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China's increasing power in the global economy is destabilizing the established system. This book analyses the possible historical trajectories of China and the capitalist world-economy in the twenty-first century. Minqi Li examines the future global prospects from the perspectives of Marxism, world-system theories, and ecological limits to growth. He argues that China is likely to exacerbate many of the major contradictions of world capitalism, which could lead to the demise of the existing world-system. This is an essential text for students of political economy, economics and global politics.
- Sales Rank: #9224609 in Books
- Published on: 2008-10-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .53" w x 5.25" l, 1.10 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 192 pages
Review
[The author] has placed the 'rise of China' from the Mao era to today in the context of the history of the entire world-system. He makes a persuasive case that the very success of capitalist methods in China has so overloaded the capacities for accumulation of the world-system as a whole that this rise has become a major factor in the coming demise of the world capitalist system. -- Immanuel Wallerstein A thought-provoking account of human economic and social evolution. Minqi Li considers the consequences of the entry of China into the global capitalist system ... This book makes a major contribution to the debate over how human society can surmount these challenges while continuing to make social progress. -- David M. Kotz, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
About the Author
Minqi Li teaches economics at University of Utah and has also taught political science at York University, Canada. He turned from an advocate of free market principles into a Marxist and was a political prisoner in China between 1990 and 1992.
Most helpful customer reviews
38 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
From Branddenotes.blogspot.com
By J.P. Franks
I had hoped this would be a hopeful book somehow laying out a convincing argument that China's rise will eclipse the disintegrating international capitalist economy and usher in a new world order focused on meeting human needs in an environmentally sustainable manner. Sadly, that is not this book's argument.
"Chinese socialism was the historical product of a great revolution, which was based on the broad mobilization and support of the workers and peasants comprising the great majority of the population. As a result, it would necessarily reflect the interests and aspirations of ordinary working people. On the other hand, China remained a part of the capitalist world-economy, and was under constant and instance pressure of military and economic competition against other big powers. To mobilize resources for capital accumulation, surplus product had to be extracted from the workers and peasants and concentrated in the hands of the state. This in turn created opportunities for the bureaucratic and technocratic elites to make use of their control over the surplus product to advance their individual power and interests rather than the collective interest of the working people. This was the basic historical contradiction that confronted Chinese socialism as well as other socialist states in the twentieth century."
The author, Minqi Li, was a member of the student dissident movement of the 80s in China. He describes the milieu during which he studied neoclassical economics at Beijing University: "The 1980s was a decade of political and intellectual excitement in China. Despite some half-hearted official restrictions, large sections of the Chinese intelligentsia were politically active and were able to push for successive waves of the so-called 'emancipation of ideas' (jiefang sixiang). The intellectual critique of the already existing Chinese socialism at first took place largely within a Marxist discourse. Dissident intellectuals called for more democracy without questioning the legitimacy of the Chinese Revolution or the economic institutions of socialism.
After 1985, however, economic reform moved increasingly in the direction of the free market. Corruption increased and many among the bureaucratic elites became the earliest big capitalists. Meanwhile, among the intellectuals, there was a sharp turn to the right... The politically active intellectuals no longer borrowed discourse from Marxism. Instead, western classical liberalism and neoliberal economics, as represented by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, had become the new, fashionable ideology."
A turn towards neoliberalism had, by the 1980s, been made possible by decades of Maoist development policy, which had developed "the necessary industrial and technological infrastructure [allowing China to] become a major player in the global capitalist economy." Li does a good job explaining the capitalist world-system, according to Immanuel Wallerstein's formulation, with its separation into core, semi-peripheral and peripheral states. The international division of labor has core states, like the U.S. and Japan, performing cutting-edge production requiring massive investment and organization, and which offer the greatest profit margins; the semi-peripheral states, like South Korea and most recently China, performing second-generation production that was cutting edge decades ago but which still offer substantial profits; and the peripheral states, like Angola and Bangladesh, which perform low value-added production like raw material exports and low-tech manufacturing.
Li argues that China's move from peripheral to semi-peripheral status (as China now produces all sorts of high- and low-tech products for the core states) signals trouble for the capitalist world-system: "the current 'rise of China' as well as the 'rise of India,' could be the signal that the capitalist world-economy is calling upon its last strategic reserves (such as China, India, the remaining resources, and the remaining space for pollution) to make one more attempt to jump-start global accumulation... The current global development is likely to suggest that several secular trends, which result from the inherent laws of motion of the existing world-system, are now reaching their historical limits."
Why? Because the capitalist world-system relies on strategic reserves of labor that can be called upon when existing labor forces begin to successfully fight for higher wages. Since the system needs high profit margins to reproduce itself via investment, and since high wages put pressure on profit margins, the capitalist world-system needs countries like China and India to turn to for their cheap labor forces once wage costs, or lack of effective demand (in other words, low wages that reduce a market's buying power) begin to threaten profitability. But the very process of exploiting labor in China - building factories and creating an urban working class, moving China from peripheral to semi-peripheral status - threatens to undermine the ability to exploit such labor in the future. Li explains: "To the extent that the non-core states have lower levels of proletarianization, workers tend to be less educated, less effectively organized, and under constant pressure to compete against a large rural reserve army [of laborers]. The workers in these states, therefore, tend to have much lower bargaining power and receive significantly lower real wages. *The low real wages in the periphery and semi-periphery make it possible for the world surplus value to be concentrated in the core and help to keep down system-wide wage costs*. However, in the long run, the development of the capitalist world-economy has been associated with the progressive urbanization of the labor force. After some initial disorientation, urbanized workers have invariably struggled for higher degrees of organization and extension of their economic, social and political rights. Their struggles have led to growing degrees of proletarianization within the capitalist world economy." (emphasis added)
This spells trouble for the world-system, since as production costs increase in China as workers successfully fight for higher wages, there will be few alternative states for producers to turn to for cheap, educated labor and efficient infrastructure. Also, China's ever-increasing contribution to environmental degradation threatens to undermine the world economy through destruction of the natural environment of which it is a part.
Li's analysis of economic - and, more depressingly, ecological trends - leads to the following conclusion: "With the decline of the US hegemony (reflected by its ever-declining ability and willingness to pursue the system's long-term, common interest), no other state is in a position to replace the US and provide effective leadership for the system. China and every other potential hegemonic candidate all suffer from insurmountable contradictions and weaknesses. None has the ability to offer 'system-level solutions' to 'system-level problems.' Either the existing world-system has exhausted its historical space for potential new leadership and therefore is doomed to systemic disintegration, or the new leadership will have to assume the form of an alliance of multiple continent-sized states, which will then become a world-government and therefore bring the existing world-system to an end.
The capitalist world-economy rests upon the ceaseless expansion of material production and consumption, which is fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of ecological sustainability. Depletion of material resources and pollution of the earth's ecological system have now risen to the point that the ecological system is on the verge of collapse and the future survival of humanity and human civilization is at stake.
To summarize, multiple economic, social, geopolitical, and ecological forces are now converging towards the final demise of the existing world-system, that is, the capitalist world economy."
What comes next could be a rational world-system of production geared towards first fulfilling human needs, then wants, in an ecologically-sustainable manner. But while the current system's demise is assured, there is no guarantee of the character of its replacement, and, at this point, very little likelihood it will resemble the description above.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Is China the beacon of an alternative model country?
By L. Green-Weiskel
The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy
Minqi Li (Monthly Review Press 2008)
Review by Lucia Green-Weiskel
originally published in Global Politics:
[...]
Is China the beacon of an alternative model country?
As a 1989 Tiananmen Square veteran, author Minqi Li risked his own life to defend free market democracy twenty years ago. Now, after seeing the impact of free markets on the quality of life for working people around the world, Li has become a Maoist/Marxist. Li is not ambiguous or ambivalent. He concludes: "A socialist world-government with global democratic planning will offer the best hope for humanity to survive the coming catastrophes and preserve the most important accomplishments of human civilization."
Li, an economics professor at the University of Utah, presents a China that is on the rise - although not as a military menace, but instead as the beacon of an alternative model country and one that will be asked to "provide system-level solutions to the system-level problems left behind by the US hegemony." Up until now, Communist China through its export-led economic growth has merged with and indeed played a key role in the global system of US-led capitalism. Now, as this system is in a state of demise, argues the book, China as a rising power will have to redefine itself in this new climate.
But there is a problem: Li doesn't see the leadership in China as quite up to the task. "Given the rules of the capitalist world economy," he writes, "can we count on the Chinese capitalist elites ... to act in accordance with human's long-term common interest?" Li makes sure that the reader is well aware that this specific passing of the torch takes place in a moment in history that is fraught with seemingly insurmountable challenges: an economic trajectory oblivious to science and the ecological limits to growth. Moreover, capitalism, Li asserts, is contingent on a form of manifest destiny in which China and its cheap labor and lack of regulations was the last exploitable front. But that final source is drying up.
In the process of discussing the rise and fall of global systems, we also learn something about the current state of capitalism. Li argues that the interstate-competition that enables capitalism and a world system that fosters collective and cooperative responses to global problems such as poverty, climate change and war implemented and enforced by a credible and international institution are dynamics that by definition are mutually exclusives. Thus, one can surmise, if we want to effectively deal with these global problems, capitalism must be the first thing to go.
Although this book presents itself as a rethinking of China's rise, it serves more as a rethinking of Maoist China, and through a rose-colored lens. This is where the credibility of the book wears thin. For example Li tries to illustrate that the 33 million deaths caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward from 1954-56 have been exaggerated. In fact, he argues, the Communist Revolution in China reduced the death rate so much that the death rate spike during the Great Leap Forward can be seen to represent no more than a return to the pre-revolution numbers.
But the book succeeds in bringing many important and thorny questions to the surface: "How will China's internal social structure evolve as China assumes different positions in the existing world-system? Will China's current regime of accumulation survive the potential pressures that will arise out of such a transformation? Will China become the next hegemonic power? How will the rise of China affect the underlying dynamics of the existing world-system itself?" As we watch America essentially nationalizing its banking industry and possible the automobile industry, too, and while China's banking, communication and transportation systems become increasingly liberalized, these are certainly the questions to be asking.
1 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
terrible service and results
By S. Johnson
Last november I ordered (directly from Amazon)The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy". After first being told a pub date, the date was withdrawn and for most of the time I was told there was no date, but you would let me know. When I was still getting this message from you I heard that the author had an upcoming promotion of the work at a local bookstore. At that point I canceled this direct order from Amazon and reordered through Amazon with one of your suppliers that had it in stock and offered quick shipment. Of course it didn't arrive until after this local bookstore event. I ended up getting the book late for more than half again the price I could have paid if I had simply bought it at the store (or directly from its publisher, Monthly Review). You really let me down on this one Amazon.
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