s “semicolonial and semifeudal” conditions (first in Lenin’s Democracy and Narodism in China, 1912). Fighting against foreign domination in collusion with a domestic ancien regime, the revolution built up its forces from the rural margins with mixed ethnicities. The fact that the revolution aimed not only at liberating an integrated Chinese nation from the imperialist powers but also at liberating its internal minorities from traditional ruling class chauvinism predetermined the constitutional foundation of the People’s Republic of China. This political-institutional situation turned out to be as much a vital asset as a stigma for the PRC, in that its present day territories were a heritage from the seventeenth-century Qing empire (though with considerable diminution). Likewise, the innovative quasi-federal system of multileveled autonomous regional governments could be as much a blessing as a curse. The repossession of Hong Kong (1997) and Macao (1999) as China’s “special administrative regions” was an additional manifestation of the elasticity of a formally unitary state’s external and internal boundaries.

It should be useful to note here a distinguished feature in China’s attitude toward the outside world. Attributable partly to its historical tradition of inward looking, and partly its modern political commitment, however compromised here and there, China, “unlike the major European states, has not tried to colonize areas of the world poorer or weaker than itself.” In broad comparisons, “unlike pre-World War II Japan, it has not waged ruthless warfare against its neighbors . . . Unlike the United States, it has not set up military bases all over the world . . . or sent in troops whenever ‘security interests’ seemed threatened. Unlike the Soviet Union, it has not engaged in a massive arms race with the world’s other ‘superpower,’ nor has it installed client governments in nations on its border” (Schweickart 2011: 174). Likewise, concerning patterns of sea power, “in sharp contrast to the European powers and their colonial-settler descendants, China did not seek to construct an overseas empire. This difference has had profound consequences for the global distribution of national property rights over the oceans’ resources” (Nolan 2013: 80). The “China threat” propaganda is indeed baseless. However, as China has increasingly participated in the global competition for resources, which has its own logic, a reminder of its nonexpansionist tradition is important.

Interestingly enough, instead of this Chinese virtue in contrast with Western imperialism and colonialism, attention is paid to Chinese peculiarity. A lack of the “normal” breakdown of the empire common to the Eurasian trajectories violates the conception of “nation” as the antithesis of “empire.” For Euro-based intellectual sensitivities, this temporal-spatial duality of the two forms seems a sheer anachronism. Their conflation, both descriptively (of an awkward and backward political entity) and conceptually (about disparities between the Sino zone and Europe), indicates impeded development and is utterly wrong historically: “empire” signifies premodernity and despotism in contrast with the sovereign modern “nation” capable of progress and democracy. To criticize the Eurocentric “historical narratives that identify modernity with the nation-state” and then the nation-state with capitalism, as Wang Hui clarifies, is to take issue with the whole “China/West binary” in which China (and its “sphere of influence”) is denied rightful historical recognition as neither “nation” nor “empire” (Wang 2007: 16–18; 2011: 73–85). In a frequently quoted condescending statement, Lucien Pye’s China is no more than “a civilization pretending to be a nation-state” (1992: 1162).³ This depiction endures and is occasionally used admiringly (e.g., Martin Jacques’s “civilization-state” in 2011), but the notion of Chinese “deviation” has a deep seated implication regarding the country’s inadequacy or insufficient modernity.

Overlooked in these binaries is the fact that the nation-state model is itself parochial, obsolete, and complacent. It fails to account for at least three overwhelming phenomena of our own times. First, multinational states have become a norm. Second, imperialism can hijack democratic powers, turning a democracy into the incompatible form of empire.⁴ And third, there is always the categorical difference between oppressed and oppressor nations as between defensive and aggressive nationalisms. Having bypassed imperial disintegration, the secular, independent, and socialist PRC Constitution nevertheless symbolizes the country’s incontestable modern accomplishment. Commitment to the centrality of the “people” is a definitive modern marker of a sovereign political community, be it branded a culture, a civilization, or a (multi)nation-state. This renders dichotomies posing a paradigmatic Europe against a deficient China hypocritical and meaningless.

In the same vein, “China” seems not to fit any of our received taxonomies of “purer” social formations. For one thing, in contrast with the Soviet system, new China was preoccupied with its own conditions as a rural based political economy. Even in its pursuit of industrialization, China resisted Stalinist approaches in formulating its own policies and methods of governance. Moreover, despite close affinities and ties with national liberation movements and postcolonial nation building, China’s revolutionary and postrevolutionary paths were set apart historically and decisively from developments in the countries in the capitalist third world. These complications, reinforcing existing prejudices in European sinology and American area studies, have played into the disciplinary “ghettoization” (term borrowed from Hough 1977 about Sovietology) of China scholarship. Meanwhile, the tendency to look for pathological symptoms in the case of China persists. Exclusion and self-exclusion are both at work in this ideological delegitimation. It conveniently projects “abnormality” and “particularity” to validate the “normal” and “universal.” The idea of “normalizing” the Chinese polity in the reformist ideology is precisely about global integration into a capitalist universe.

If “China” is both concrete and elusive in its signification, global capitalism at the other end of the relationship is ubiquitously tangible. In its “epochal conditions,” formed, developed, and stabilized in the last several centuries, nations and societies have since found themselves. These global conditions interact with specific local situations through economic, political, military, and ideological sources of power (Mann 1986: 2, 22–30), as well as demographic, geographical, and ecological forces. Capitalism is therefore totalizing as a mode of production and extraction, but is simultaneously fragmented by conflicting classes, states, markets, and other structural components and agents working for or against the system.

For Marx, the epoch of capitalist global transformation for the first time connected the disjoint economies and cultures with which world history began. The historical distinction of this epoch is brilliantly summarized in the Communist Manifesto: capitalism constantly revolutionizes production while transforming pre-capitalist relations. The bourgeoisie, emanating from Europe, by rapidly improving productive instruments and means of communication, draws all nations into the world market. The need for market expansion chases the bourgeois class over the entire surface of the globe—it must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere, inventing a world after its own image. Colonial violence is not the focus of the Manifesto, but Marx and Engels emphatically note the “free trade” of cheap commodities requiring the “heavy artillery” that “batters down all Chinese walls” ([1848]1998: 38–40). There is no lack of either moral condemnation or instrumental rationalization in their writings on the capitalist global conquest. They denounce colonial barbarity as manifested in looting and destruction of native societies and the killing, enslaving, and trading of indigenous people overseas. The “civilization mongers” “drink nectar from the skulls of the lesser breed,” as the direct producers are compelled to become exploited and expropriated slaves or wage laborers selling themselves. The capitalist primitive accumulation is thereby compiling a page “in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” ([1867]1971: 146, 738; in Avineri 1969: 93).

Of the main conceptualizations within the Marxist framework of capitalist global expansion, “uneven and combined development” stands out. This thesis is concerned with the potential “privilege of backwardness” initially depicted by the Russian narodnik and confirmed by the Bolshevik theorists. Given the prospect of the proletarian revolutions stirring up the capitalist strongholds, socialism instigated at the “weak links” of imperialist chains can catch up economically with more advanced regions (Trotsky 1959; Rosenberg 1996; Veblen 1990: 253). The logic of the margin overtaking the core through compressing more regular developmental stages in this perspective anticipates the idea of shifting power centers of the global system. When a flourishing China led the way in outputs, Europe was backward at the global periphery. Later, the decline of China and rise of Europe offered another case of uneven development in world history. Once a center becomes too rigid to be open to learning and adaptation, when stability turns into inflexibility or stagnation, it loses its advantages and begins to develop vulnerabilities. The time then comes for a new center to form and grow (see case analysis in Amin 1980).

In the world system theory, scrutiny of capitalism begins with the “long sixteenth century” (1350–1650), when it began to grow globally. The history of this systemic formation is shown to be a process of relentless capital accumulation, not only domestically but also through colonization, intraimperialist wars, unequal exchange between rich and poor countries, and deprivation and subordination of the peripheries (Amin 1976; Frank 1978; Wallerstein 2004). In the same vein, “space” is an appealing analytical tool of “historical-geographical materialism.” Capitalist “spatial fix” in its double denotation refers to borderless capital flows in the form of physical investment as well as to the function of relaxing or transferring crises. In the vein of the earlier insights, the “uneven geographical development” of “accumulation by dispossession” driven by the capitalist class and state in search of sustained profits is highlighted (Harvey 2006: 42–46, 90–109; 2010; Arrighi 2009).⁵

In particular, as an adventure of hegemony building, capitalist development relies on regional and global power networks. These networks enable ever freer movement of evermore financialized international capital (Arrighi 1994: ch.1, 96ff; 2007: 89–96, 140–161). The observation regarding the financialization of capitalism has its intellectual origin in the classic Marxist analysis of financial capital, overaccumulation, and imperialism by Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital) among others. These trends, augmented by a virtual economy and “casino capitalism” (Strange 1986) largely severed from real material production in the post–Bretton Woods era, have peaked to engender a series of financial crises. The lost fiscal capability without gold standard and international balance of payment have enabled primarily the United States to freely enlarge and export its inflation, credit and deficit, along with liberalization of transaction in speculative investments. This “new global financial architecture” facilitates easy international transfer of liquid “surplus fictitious capital” to wherever it can be most profitable (Harvey 2010: 16, 30).

Among non-Marxist thinkers, capitalism is generalized as a convergent modern “commercial economy” and the end form of historical evolution. Its problems are variously recognized but are seen as overshadowed by its necessity or advantages—accelerated production and circulation, spread of liberal values, individual rights and market democracy, or international balance of power. A more interesting approach is to trace business cycles of capitalism in the light of periodic “creative destructions,” which, following Marx, are seen as strikes generated from within the system’s own technological and innovative successes. Such cycles could even lead to a socialist conversion, like it or not, through the regulatory apparatus, corporatist accommodation and labor unionization (Schumpeter 1962). In an especially critical perception of modern capitalism as a socially destructive transformation, the stark utopia of the “self-adjusting market” is seen as potentially “annihilating the human and natural substance of society.” A predictable “double movement” of social self-defense is thus bound to arise (Polanyi 2001: 3, 45ff, part III). This critique is directly resonant with respect to China’s present developmental costs and social tensions; market integration and commodification of labor and society in general appear to have gone farther in China than in most other ex-communist states and transitional economies. Needless to add that, having experienced an indigenous revolution and thoroughly anticapitalist radicalism, the Chinese should not have needed any such exposition from a foreign source.

For our concern here with China’s past and future trajectories in terms of its position in the world system or its evolving relationship with the global capitalist political economy, particularly worth noting is also Fernand Braudel’s distinction between market and capitalism. For him, both are about accumulative augmentation of material and monetary wealth, as well as short and long distance trade constitutive of locally and globally nested productive and commercial activities. But “capitalism” is not merely a “market economy” and dependent on a specific structural constellation of state promotion and protection (1980: 31, 34, 48; 1992: 232–238). Instead of the “surplus value” central to the Marxist notion of “economic base,” this non-Marxist observation confirms the importance of proactive or reactive functions of the state in the “superstructure”—never mind if th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Notes
• References
• Index