Ho-fung Hung

Rise of China and the global overaccumulation crisis

ABSTRACT This paper assesses the sources of potential instability of Chinas political economy by expositing the limits of the post-Mao regime of capital accumulation in historical and comparative perspectives. It argues that the new spatial and socio-political orders under this regime, while propelling Chinas economic miracle, also contribute to the internalization of the global overaccumulation crisis, which has been haunting the world capitalist system since the late 1960s, into Chinas national economy. Whereas decentralization of regulatory authority of the state accelerates overinvestment among local economic agents, breakdown of the Maoist social compact and the subsequent class polarization foster underconsumption. The resulting structural imbalance of the economy leads to the risk of falling profit across key sectors and Chinas over-reliance on the export market, the expansion of which has hinged much on the debt-financed and unsustainable consumption spree in the US. A full-fledged overaccumulation crisis within China in the form of extensive bankruptcy of enterprise, surging unemployment and financial turmoil will certainly trigger extensive global repercussions, given Chinas weight in the global economy. This crisis, nonetheless, is not inevitable, and can plausibly be averted through a recentralization of the states economic regulatory functions and income redistribution. No matter whether and how such a crisis unfolds, nonetheless, it is not likely to stop the shift of the center of gravity of global capitalism to Asia in the long run.

Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900

This paper examines the long-term development of Orientalism as an intellectual field, with the European learning of China between ca.1600 and ca.1900 as an exemplary case. My analysis will be aided by a theoretical framework based on a synthesis of the world-system and network perspectives on long-run intellectual change. Analyzing recurrent debates on China within European intellectual circles, I demonstrate that the Western conception of the East has been oscillating between universalism and particularism, and between naive idealization and racist bias. This oscillation is a function as much of the changing political economy of the capitalist world-system as of the endogenous politics of the intellectual field. Despite their contrasting views, both admirers and despisers of the East viewed non-Western civilizations as uniform wholes that had never changed. I argue that the fundamental fallacy of Orientalism lay, not in its presumptions about the ontological differences between East and West and the formers inferiority, as previous critics of Orientalism have supposed, but in its reductionism. Understanding non-Western civilizations in their full dynamism and heterogeneity is a critical step toward the renewal of the twentieth-century social theories that were built upon and impaired by the Orientalist knowledge accumulated in the previous centuries.

Protest with Chinese characteristics : demonstrations, riots, and petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty

List of FiguresList of TablesIllustrations of Chinese Protest from Qing Times to Present PrefaceIntroductionChapter 1. Market Expansion, State Centralization, and Neo-Confucianism in Qing ChinaChapter 2. Documenting the Three Waves of Mid-Qing ProtestChapter 3. Filial-Loyal Demonstrations, 1740-1759Chapter 4. Riots Into Rebellion, 1776-1795Chapter 5. Resistance and Petitions, 1820-1839Chapter 6. Mid-Qing Protests in Comparative PerspectiveEpilogue. The Past in the PresentNotesReferencesIndex

Globalization and Global Inequality: Assessing the Impact of the Rise of China and India, 1980–20051

This article uses updated purchasing power parity measurements of countries’ income and a new strategy for approximating global inequality to examine how global income inequality—as a combination of increasing average within-country inequality and decreasing between-country inequality—changed in the period 1980–2005. In view of the overwhelming influence of China and India on trends in global inequality change, the authors base their strategy on estimating the change in world average within-country inequality from change in within-country inequality of these two countries. The authors find that global inequality decreased continuously throughout the period. They also project that global inequality will likely rise again in the next 25 years unless the stellar economic performance of China and India spreads widely to other developing countries.

Agricultural Revolution and Elite Reproduction in Qing China: The Transition to Capitalism Debate Revisited

Recent actor-centric theory about the historical rise of capitalism emphasizes the role of the autonomous agrarian elite in fostering a sustained agricultural revolution. This revolution generated ample agrarian surplus, in the form of rural elites elevated income, to fuel a capitalist-industrial takeoff in late-eighteenth-century England. The nontransition to capitalism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China, despite the vast surplus generated in its advanced agrarian sector, shows that high agricultural productivity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a capitalist takeoff. By comparing Qing China with eighteenth-century England, where capitalist industrialization erupted spontaneously, and nineteenth-century Japan, where capitalist industrialization succeeded under intensive state sponsorship, this article argues that a strong urban entrepreneurial elite, capable of centralizing the agrarian surplus and investing it in productive industrial innovation, were as important as the existence of the surplus itself in fomenting capitalist transition. The reproduction of the elite in eighteenth-century China was constrained, not by the anticommercial “oriental despotic” state as presumed in earlier literature, but by the states paternalist disposition in managing urban class conflict. Capitalist-industrial development in China was further impeded in the nineteenth century, when a nexus of local predatory-military elite emerged in response to millenarian uprisings and wasted most of the agrarian surplus in their accumulation of means of violence. The negative case of China helps us advance the actor-centric model of capitalist transition by bringing urban entrepreneurs and class politics back in.

Money Supply, Class Power, and Inflation Monetarism Reassessed

Recent sociological work shows that pro-market neoliberal policies across advanced capitalist countries are due to distributional struggle between classes in the 1970s and 1980s. The orthodox monetarist view, alternatively, sees neoliberal reform as a nonpolitical attempt to end the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. From this perspective, monetary and fiscal expansions brought high inflation, and central bank discipline and government austerity is the solution; but the recent trend of low inflation despite accelerating money growth and government spending contradicts this view. Analyses of time-series cross-section data for 23 OECD countries from 1960 to 2009 support the thesis that the rise and fall of inflation is more about distribution of power between labor and capital than about monetary and fiscal discipline. Inflation in the 1970s originated from a strong working class and hurt capital more than it did workers, while neoliberal repression of workers’ power has kept inflation low from the 1980s onward. Disempowerment of labor created rising inequality and economic imbalances that fueled a financial boom underlying the global financial crisis of 2008. Re-empowering labor is a remedy to such imbalances and the subsequent deflationary pressure.

“One country, two systems” and its antagonists in Tibet and Taiwan:

In turning the vast and diverse territory of the Qing Empire into a singular nation-state, Beijing has kept redefining its conception and institution of nationhood in response to challenges from the recalcitrant or not-yet-incorporated peripheral regions including Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Since 1949, Beijing has attempted to solve the Tibet and Taiwan questions with the institutional design of “one country, two systems.” This design, widely thought of as a 1980s invention, can in fact be dated back to the early 1950s with respect to Tibet. This design has been far from successful in Tibet and Taiwan. While the “one country, two systems” experiment in Tibet failed with the Lhasa uprising and the flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, the proposal of “one country, two systems” lost its appeal and had become a taboo among politicians of all strips in Taiwan by the 21st century. In this article, we argue that the success of “one country, two systems” requires a very delicate balance and virtuous interaction between the political center in Beijing and the elite, as well as popular classes, in the periphery concerned. It can easily be jeopardized if the center tilts too much to the left or right.

Changes and Continuities in the Political Ecology of Popular Protest: Mid-Qing China and Contemporary Resistance

This article will delve into the historical roots of Chinese environmentalism. A wave of recent research has unearthed numerous instances of Chinese state—society conflicts, as well as the ecological crisis precipitated by drastic population and commercial growth in 18th-century China. Based on a survey of protest events derived from archival sources, this contribution analyzes how the mounting ecological crisis and falling capacity of the Qing state in the 18th and 19th centuries generated changing forms of popular protests as responses to the “externalities of development.” It is found that when the Qings regime capacity peaked in the early 18th century, most popular protests were peaceful and were resolved through compromises between officials and protesters. Amid the administrative breakdown in the 19th century, however, many protests escalated into violent confrontations, while others developed into “appeals to the capital” (jingkong ), a litigation process that enabled local communities to seek the support of the central government in their struggle with predatory local officials. Remarkably, some repertoires and patterns of environmental protests in contemporary China can be traced back to the Qing times, which raises questions about whether todays environmental protests are completely novel, or whether certain continuities are inherent in the deep-seated tradition of state—society conflict and negotiation in Chinas late imperial history.

A ASCENSÃO DA CHINA, A ÁSIA E O SUL GLOBAL

Muitos veem o milagre da economia chinesa como uma ilustracao de um modelo de desenvolvimento alternativo a ortodoxia neoliberal promovida por Washington. Tambem se assume muitas vezes que o envolvimento economico e politico da China nos paises do sul global, particularmente nos vizinhos asiaticos, esta criando uma nova ordem geopolitica que desafiaria a dominacao norte-americana. Neste artigo, argumenta-se que o milagre do desenvolvimento orientado pela exportacao nada mais e do que uma parte constitutiva da ordem neoliberal, e que o crescimento da China como exportadora de capital segue os passos de outros poderes capitalista-imperialista se seus projetos de influencia politica no exterior. Isso tem gerado apreensao crescente entre os paises vizinhos em relacao a dominacao regional chinesa e colocado a China em rota de colisao com os Estados Unidos, que ainda dominam a ordem politica e de seguranca na Asia-Pacifico, precipitando uma nova competicao entre potencias imperiais.

The tapestry of Chinese capital in the Global South

Though China’s capital export is not as big as many journalistic and think tank reports portray, it is definitely a rising force in shaping the context of development in many developing countries. Excluding capital flight to financial centers, most Chinese outward investment to developing regions is in the extractive, infrastructure, and trade sectors. Chinese governmental foreign aid, mostly in the form of grants and loans, has been rising in the developing world too. The form and size of China’s inroad into the Global South vary from country to country, depending on individual countries’ geopolitical and geoeconomic relation with China, as well as the countries’ natural resources endowment. The existing literature on China in the Global South focuses mostly on Africa. This paper accompanies an article collection that expands our knowledge on China’s variegated impact by looking into Argentina, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Central Asia. It also looks into how China is reshaping the structure of global politics at large.