Many thought China's rise would fundamentally remake the global order. Yet, much like other developing nations, the Chinese state now finds itself in a status quo characterized by free trade and American domination. Through a cutting-edge historical, sociological, and political analysis, Ho-fung Hung details the competing interests and economic realities that temper the dream of Chinese supremacy—forces that are stymieing growth throughout the global South.
Hung focuses on four common misconceptions: that China could undermine orthodoxy by offering an alternative model of growth; that China is radically altering power relations between the East and the West; that China is capable of diminishing the global power of the United States; and that the Chinese economy would restore the world's wealth after the 2008 financial crisis. His work reveals how much China depends on the existing order and how the interests of the Chinese elites maintain these ties. Through its perpetuation of the dollar standard and its addiction to U.S. Treasury bonds, China remains bound to the terms of its own prosperity, and its economic practices of exploiting debt bubbles are destined to fail. Hung ultimately warns of a postmiracle China that will grow increasingly assertive in attitude while remaining constrained in capability.
Ho-fung Hung is Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Associate Professor in Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the award-winning book Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty (Columbia, 2011).
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables Preface Chronology of State Making and Capitalist Development in China, Sixteenth to Twenty-First Centuries Introduction: Sinomania and Capitalism Part I. Origins 1. A Market Without Capitalism, 1650–1850 2. Primitive Accumulation, 1850–1980 3. The Capitalist Boom, 1980–2008 Part II. Global Effects, Coming Demise 4. Rise of the Rest 5. A Post-American World? 6. Global Crisis Conclusion: After the Boom Notes References Index
What People are Saying About This
Victor Shih
A very readable and informative book that will find a wide readership. Its great strength is that it shows on many different fronts that the notion of China's rising dominance may be unrealistic or, at least, premature.
Peter Evans
Ho-fung Hung's brilliant analysis of the intertwining of China's national trajectory with the evolution of global capitalism adds new energy and insights to one of the most fundamental debates in contemporary political economy.
Michael Pettis
Ho-Fung Hung's important and stimulating work places China's recent economic reforms and development trajectory firmly within their proper historical context, thereby releasing them from triumphalist or defeatist narratives that begin in 1949 or 1978. The China of the past four decades, Hung shows us, is the same China that has wrestled with modernization since the early Qing Dynasty and has faced the same problems many times before.
Robert A. Kapp
Timely and important, Ho-fung Hung's accessible and clear-eyed assessment of China's prospects, rooted in both the longer patterns of China's own history and global economics, reaches unexpected and reassuring conclusions. A stimulating intellectual journey led by a calm and judicious guide.
