The Integration of China into Global Capitalism

Abstract

Although the current crisis has amply demonstrated the many challenges and contradictions the American state faces, it has also demonstrated that it nevertheless remains critical to the system's survival. Whereas it was still possible in the 1960s and 1970s to represent the capitalist relationship between the global north and south in terms of “the development of underdevelopment,” by the new millennium there was clearly a very remarkable, if still highly uneven, process of capitalist development taking place in the global south. Nowhere was this clearer than with the integration of China into global capitalism. At the same time, the severity and duration of the latest crisis in a global capitalist economy that the American state had been so central to constructing has, unsurprisingly, led to a resurgence of pronouncements that US hegemony was coming to an end. China's entry into the circuits of the international economy, many commentators now predicted, marked a fundamental “re-orientation” of the global capitalist order. However, far from displacing the American empire, China rather seems to be duplicating Japan's supplemental role in terms of providing the steady inflow of funds needed to sustain the US's primary place in global capitalism. Were this to change, it would require deeper and much more liberalized financial markets within China, which would entail dismantling the capital controls that are key pillars of Communist Party rule. Furthermore, a major reorientation of Chinese patterns of investment and production away from exports towards domestic consumption would have incalculable implications for the social relations that have sustained China's rapid growth and global integration. In this regard, though the outcome of the working class struggles now underway in China cannot be known, this cannot but impinge on, and possibly even be affected by, the direction working classes elsewhere take out of the current crisis.