1.1 Overview
Since 1978, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has pulled off a developmental miracle. China leapt from its position as one of the lowest income economies in the world into the bracket of upper middle-income countries—a truly rare feat for a large, poor state in the history of the capitalist world economy. During this period, its achievements in poverty reduction, industrialisation, urbanisation and improvements in agricultural productivity and the bureaucratic capacity of the state were, taken collectively, of a world historic scale. Explosive economic development, moreover, has catapulted the PRC into the role of the world’s second superpower; encouraging the view—now increasingly mainstream—that China may be likely to play a hegemonic role in (an Asian-centric) world politics during the twenty-first century, reprising that of the United States in the latter part of the twentieth (though whether this is to be welcomed or not remains an open question: cf. Jacques 2009; Mearsheimer 2006; Rachman 2016). Nor have some major negative upshots of this transformative project gone unnoticed: the high degree of labour exploitation and the creation of a labouring migrant underclass, environmental degradation, rampant corruption and increasing political authoritarianism. Outgrowing its national or even regional impact, China’s growth miracle, alongside the boom in financialisation, the shrinking of welfare states, and the rise of income inequality, ranks as—perhaps the—striking fact of the contemporary global political economy. The foundational proposition of this book, then, is that China’s ‘rise’ is real, and that it represents a major restructuring of the capitalist world system.
This monograph is motivated by the urgent need to better understand—both historically and theoretically—the factors and social processes which have enabled and structured China’s period of rapid economic growth since the late 1970s. To do so, and from a perspective of critical political economy often lacking in approaches to understanding the ‘rise of China’, this book first revises and develops, and subsequently mobilises, Leon Trotsky’s theory of the uneven and combined development (UCD) of the global capitalist economy.
At the core of my argument is the contention that China’s growth spurt has been characterised by the activation of UCD—understood as a distinct set of political-economic processes and possibilities immanent in the capitalist world economy. UCD suggests that—and while the possibility remains an outlier rather than the norm—developing economies suffering poverty and geopolitical subjugation (in a world order bifurcated between national states of global north and south) may, seeking rupture with this inequality, mobilise the ‘privilege of historical backwardness’ by importing advanced technologies, thus leaping ahead and driving towards economic convergence with advanced capitalist economies through an intensive bout of industrialisation and urbanisation. But, a second implication is that true convergence is in fact only rarely facilitated by UCD, precisely because these developmental ‘leaps’ take place by grafting advanced forms of production and social relations onto antiquated ones; producing sociospatial hybridities which are, more often than not, chronically unstable and unlikely to directly replicate their source material. Instead, these hybridities have developmental trajectories entirely of their own which must be analysed in their specificity and (strictly) cannot be expected to simply repeat established patterns of development. Thus from the outset, UCD injects into Marxism an orientation which some may associate more closely with postcolonial theory. One objective of this book is to firmly root such concepts in a materialist understanding of political economy.
This conception of UCD forms only a subsection of a more general theory of capitalist development and so, unlike the comparative capitalisms perspectives discussed here shortly (and in greater depth in Chapter 2), is itself expressly not applicable in every time and place—but specifically in the case of developing states experiencing ‘leaps’ towards the level of the leading economies (van der Linden 2007).1 This more specific application of UCD I develop here seeks to theorise why more abstract propositions regarding capital accumulation as a general process become modified in this context (for example, while technological innovation is generally cumulative and reliant upon deep R&D investments and basic research in the advanced economies, UCD might allow developing economies to appropriate these technological advances while investing far less capital). A core (latent) assumption of UCD in this regard is both of a fundamental geographical distinction in the world economy between developed and developing states (measured by relative income and labour productivity) which is predicated upon differential levels of industrialisation and urbanisation (Dunford and Liu 2017)—and, simultaneously, the complex and sporadic diffusion of portions of the most advanced capitalist practices to those states whose general level remains at that of a ‘developing’ economy. It is the emphasis on capitalist temporality and dynamism which distinguishes UCD from (what I regard as) the misleading inertia posited by the major proponents of world systems theory.
Uncovering both why this process of UCD should have been kick-started in the particular case of contemporary China, as well as its implications and outcomes there, requires an extensive historical and empirical exegesis (as is developed from Chapter 4 onwards). But I also contend that UCD, while it takes on novel forms across periods and spaces of capitalist development, also represents a more fundamental condition of the capitalist mode of production as it expands on a global scale. Capital—despite its intrinsically globalising thrust (as Marx [1991, 359] writes, ‘the capitalist mode of production is therefore a historical means for developing the material powers of production and for creating a corresponding world market’)—also and inevitably relies upon a relatively fixed system of national states to achieve this mobility. The parcellisation of political territory, and the competitive interaction between this multiplicity of sovereign units which capital thus creates, has distinctive and observable effects on the way particular political economies develop. The world economy is thus uneven insofar as the gains from economic development are never evenly distributed across space; and yet, the global and expansionary drive of capital to foster market interactions everywhere renders this unevenness combined into a world system. The competitive drive for survival by national states entangles them within this combinatory logic, and, moreover, contributes to its enforcement as states become promoters and defenders of the capitals with which they are interwoven. This looser and (under capitalism) general condition of UCD is, rather confusingly, to what recent scholarly debates of the concept have mostly referred (see Chapter 2).
Capitalist development is both uneven and combined in two senses then: first, in the nationally bounded sense referred to in the case of China (a specific form of UCD comprising of accelerated, but uneven, development in a national economy). Second, on a global scale—a general form of UCD in which states competitively coexist as part of a single world economy. The two different senses of UCD are intrinsically linked, because it is the pressure exerted by competitive political multiplicity (referred to simply as ‘geopolitics’ by the ascetic international relations literature, though more often in this book in an expansive sense as ‘geopolitical economy’)—or UCD in the second sense—that drives developing states to attempt to initiate the first form of UCD: to combine their development with advanced capitalist economies rather than face the often dire consequences of underdevelopment (what Trotsky termed the ‘whip of external necessity’) and ‘leap’ developmental stages towards the technological frontier. As I show in Chapter 3, China experienced most acutely the ‘whip of external necessity’ in the late 1970s, which motivated it to pursue economic development through reform and opening as the only plausible means of maintaining regime stability during the late Cold War.
While these observations are neither wholly original nor especially illuminating in and of themselves, they do, in my view, present a powerful toolkit for approaching an extended, detailed, and creative exploration of a highly atypical period of rapid growth as China has recently experienced. Disentangling these two different forms of UCD requires a work of fairly lengthy conceptual revision, which is presented across this Introduction and the subsequent two chapters. This book consequently has three objectives:
- 1.The further development of UCD as a research programme capable of being deployed to analyse aspects of the contemporary global political economy—particularly China’s catch-up development under conditions of an increasingly globalised manufacturing system (Chapters 2 and 3).
- 2.A re-reading of China’s reform and opening period through the conceptual ‘lens’ of UCD which demonstrates how geopolitical-economic determinants shaped China’s political economy with effects that persist to date, shaping the ongoing evolution of its distinct system of capital accumulation (Chapters 4–7).
- 3.An elaboration on how the consequences of China’s UCD are increasin...