1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910484001603321

Autore

Rolf Steven

Titolo

China's uneven and combined development / / Steven Rolf

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham, Switzerland : , : Palgrave Macmillan, , [2021]

©2021

ISBN

3-030-55559-3

Edizione

[1st ed. 2021.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (XVII, 264 p. 13 illus., 12 illus. in color.)

Collana

Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, , 2524-7441

Disciplina

333.70951

Soggetti

Economic development - China

China Economic conditions

China Foreign relations 1976-

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Chapter 1: Introduction: China shakes the world-system -- Chapter 2: Uneven and combined development and the capitalist states-system -- Chapter 3: From varieties of capitalism to uneven and combined development: a new perspective -- Chapter 4: China’s boom (I): The geopolitical economy of reform and opening, 1978-2000 -- Chapter 5: China’s boom (II): Making the ‘leap’, 2001-2008 -- Chapter 6: The ‘rebalancing’ fallacy: 2008 and its aftermath -- Chapter 7: The state resurgent -- Chapter 8: Conclusion: China cracks the whip: The externalisation of China’s political economy.

Sommario/riassunto

This book mobilises the theory of uneven and combined development to uncover the geopolitical economic drivers of China’s rise. The purpose is to explain the formation and trajectory of its economic ‘accumulation system’ — which remains a confounding hybrid of statist and neoliberal forms of capitalism — as the outcome of China’s geopolitical engagement of the USA during the late stages of the Cold War, and its participation in manufacturing global production networks (GPNs). Fear of geopolitical catastrophe drove China to open its economy, while GPNs enabled China to generate substantial export surpluses which could be recycled through state-owned banks as cheap credit and subsidies to large, vertically integrated and politically-controlled state-owned enterprises. In this way, a synergy emerged



between the ‘neoliberal’ and ‘Keynesian-Fordist’ sectors of the economy, while the national-territorial state retained its form and expanded its functions. The book chronicles how this reliance on export surpluses, however, rendered China extremely vulnerable to external shocks — prompting a dramatic monetary and fiscal stimulus response to the crisis of 2008, even while sustaining the illusion of economic ‘decoupling’ from the global economy. Finally, it examines the growing role of the state in the current crisis-ridden economic model, as well as China’s current geoeconomic and geopolitical expansionism in areas such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the militarisation of the East and South China Seas. Steven Rolf is ESRC Research Fellow at the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre, based at the University of Sussex, UK. He has previously worked at the University of Bristol, Aston University, and Birkbeck, University of London. He has also held visiting positions at City University Hong Kong and UCLA, USA. .