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China’s Credit Conundrum
Interviewed by Robert Brenner, Victor Shih discusses the one-off factors that enabled China’s rise as workshop of the world and its subsequent dependence on state credit as driver of growth. Contradictions between the conditions for political and financial stability, as the Xi regime superintends an unsteady slowdown.
Ronald Coase in Beijing
On the eve of the financial crisis, Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing posited the advent of a world-equalizing market state in China. Christopher Connery now takes a sardonic look at the country’s ‘institutional economics’ through the eyes of an idiosyncratic English Hayekian.
The CPC and the Ancien Régime
Roots of the PRC’s legitimating ideology in the longue durée of Chinese history, as source of the Party’s confidence that it need not imitate Western models in the coming century. Peter Nolan sets out the view from Zhongnanhai on the desirable relation between market and state—a potential alternative to the current world order?
Belated Reunion?
One of China’s greatest modern writers, Eileen Chang reframed its traditional fictional forms to grapple with post-1919 realities: decline of the Qing aristocracy, price of female emancipation, devastation of the Sino-Japanese war. Jiwei Xiao asks how publication of her long-suppressed last novel alters understandings of Chang’s work.
A Footloose Scholar
The descendant of Dutch bargees, Jan Breman has been investigating workers’ lives for half a century, travelling from rural Gujarat to the Javanese uplands and now coastal China. The social relations patterning control of land and labour framed in historical perspective, from colonial plantations to the globalized informal economy.
Scholarism on the March
Interview with the eighteen-year-old leader of Hong Kong’s radical school students. Joshua Wong discusses his personal and political formation, the battle against Beijing’s patriotic education syllabus and the Umbrella Movement’s three-month occupation of the city’s streets in the fight for democratization.
The Party and its Success Story
How should the balance-sheet of Chinese Communism be assessed? In a rejoinder to Perry Anderson’s comparison of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, Wang Chaohua delivers a critical verdict on the record of Mao’s utopianism and Deng’s pragmatism, and the bleak legacy of the crushing of popular aspirations in 1989.
The Spectre of Global China
China’s overseas expansion has unsettled Western commentators. In this striking ethnographic study, Ching Kwan Lee investigates the labour regimes, investment patterns and management ethos of the PRC’s state-owned firms on the Central African Copperbelt, in contrast to the giant multinationals. Surprise findings include Zambia’s first SEZs and a distinctive, quasi-Weberian ethic of ‘eating bitterness’.
A Traveller’s Glance
Object of fierce controversy when first shown, Antonioni’s documentary Chung Kuo—filmed in the PRC during the Cultural Revolution—has since been largely overlooked within his oeuvre. The director of L’avventura as failed Marco Polo, whose patient, humanizing gaze left a record of China’s past that is belatedly being rediscovered.
China’s Multiple Revolutions
Beneath the dramatic social, political and military turmoil of China’s last two centuries, Mark Elvin suggests, lay a series of existential crises amid the collapse of established pillars of authority, whose most vivid expression can be found in two largely forgotten novels of the 1920s and 1970s.
Concepts of Nature
Landscapes of Ausonius, mountain retreats of Xie Tiao, mediaeval paradise-gardens: can underlying similarities of deep structure and social function be traced in the work of classical European and Chinese writers? A panoramic cross-cultural comparison of approaches to the natural world.
Changing Colours in China
The nature of China’s present socio-economic system has for some time been hotly debated. Reflecting on Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing, Joel Andreas traces the path of property relations, social services and income distribution in the PRC since the late seventies, reaching unambiguous conclusions.
Casino Colony
The transformation of the former Portuguese enclave of Macau into East Asia’s gambling capital by an alliance of local elites and Las Vegas entrepreneurs, under the approving gaze of Beijing. A frenzy of construction, rising inequalities and rampant corruption as outcomes of a neon-lit decolonization.
The Chinese Road
The PRC’s breakneck transition to capitalism seen through the prism of 19th-century Europe and America, as its cities rehearse the processes analysed by Marx: commodification of land and labour, formation of markets and capitalist elites. What lessons might the West’s past hold for China’s future?
Death in China
Does the PRC’s staggering economic growth confirm the thesis that ‘wealthier is healthier’? Using life expectancy data from three decades, Sanjay Reddy measures China’s advances against those of other countries—and finds explanations for its relatively poor performance in the marketization of health care and shrinkage of state spending since 1980.
East Asia’s Dollars
Discussions of the sustainability of the US current-account deficit—trending upward from $800bn—rarely plumb the long-term motives of its creditors. Taggart Murphy analyses the historical roots of Tokyo’s post-1868 geofinancial support for the ruling superpower, London or Washington, and the implications of China’s rise for Japanese strategy.
Chinese Labour Struggles
A railway worker caught up in the events of Tiananmen Square, now using his radio show to broadcast the problems of Chinese factory hands live on air. Han Dongfang describes life in the Red Army, student-worker unity in 1989, surviving TB and torture in prison and the China Labour Bulletin’s legal strategy. Can the PRC’s official trade unions be captured from below?
Dark Side of the Chinese Moon
Yang Lian on Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, Zhongguo nongmin diaocha. A catalogue of the iniquities visited on rural China as the CCP safeguards the ‘investment environment’ of the coastal cities, at the cost of the countryside. Impoverishment and extortion of 40 per cent of the world’s peasants, in a survey suppressed by the PRC authorities.
A Tale of Two Nationalisms
As tensions are ratcheted up across the Taiwan Strait, Wang Chaohua analyses the distinctive trajectory of national consciousness on the island. Contradictions of identity, as the legacies of KMT and Cold War confront local particularities and democratic impulses, and possibilities for an exit from the impasses of geography and history.
Ruins of the Future
West of the Tracks, Wang Bing’s stupendous documentary on the collapse of heavy industry and the fate of workers in China’s North-East, viewed in comparative perspective by a film-critic compatriot. Memories of the battlegrounds of Manchuria, and echoes of Lukács, Benjamin and Hobsbawm, amid the debris of an epoch and its human fall-out.
Dividing the Big Family Assets
Where is the PRC heading? One of its leading intellectual iconoclasts, after describing his origins in the Cultural Revolution, offers a long-range comparative perspective on the Chinese state’s strategy for land and industry today. The divisions in the intelligentsia and the fate of the peasantry, the overwhelming majority of the country, as China enters the WTO.
Elgin in China
The sacking of the Emperor’s Summer Palace in Beijing by an Anglo-French expeditionary force was one of the high-points of nineteenth-century imperialism. The lucidity of its perpetrator, Elgin, offers a paradoxical contrast with the chorus of apologists for Anglo-American interventions today.
Race and History in China
The official ideology of the PRC has been changing rapidly. Do new definitions of the ‘nation’ imply a greater racial tinge? The author of The Tyranny of History looks at the long sweep of Chinese civilization, and asks whether the current period is seeing a shift away from the general tenor of that past.
Fire at the Castle Gate
The Chinese intellectual scene has been transformed by the emergence of a New Left. Its leading theorist explains how and why the neo-liberal consensus of the early nineties broke down, and considers what a radical agenda should look like as social and political problems mount.
Return to Beijing
A Chinese poet rediscovers his native city, learning how much a favourable book review costs. Vignettes of China’s new ‘literary merchants’ drawing water from Mao’s well, with a faux slice of the Great Wall in the garden; and of its older industrial workers, destined for the scrapheap.
Introduction to the Dialogue on China’s Future
The student movement that arose in Beijing in March 1989, and developed into a nation-wide upheaval, drawing in millions of citizens in the capital and across the country in protest against the official response to the crisis, before the occupation of Tiananmen Square was repressed by military force . . . read more
The Elegy of Wild Swans
The significance and integrity of this first-hand account of the lives of three women in twentieth-century China—the author, her mother and grandmother—so vividly written and ambitious in scope, are beyond question. The author, someone of my own age and background, was born in 1952 to a Communist family, . . . read more
Postmodernism and Post-Socialist Society: Cultural Politics in China After the 'New Era'
Enthusiasts for Chinese postmodernism are nowadays put on the defensive by those who dismiss the issue as a Chinese problematic, or resist postmodernism in general. However, it is often neglected that, at a pedestrian, journalistic level, it has never been too difficult to identify and inventory postmodern(ist) works . . . read more
Student Protests in Fin-de-Siecle China
It was springtime in China and, once again, students were taking to the streets and making headlines. Some youths held aloft official flags bearing the names of their schools, while others carried banners covered with passionate phrases written out in Chinese characters or Roman letters. Campuses throughout the . . . read more
A Dialogue on the Future of China
How do you think the June 4th movement of 1989 will be remembered—as another May 4th 1919, the threshold of a period of general political awakening and turbulence, or instead as a Chinese version of 1848 or 1968 in Europe: a last spontaneous explosion of idealistic revolt, followed . . . read more
The Strategic Triad: The United States, Russia, and China
The official end of the Cold War, marked by the growing incapacity and then the collapse of the Soviet Union, inevitably meant a reduction of us military expenditure. This had long been regarded as essential from a strictly economic point of view: the extraordinary prodigality of the . . . read more
Consumerism, Confucianism, Communism: Making Sense of China Today
The dramatic social, economic and cultural changes that have been taking place in China over the past fifteen years have been attracting more and more attention from commentators in the West. The old order maintained by stringent state control over the economy and everyday life has been gradually . . . read more
Creative Destruction: Capitalist Development and China’s Environment
The ‘Rise of China’ has been hailed as the most important trend in the world for the next century, and with good reason. While Russia and much of Eastern Europe sink into depression, Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms have turned China into the fastest growing large economy in the . . . read more
China in the Russian Mirror
When people all over the world think about the collapse of the Soviet Union they draw a certain picture in their minds. According to this picture, modern societies developed along two different paths: the market economy and the command economy. Countries that took the path of the command . . . read more
Current Successes and Future Challenges in China’s Economic Reforms
China’s programme of economic reform has met with remarkable success. The average annual growth rate since 1979 has been 8.8 per cent, placing China in a select group of developing countries which have achieved sustained industrial growth for over a decade. Indeed, China doubled output per person in . . . read more
China Today: 'Money Dissolves the Commune'
Before I returned to China last year I was working on an essay entitled (borrowing and combining Raymond Williams and Juliet Mitchell) ‘Culture: The Longest Revolution’, explaining how difficult it would be to get rid of our dominant cultural heritage of patriarchy, and more specifically, what I called . . . read more
The Chinese Road to Capitalism
In the late 1970s, in the face of a deepening economic crisis, growing political unrest and the ideological exhaustion of Maoism, China’s pragmatic post-Mao leadership turned to the market to rescue their sinking bureaucratic economy. In the West, many left-wing China scholars began to look with favour on . . . read more
Russia Should Be Looking East, Not West
It is difficult not to feel one has seen it all before as one watches the Western response to the request of the new Russian and Union governments for economic assistance. The ‘grand bargain’ has been dusted off the shelf on the Russian side and the more impressionable . . . read more
For a Return to Genuine Marxism in China
The latest media fad in our country is a kind of ‘worship’ of the Gang of Four. It appears to people as if the Gang of Four were almost gods, with vast magical powers. They were capable of moving heaven and earth—they could make China change colour if . . . read more
China 1974: Problems not Models
Deep down, French public opinion is still anti-Chinese. For example, l’Aurore and Paris Match do not hesitate to play on ignorant and quasi-racist fears of the ‘yellow peril’. Consequently, the pro-Chinese sentiments which travellers and leftists have combined over the past few years to disseminate should be seen . . . read more
Introduction to 'A Chinese Village'
Exaggeration is easy. Privation is one thing, poverty to the point of wretchedness—‘la misére’—another. A sturdy self-reliant stock may grow in a stony soil. But, when due allowance has been made for the inevitable misconceptions, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that a large proportion of Chinese . . . read more
The USSR and China: Confrontation or Detente?
Difficulties in relations between the cpsu and the Chinese Communists existed before Mao Tse-tung came to power in Peking and they were apparent in the first negotiations in Moscow with the Party-Government delegation of the Chinese People’s Republic. At the time, however, the existence of these difficulties . . . read more
Introduction to Mao’s 'Letter to Comrade Lin Piao'
This letter is best known in the abbreviated and partially altered version included under the heading ‘A Single Spark can Start a Prairie Fire’ in the editions of Mao’s writings published at Peking since 1951. It was written at Kut’ien, Fukien Province, where the Ninth Party Congress of . . . read more
The New Chinese Revolution
Great things have been happening in China during the past three years, where the masses have been taking part in struggles to decide the future of the socialist revolution in their country. An established Communist Party and government structure has been shaken and in places replaced in popular . . . read more
History in the Manufacture
As China grows in power and revolutionary achievement the Western world begins to take her history seriously. Chinese studies, particularly in the usa, have developed from an eccentricity to an industry. The American government, in its role of world gendarme concerned to strangle or corrupt popular revolutionary . . . read more
Marxist Analysis and Post-Revolutionary China
The Communist Party of China’s triumph in 1949 was an event of momentous importance. It put an end to the century of foreign intervention in China that had begun with the Opium War of 1840, and liberated a quarter of the world’s population from control by capitalism. The . . . read more