Christopher A. McNally (ed.), China’s Emergent Political Economy: Capitalism in the Dragon’s Lair

Abstract

Of all the competing prognostications for China’s rise, few disagree with the notion that this monumental ascent will have transformative affects upon both the PRC’s domestic political economy and the international system. In fact, ‘as a result of these concurrent and monumental changes’, McNally writes, ‘China has [already] begun to impact the world’s economics and geopolitics’ (McNally 2007: 4). And although the literature on contemporary Chinese affairs has produced a wealth of analysis, few of these have had success in characterising the forces shaping China’s modern transformation. That is, few have placed China’s rapid development within the context of ‘global capitalism’ or ‘capitalist development’. This is precisely the void that Christopher McNally has begun to fill with his edited volume, China’s Emergent Political Economy: Capitalism in the Dragon’s Lair. Herein, the monumental changes occurring in China are conceived as part and parcel of a capitalist transition. McNally begins with the premise that ‘capitalism constitutes the nature and logic of the predominant political economies of our time, [and] whether we like it or not, there is in fact no viable alternative to capitalism at this stage in world history…It shapes our present world in the most fundamental ways and should be up and front in social inquiry’. As such, the task undertaken in China’s Emergent Political Economy is ‘to explicitly interpret the enormous transformations taking place in China as associated with the same process of capitalist development that shaped the rise of the world’s advanced industrial nations, including Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan’ (McNally 2007: 8-9). China’s capitalist transition is then explored both as a phenomenon in itself, attempting to characterise the political economy of China’s contemporary transformation, and as it impacts vital aspects of China’s domestic and foreign policy. These two questions form the crux of the volume, and are present