Book review: Karl Marx à Pékin, les racines de la crise en Chine capitaliste, by Mylène Gaulard

Abstract

Mylene Goulard Karl Marx a Pekin, les racines de la crise en Chine capitaliste, Demopolis, Paris, 2014; 2354570600, 16 [pounds sterling] (pbk) English-language, book-length studies of China's political economy from a Marxist vantage point are distressingly rare. Within the tradition of critical political economy, one example from the past decade that readily comes to mind is Giovanni Arrighi's (2007) Adam Smith in Beijing. Ironically, however, Arrighi's embrace of China was the very occasion of his parting ways with Marxist analysis in favour of a Smithian interpretation of market society. His portrayal of China as a potential peaceful, market-based, yet non-capitalist global hegemon appeared at the time as disturbingly apologetic, and the book's contentions on China were largely rejected by other scholars. By entitling her work Karl Marx a Pekin, Mylene Gaulard is both nodding--disapprovingly--to Arrighi, and suggesting the need for a return to Marxian fundamentals in order to get a better grasp of Chinese developments. Gaulard is a junior economist based in Grenoble, whose doctoral research, completed in 2008, compared dynamics of capital accumulation and inequality in Brazil and China. Since then, she has maintained her research interests in both countries, and already has a dozen articles and one book--on Brazil's economy--to her name. As a critic of existing scholarship, Gaulard pulls no punches, in particular regarding the 'mass of sheep-like' neoclassical economists celebrating China's miracle, a crowd for whom she harbours 'neither patience nor respect' (p. 8). Throughout the book, Keynesians, heterodox scholars and adepts of French 'regulation do not receive a much better treatment than their mainstream peers. And Arrighi's Adam Smith in Beijing rarely mentioned beyond the introduction and conclusion--is described as being of a 'stupefying superficiality', and 'sub-Marxist if not fully post-Maoist' (p. 239). Gaulard's occasional bursts of vindictiveness might surprise in what is otherwise a squarely academic work. However they might express an idiosyncratic trait of the French left-intellectual milieu in general, rather than of the author herself. Thankfully, Gaulard's chief purpose is not to engage in scholarly polemics for their own sake, but to offer a wide-ranging, critical survey of China's development experience. The book is organised into six chapters, each of which is meant to rebuke a common misconception about the country's economic strength. These chapters address, in turn: the role of the state in capitalist development since 1949 (note that Gaulard denies Mao-era China's claim to being 'socialist'); the lacklustre Chinese record of dealing with absolute poverty and inequality since the beginning of Reform; the underdevelopment of the so-called Chinese 'middle class'; the twin issues of overproduction and declining profitability; factors of fragility in the FDI regime and the state's foreign-exchange reserves; and finally, structural weaknesses in the real estate and financial sectors that will, according to the author, resolve in a crisis not unlike that experienced by many Asian countries in 1997. The overall impression one derives from the book is that despite numerous valuable insights, and a few very promising leads, Gaulard may have tried to bite off slightly more than she could chew in just over 250 pages. Another, related weakness is that given the general dearth of up-to-date and accessible Marxist scholarship on China, the author relies, quite understandably, on a large number of secondary sources of a more conventional (meaning un-Marxist) orientation. As a result, most chapters oscillate uneasily between a selective reading of what the mainstream literature yields--as on the issues of income inequality, domestic consumption, export dependence, industrial overcapacity, and local government debt--and attempts to innovate more decisively by bringing classical-Marxist notions to bear on the Chinese case. …