The innovation of Marxism in China

Virginia Review of Asian Studies, 2019

Regardless of theoretical perspective, hierarchy is an ever present focus of international Relations, especially in terms of empire or hierarchy. Due to the structural impact of the Industrial Revolution since the late 18 th century, it has become possible for one to find differences concerning the definition and behavior of hegemonies. This paper identifies three types of empires in history-classic, European and modern-based on the outcome and appearance of power as demonstrated by the hegemon or dominant power. Looking towards the future, China indeed stands out. Nonetheless, China needs to respond to the following questions in its rise onto the world stage: (a) whether to conform to the assumptions of parity and overtake, or reduce the power differential with the incumbent hegemon (the United States); (b) to be in possession of a power vacuum (for example, East Asia) that can serve as a geopolitical foundation; (c) to use force effectively to demonstrate and increase its international status, but prevent from being dragged into unnecessary mudslides; (d) to come up with grand strategies characterized by long term vision instead of great power strategies aimed only at catching up. This paper adopts the approach of paradigm shift and China as the case study, and seeks to understand its strategic choices and potential influences in the world in the near future.

Events following the Second World War propelled the United States to assume command of the globe, as well as the organization of its resources, wealth, and power. China, represented by the newly formed revolutionary People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile developed outside this new anti-Communist, and hyper-liberal, trading and security system. As a result, China's early existence left China's early development and preparation for the 1980's largely in the hands of CCP leadership, which, after the death of Mao, immediately assumed a technocratic stance to the nation's affairs. With the United States beckoning it to return to the international system, largely to spite the Soviet Union, a massive and new area for liberal capitalist development suddenly appeared to global investors, international production networks, and global financial systems. With the 2008 collapse, US demand, represented prominently by the easy availability of credit, soon dried up, and with it, the external source that allowed the Chinese state to pursue its massive expenditures went with it. The world, now, is in flux. Larry Summers sees this new period as a dangerous one in which China may finally be inclined to pursue its own interests, as heralded with China's formation of the Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank. Should China fail to reform domestically - a major undertaking - the CCP stands ready to lose as it credibility crumbles and conservatives block reform at every turn. Alternatively, China could export its wealth and replicate the past actions of the United States with the revival of the ancient Silk Road as a new, and massive, Marshall Program so as to marshal its own satellites worldwide. This however, would place the PRC on a collision course with the US internationally. For the world America made, this course of action may represent a major and fundamental challenge to the American military, economic, scientific, and ideological order; this scenario, however, relies entirely upon the PRC's competency and success securing further growth. In the end, without a basis of growth, nothing remains certain for the People's Republic of China, as the CCP has staked so much upon it.

The Neoliberal World Order in Crisis, and Beyond: An East European Perspective, 2023

This chapter strives to paint a more complex picture of the nature of China’s systems, its characteristics, development, and complex relationship with the US-led capitalist (neo)imperialist order, together with its central contradictions and potential trends and transformations. It is initially argued that a complex perspective is needed given not only the specificity and exceptionality of the system in China and its historical and contemporary development, but also the country’s growing importance in shaping the potential future of the global order characterised by the fundamental contradictions of the current global and national systems intensifying. The analytical framework is based on a critical interrogation of predominantly Marxist, but also other critical analyses of China. The analysis first focuses on the PRC’s historical politico-economic development during the reform period after the late 1970s, where the country’s internal and geopolitical and geoeconomic conditions of possibility, and central characteristics are addressed. The spotlight is placed on the nature of the break with the Maoist period and the genesis of specific central characteristics of the novel system gradually established following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. The singular nature of these reforms that enabled China to avoid a general breakdown of society, the economy and politics that characterised the reforms in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European and Asian satellites are considered, while the contingency and non-teleological nature of China’s reforms are also addressed. This serves as the starting point for the second part of the analysis in which the specific nature and characteristics of China’s post-reform system and its relationship with the US-dominated politico-economic and geopolitical order are reflected on. Building on the insights of Marxist thinkers, we strive to offer a complex picture of the paradoxical/dialectical nature of China’s present system. This enables a consideration of specific central fundamental contradictions present in China’s system, while potentially highlighting contradictions that, while crucial, are less prominent in existing research. The final section concentrates on technological development in China as it plays a vital role not only in the country’s historical and present development but is understood by the CCP as essential in its quest to address crucial politico-economic, geopolitical, and ecological contradictions. Focus is placed on why the technological sector is a crucial part of the politicoeconomic system, and why it is the prime target of the US-led Western anti- China policies.

Comparative Politics (Russia), 2015

Journal of World-Systems Research, 2019

In recent years China has positioned itself as a global economic leader, working through its "Belt and Road" initiative (BRI) and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), to not only expand its global economic reach, but to organize and lead global economic relations. China's rise is largely understood in economic terms, but the history of global power dynamics suggests that such leadership is built on both economic and political-military foundations. This paper explores the structural relationship between China's economic and political-military relationships with other states over the period 1993 to 2015. Drawing on a wide variety of data sources, we present a multi-dimensional analysis that measures the changing size of China's economic and political-military networks, their shifting regional distribution, and the degree of coupling, or decoupling of economic ties from political-military ties. In describing these patterns, we conduct a similar analysis for the United States. This allows us to situate Chinese trends in the context of the structures of U.S. global power. Our analysis points to ways in which China's global rise has been shaped through navigating U.S. global power. Our analysis also shows that China's growing leadership in the global economy builds upon a set of existing political-military relationships that, while their scope and form are quite different from those that the United States built to support its hegemonic ascendency, are nevertheless critical for understanding the mechanisms by which Chinese power and influence has grown in the global political economy.

China’s rise has brought about various propositions about its role in the future global order. Based on a dozen influential scholars’ works, this essay first summarizes the supposed economic, political, and cultural challenges China will pose for America and then analyzes their sustainability. Like Martin Jacques, it insists that China will not be able to catch up with America using a resource-intensive model. And China cannot expand using this model through technological upgrades either, for, as a power-oriented culture, China cannot train disinterested scientists to be truly engaged in technological upgrades. Nevertheless, China has alarmed the West as it seeks a way to deal with its rise. My position is that, as China and America become more economically interdependent, the best way is to achieve mutual benefit through peaceful dialogue and establish a world culture that integrates Chinese tradition and American democracy, for maintaining American universalism and containing China by preserving U.S. military superiority are unsustainable.

The central puzzle that this research aims to address is whether instrumental rationality alone is the determinant of an actor’s social behaviour. The problem is framed within the context of the debate between the Rationalist and Constructivist scholarship in the discipline of International Relations. Although there are several epistemological, ontological and analytical angles to this debate but two emerge as most relevant to this inquiry. First, whether ideas have any place in formulation of foreign policy of a state; and second, if that is the case then where do they come from and how do they influence this process? Rationalists, represented in this study by neorealists, have resolved the problem through a major move: that is by making units of the international structure functionally similar, states are expected to pursue similar ends based on utility maximization. Thus, grand strategy, which denotes strategic behaviour of states at the highest level, is agnostic with respect to the ends and becomes only a function of means. Constructivists, represented in this study by all schools of thought who consider ideas as partly or entirely influencing strategic action, have not come up with a coherent response. A major theoretical effort made by Alexander Wendt in response to neorealist claims also ends up subsuming the individual identities of the actors in the larger culture of international politics where actors pursue shared goals; and thus the only distinction in their grand strategies is in terms of means. Another category introduced by Constructivists is of Strategic Culture that aims to explain the departure of actors’ strategic conduct from instrumentality due to influence of their cultural proclivities. This also ends up making distinctions among various grand strategies along the scale of means, not of ends. Strategic culturists such as Alastair Iain Johnston also do not take into account the influence of the strategic environment on an actor’s strategic behaviour. This study takes up the matters from here and makes a simple proposition that ideational categories such as culture and ideology are determinants of the ends of grand strategy, not its means. The major theoretical move made in this study is to challenge the neorealist conception of functionally similar units and introduce the category of Civilization-States which in the contemporary era are successors to their old civilizations and culture. Their formative ideologies, represented as worldviews in this study, transmitted across time exert a major influence in formulating the ends of their grand strategies. Engaging with the major concepts of the English School of International Relations, this study proposes a theory of grand strategy in which the actors’ ends as derived from their worldviews are pitched against the international order which represents the strategic environment, and are measured on the scale of revisionism to status quo with respect to it. The theory is then tested by considering the case of China at four points in time. First, at the formative or pre-dynastic period (before 221 BC) and subsequently during the former Han era (202 BC-9 AD) when the Confucian ideology was adopted as official orthodoxy, during late Qing period (1839-1911 AD) when it clashed with the Western international order, and during late Communist period (1976-2015 AD) when China recovered the material basis of its power. The study concludes that the failure of Qing dynasty to maintain the Sino-centric world order was due to internal contradictions in its worldview generated by external influences, and that the contemporary Chinese worldview is not at a major variance from the precepts of the prevalent liberal international order and, therefore, China is only a mildly revisionist state only aiming to slowly erode the United States’ hegemony.