China's Reforms and International Political Economy

David Zweig, Zhimin Chen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134221516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Written by an international team of experts from the US, UK, Hong Kong, China, Korea and Canada, this important and interesting book examines and explores the relationship between the international political and economic system, and China's economic and political transition.

Exploring international relations theory with a China-centric view, the book addresses key and significant questions such as:

• Has the outside world shaped China's position within the global polity and economic, and affected the way China deals with the world economy?
• Have Chinese leaders and foreign policy makers internalized the norms and values of the global economic activity?
• Who are the key players in China in this process of globalization?

Giving vital insights into China's likely development and international influence in the next decade, China's Reforms and International Political Economy is an essential and invaluable read.

PART I
External structures

Power, norms, multilateralism and production

1 Beyond the disciplinary heartlands

Studying China’s international political economy

Shaun A. Breslin

Introduction

China’s (re)integration into the global economy challenges students of Chinese politics, economics, international relations and political economy. Old paradigms and epistemologies developed to understand China in an era of relative economic isolation, where international relations were dominated by the geo-strategic considerations of the Cold War, need, at the very least, to be modified to take into account the changing domestic and international environments.

Many studies of contemporary China have assessed these changing environments.¹ Nevertheless, and at the risk of caricaturising a vast canon of literature, much of what is written on China – particularly from inside China – is constrained by a realist perspective that remains overly statist, and establishes the domestic and the international, and the economics and political, as separate spheres of enquiry. To be sure, there is now a considerable literature that deconstructs or disaggregates the Chinese state, focussing on how localities have interacted with the regional and global economy. Nevertheless, much of these writings remain constrained by bilateral and/or regional levels of analysis that miss the salience of extraregional actors and wider global processes in the evolution of what Gereffi et al. refer to as commodity-driven production networks.²

Building on Payne’s analysis of the political economy of area studies,³ this chapter proposes a Coxian framework of International Political Economy (IPE) – or what Payne and Gamble among others term the New Political Economy (NPE) – as an effective analytical framework for understanding both the dynamics of globalisation and the impact of globalisation on China. Such a framework respects the inherent power of states, but also considers the power of non-state actors in the global political economy, and the way in which the global becomes embedded within domestic policy making.

While Payne advances IPE as the most efficacious analytical framework,⁴ he accepts that much of that theory has been developed through examining the experiences of advanced industrialised economies. And although IPE studies of the implication of globalisation and the state have become more “pluralistic” in case studies⁵ and more nuanced in approach, many approaches still do not transfer efficaciously to the study of developing states.

The objective of this paper, then, is both quite straightforward and rather grand at the same time. On one level, the study of China can be enhanced by deploying the analytical tools of NPE to consider China’s political economy under conditions of globalisation. On another level, the study of IPE needs to become more sensitive to case studies from the developing world, with recognition of the different characters of “the state” outside the advanced industrialised world. It also needs to consider not just national levels of the state, but also the role of local states – an area in which students of China have much to offer IPE theorists.

International relations studies of China

The dominant approaches to studying China’s international relations overemphasise the nation state as the level of analysis, and build on statist and realist notions of international relations. This statist and realist ontology is also reflected in the way in which IPE is emerging as a field of enquiry within China itself. Song Xinning argues that “the divides which separate disciplines and institutions are still very deep in China.”⁶ For Song, this is a consequence of “the social setting in which the study of IR in China takes place”⁷ – namely, the dominance of policy related research, the residual ideology, and the simple fact that the state remains a very powerful force in contemporary China. In combination, these factors reinforce the separation of disciplines and have obstructed the emergence of an IPE which considers the importance of non-state actors (and economics in general) in considering what constitutes international relations.

I suggest a fourth explanation. While there clearly is an emerging sophisticated IPE field in China – as the contributions to this volume amply demonstrate – many Chinese scholars are heavily influenced by US academia and therefore sometimes overlook new theoretical innovations occurring outside of the US. For example, in a paper intended to explain IPE in China to an international audience, Zhu Wenli depicts an IPE which is heavily statist, and largely defined in response to American IPE theories as analytical tools, particularly hegemonic stability theory.⁸ In particular, she argues: “The emergence of global issues is portrayed as the expansion of the diplomatic arena.”⁹ Thus, while the issues governments face are increasingly transnational in character, the solution is still seen to be found in intergovernmental dialogue and processes. Under this approach, economic affairs are often ignored as being “economics,” or more often subsumed as a subject that can be dealt with by state-to-state relations.

On another level, Song and Chan argue that there is a strong concept in China that equates IPE with “the approaches used by Western scholars in IPE studies, such as rational choice, game theory, mathematical and statistical methods.”¹⁰ Again, this view reflects the over-dependence on the US as a source of ideas (even if those ideas are being rejected) in the Chinese IR and IPE disciplines. At the very least, non-statist critical IPE in the Coxian or neo-Gramscian tradition has had little impact on Chinese international relations studies.

The above is not intended to “rubbish” Chinese academia – far from it. Very similar comments could be made about the majority of Western observations of IR in general, and of Chinese foreign policy in particular. Wæver has shown, for example, how publications in the mainstream IR journals are in general dominated by rational choice and realist approaches (and also by authors based in the US).¹¹ Nor is China the only country where the link between academia and policy making can create methodological myopia. Indeed, at times it is difficult to know whether some scholars are writing about US policy towards China, or trying to write that policy itself. Finally, divisions between disciplines are also strong outside China.

Similarly, debates over the relationship between area studies and discipline (particularly in the US) are, like much of Chinese IR theory, overly dominated by conceptions of “discipline.” Broadly speaking, the complaints from the area studies scholars revolve around the notion that economics, and its bastard offspring, rational choice theory, have become hegemonic in academic discourses. According to Johnson, rational choice theorists are attempting to promote their agenda by discriminating against “unscientific” area studies.¹²

It is not my intention here to embark on a detailed account of the relationship between politics and economics in IPE. It suffices to say that within the international financial institutions, economic-oriented approaches dominate much research and also have a disproportionate influence on policy-making methodology. But while it is right to be sceptical of the efficacy of rational choice and economic theory as explanatory tools and methods, it is important not to fall back into a defence of area studies that denies the relevance and utility of all theoretical approaches.

The area studies discipline, particularly but not only related to the study of China, needs to come to terms with the changing geo-strategic environment within which it functions. The Cold War context that Cumings argued drew the lines of demarcation between area studies and international relations has gone.¹³ To borrow a Maoist concept, the primary analytical contradiction is no longer a geo-strategic one based on security, but a geoeconomic one based on increased economic interdependence (albeit an asymmetric interdependence) through greater trade and investment flows. And this means that the boundaries between the domestic and the international become ever more blurred, requiring an analysis of how the two interact. As Gamble, et al. argue, “The separation between the global and the local no longer holds, as the new hierarchies of the global economy cut across regional and national boundaries.”¹⁴

This shift requires an understanding of the dynamics of the external environment, actors and processes.

In the case of “Chinese studies,” the end of the geo-strategic context of study has coincided with the end of a period of relative autarky. Until perhaps as late as Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour” in 1992, Chinese politics could be studied almost entirely in terms of domestic dynamics. And while I would contend that such “domesticism” was no longer efficacious for much of the 1990s, China’s post-WTO political economy clearly cannot be considered without recognition of the role of external factors.

The debate over the validity and future of area studies versus discipline should not just be conducted within the narrow confines of US academia, and in the specific context of a revolt against hegemonic approaches in the shape of economics and rational choice theory. Area studies require revitalizing, but the aim should not be to replace old disciplinary barriers between “area studies” and “international relations” with new barriers.

If we move away from an internecine battle within U.S. academia, we can find ways in which area and discipline come together to enhance each other. This synthesis is done by recognising that there is a set of internationalised factors that most, if not all states, face that can fall under the broad heading of “globalisation.” But we must also recognise that these globalising factors will play out in different ways in different states because of the embedded domestic contexts of each individual state.¹⁵ We need the discipline to understand the former, and the area studies to understand the latter.

Studying IPE in an era of globalization

The dominant approaches to understanding contemporary Chinese IR have a number of pitfalls for researchers. However, IPE does not have all the answers. On the contrary, a starting point for this paper is that IPE itself can be enhanced by taking on a more comparative nature that is aware of the contexts of individual states – and in particular, states from non-core areas of the global political economy.

From Kenichi Ohmae at one extreme, to Hirst and Thompson at the other, there is a vast literature attempting to understand what globalisation really means (or in the case of Hirst and Thompson, to ask if it is even happening at all).¹⁶ As Hurrell notes:

Although rarely tied to any very clearly articulated theory, it [globalization] has become a very powerful metaphor for the sense that a number of universal processes are at work generating increased interconnection and interdependence between states and between societies.¹⁷ [original emphasis]

There is simply not space here to trawl through all the different IPE interpretations of globalisation, and clearly any comment about the nature of globalisation, and IPE studies of it, runs the risk of making gross generalisations. However, just as there are methodological pitfalls in using dominant approaches to understand China’s IR in an era of globalisation, so too there are potential methodological pitfalls in the IPE literature.

Universalism

The first pitfall is one that emerges from trying to make definitive statements that contain universal truths. Trying to find a once-and-for-all answer to, for example, the question of which has power, states or markets, is essentially misguided. The real quest should be twofold: the first goal is to discover differential levels of power in the international political economy – an approach that fits well with conceptions in the Chinese literature regarding the uneven nature of power in a unipolar globalised world. Quite simply, there is a clear divergence in each state’s ability to dictate, respond or react to globalising forces. This study, then, shares an understanding with those scholars who perceive globalisation as an uneven process.¹⁸ For proponents of this view, rather than globalisation leading to harmonisation and convergence, “existing inequalities make it more likely that globalization will lead to an increasingly sharp division between ‘core’ states, who share in the values and benefits of a global world economy and polity, and ‘marginalised’ states.”¹⁹

The second goal is to embrace divergence and, deploying the insights of area studies, consider how the relationship between states and power is determined by the specific setting; to accept that the ability of humans to change history (agency) is constrained by the economic and social structures within which they exist; but also to accept that the balance between agency and structure may vary on a case-by-case basis. IPE should not only allow diversity, but indeed emphasise the fact that there is no single explanation and no single set of relationships. The researcher should consider, particularly through comparative approaches, how different sets of relationships emerge with different balances of power between actors in different and specific historical, geographical, social and political contexts. As Tim Shaw has argued:

any local-to-global social relationship inevitably includes a trio of heterogeneous actors [states, non-state economic actors and civil societies] . . . To be sure, the balance among this trio varies between regions and issue-areas and over time but none of them can be excluded or overlooked in any ongoing relationship.²⁰

This approach does not lead to simplicity. Nor does it lend itself to snappy book titles or defining characteristics that ensure good results on citation indexes. But as Hettne and Söderbaum argue,²¹ the world is complex, and saying this is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• China’s Reforms and International Political Economy
• Routledge Studies on China in Transition
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: External structures: Power, norms, multilateralism and production
• PART II: China and the World Trade Organization
• PART III: Outside in or inside out: Case studies