China: In the Perspective of Historical Materialism

Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

The subject of the study is economic relations between USA and China. The aim of the study is to characterize the dynamics of the world-system status of China in the XX-XXI centuries and the economic characteristics of its mode of production at present. The main idea of the article is to substantiate the untenability of considering the real state of the economic system of China as "socialism with Chinese characteristics". Currently, China is integrated into the world-system according to the Beijing Consensus model. The model of China is a specific Asian capitalism, in which a special mode of capital accumulation is formed-with a higher role of the state in the process of capital accumulation than in the fourth cycle of capitalist accumulation. Its world-system status can be characterized as a strong semi-periphery, which entered the competition for hegemony in the next system cycle of capitalist accumulation. If the motion path leads China to the goal, it will be for the first time a specific non-Western hegemony. This research result allows determining the prospects for changing relations in the world economy as a result of the completion of the fourth system cycle of capitalist accumulation.

The Journal of Asian Studies, 1994

2024

I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the many individuals who have played a crucial role in my Ph.D. journey. Their support, encouragement, and guidance have been instrumental in the successful completion of this research. The following list is admittedly insufficient, but I will ensure to personally thank anyone else that I may have forgotten to name here.

China as a concept has not been put under much scrutiny and challenge until the recent postmodern and postcolonial theoretical discourse on nation and nationhood, and the radical skepticism about tradition and homogeneity. Some scholars have questioned whether China could have been a nation state before there was any nation state in Europe, and others have challenged the very notions of China and Chineseness. How do the Chinese themselves respond to such skepticism and challenge? How does one re-conceptualize China at the present time? By drawing on recent debates on such important issues, this essay tries to find some answers and offers some views from a Chinese perspective, while fully engaging Western theoretical discourses to attempt at an international dialogue and meaningful exchange.

The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2020

This article examines China's encounter with modernity from the 19th century to the present day. It builds on the historical narrative of modernity developed by Buzan and Lawson (2015), and two theoretical perspectives: uneven and combined development, and differentiation theory. The article opens with a short history of modernity, establishing that it is not a static phenomenon, but a continuously unfolding process. It then explores five periods of China's encounter with modern-ity: imperial decline and resistance to modernization; civil war and Japanese invasion ; Mao's radical communist project; Deng's market socialism; and Xi's attempt to synthesize Confucius, Mao, and Deng. It explores both how China fits into the general trajectory of modernity, and how it has evolved from rejection of it to constructing its own distinctive version of 'modernity with Chinese characteristics'. The article ends by reflecting on what issues remain within China's version of modernity, and how it fits, and doesn't fit with other forms of modernity already established within global international society.

Sociología Histórica, 2022

Since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policies by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China has undergone a series of rapid changes that have turned it into a great power with prospects for global leadership. Its rise has not only opened up the possibility that, for the first time in the last two centuries, a non-Western country could once again rise to the top of the international order. The changes in China over the past four decades have also refuted a considerable number of assumptions and arguments held from different angles of the social and political sciences. This paper will analyze how the rise of China has debunked some of the main paradigms and theories in the field of International Relations, democratization, and globalization. The present study concludes that the multidimensional implications of China's rise were not, to a large extent, anticipated by some of the mainstream theories of these disciplines.

2011 was the 100th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution. The centennial is relevant not only in terms of state ideology, but also plays a significant role within academic research into Chinese society and culture. This historic turning point likewise represents the symbolic and concrete linkages and tensions between tradition and modernity, progress and conservatism, traditional values and the demands for adjustment to contemporary societies. The book shows that Chinese transition from tradition to modernity cannot be understood in a framework of a unified general model of society, but rather through a more complex insight into the interrelations among elements of physical environment, social structure, philosophy, history, and culture. The present book carefully maps the Chinese modernisation discourse, highlighting its relationship to other, similar discourses, and situating it within historical and theoretical contexts. In contrast to the majority of recent discussions of a “Chinese development model” that tend to focus more on institutional then cultural factors, and are more narrowly concerned with economic matters than overall social development, the book offers several important focal points for many presently overlooked issues and dilemmas. The multifaceted perspectives contained in this anthology are not limited to economic, social, and ecological issues, but also include political and social functions of ideologies and cultural conditioned values, representing the axial epistemological grounds of modern Chinese society.

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, 2011

In the recent years many books have appeared on various facets of Chinese economy, particularly on its high growth story. Most of it pertains to the beginning of country's transition to the socialist market economy. This book is not an exception to this fact. But the book is different in many other ways. Importantly, it highlights the critical role of two major agents-the government and the people. No doubt, credit goes to the government for the successful transition to the high growth economy and an equally important role played by the Chinese people, displayed by their hard work, tenacity and struggle for a better living standard. The economic transition of China has not been smooth but beset with challenges in every sphere of activity. The author sketches the problems with considerable care and caution and traces the story of development and growth. The development of China is divided into five phases and the first three phases take stock of cultural heritage and rule of various dynasties including Japanese dominance. The life in general for the Chinese people was worst to say the least. The fourth phase was under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule, with Mao Zedong at the helm of power. During this period, Chinese people underwent transition to socialism without any freedom. Mao's era was a period of nightmare. Fifth and the current phase is the 'new China', that is, the period of economic transition from 1978 to the present time. The author has made an honest effort to capture the developments that have taken place in the last three decades. China is very much into the next phase of its capitalist development. Now it has become a capitalist inroader and is competing with the matured capitalist economies. The Chinese leadership loath to use the phrase 'capitalist economy' and alternatively it is trying to develop a brand value around a 'socialist market economy'. However, its meaning is debatable. All said and done, China wants to be a developed market economy at the earliest. The prefix 'socialist' is merely an adjective and more of a rhetoric. The economic landscape in China has totally changed. It may be a different matter that China is still a low-middle income economy, with per capita GDP of around $2,000, and has a long way to become an advanced economy. The book captures the developments that have shaped modern China, which is acclaimed as the second largest economy. The book provides a bird's eye view of the past to enable the reader to appreciate the significance of the changes that have taken place. Chapter 1 provides a capsule of the historical setting in China, starting with Shang dynasty and ends with the breakdown of the dynastic rule that led to the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. In a nutshell, it depicts the picture of the economic oppression of the Chinese people over the India Quarterly 67(2) [183][184][185][186][187][188][189][190][191][192][193][194][195][196]

International Journal of Communication, 2016

In The Global Rose of China, authors Alvin Y. So and YinWah Chu—Hong Kong-based social scientists—set out to identify the distinctive characteristics of how the communist party-state has shaped China’s postsocialist development. They examine neoliberalization, a shift from state domination to market domination adherence to socialism to contain the worst repercussions of neoliberal practices, and ongoing policy ebbs and flows between market-oriented and state-oriented policies. The unique outcome is “state neoliberalism.”

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies

This is a study of those Chinese political economists and political philosophers in the early 1950s who sought to distance China's transition to socialism from the Soviet model for development. Writing for the leading economic and philosophical journals, Xin Jianshe [New Construction] and Xuexi [Study], these theorists attempted to apply Mao's 1937 call for a sinified Marxism to their contemporary reality by insisting upon a national strategy for socialist construction. Their arguments provided a source for the later break with the Soviet command economy. And it is the emphasis upon Chinese solutions to national problems that forms a line that connects this past with China's present.

paper presented at the World Economic History Congress, Kyoto, 2015

Recently, many Japanese have been shocked by the fact that the GDP of China had exceeded that of Japan, and that China had overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. This would further encourage economic historians of China to reevaluate potential of China’s economy, even before its encounter with the West. In this paper, I argue that i) in the recent China’s economic historiography, scholars have been increasingly focusing on quantitative changes, rather than qualitative and transformative “development”. This can be interpreted in the context of the important shift in social thoughts after the collapse of post-Cold War regime, and in the evolutional development in the cliometrics. ii) recent findings in quantitative history are best culminated in the historical statistics compiled by Angus Maddison, including those of pre-modern China. Maddison’s studies have made a great contribution: He incorporates the experiences of China into global economic historiography, in a way which encourages the comparison beyond time and space, and empirical and cross-disciplinal discussion as well. Yet the credibility of statistical records (and estimation itself) on population and productivity, for example, are still opened to debate. iii) one of the most critical issues is that most of the arguments in comparative history obviously resort to a conventional essentialism to understand the economic growth in pre-modern China, in which monotonous “institutions” are often identified as explanatory variables.

[This is my Msc Dissertation, edited only to correct errors in the writing rather than any content] This paper will provide an alternative to the currently reductionist interpretations of China’s political economy, arguing that their key failure is the inability to conceptualise capitalism in a way which can think beyond the historical examples from Europe, and deal with the atypical complexity of China as a rising non-European power. To counter this we will utilise historical materialism to focus the concept of capitalism around capitalist accumulation for the production of surplus-value; forming and propagating a capitalist class who reproduce by extracting surplus-value, and wage-labour who can engage in production only when organised to do so by capitalists and to create commodities controlled by capitalist. From this we will argue that China should be seen as wholly capitalist. Though in a form articulated by the historical legacy of the Chinese state, which has been essential to ensuring the expansive population and territory of China can remain coherent. This articulation is explicitly non-European, however, its particular form has been key for capitalist accumulation in China to remain successful. Especially in its attempts to catch up with Europe. Consequently, the ability for this articulation to remain stable as an endogenous form of Chinese capitalism should be at the centre of analysing the capacity for Chinese capitalism to both develop, and remain successful.

Asian Business & Management, 2010