China’s Uneven and Combined Development

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

2. Introduction: China Shakes the World System

   • Steven Rolf

   Pages 1-19

3. Uneven and Combined Development and the Capitalist States System

   • Steven Rolf

   Pages 21-57

4. From Varieties of Capitalism to Uneven and Combined Development: A New Perspective

   • Steven Rolf

   Pages 59-86

5. China’s Boom (I): The Geopolitical Economy of Reform and Opening, 1978–2000

   • Steven Rolf

   Pages 87-123

6. China’s Boom (II): Making the ‘Leap’, 2001–2008

   • Steven Rolf

   Pages 125-170

7. The ‘Rebalancing’ Fallacy: 2008 and Its Aftermath

   • Steven Rolf

   Pages 171-206

8. The State Resurgent

   • Steven Rolf

   Pages 207-227

9. Conclusion: China Cracks the Whip: The Geopolitical Economy of Chinese Externalisation

   • Steven Rolf

   Pages 229-258

10. Back Matter

    Pages 259-264

    PDF

This book mobilises the theory of uneven and combined development to uncover the geopolitical economic drivers of China’s rise. The purpose is to explain the formation and trajectory of its economic ‘accumulation system’ — which remains a confounding hybrid of statist and neoliberal forms of capitalism — as the outcome of China’s geopolitical engagement of the USA during the late stages of the Cold War, and its participation in manufacturing global production networks (GPNs). Fear of geopolitical catastrophe drove China to open its economy, while GPNs enabled China to generate substantial export surpluses which could be recycled through state-owned banks as cheap credit and subsidies to large, vertically integrated and politically-controlled state-owned enterprises. In this way, a synergy emerged between the ‘neoliberal’ and ‘Keynesian-Fordist’ sectors of the economy, while the national-territorial state retained its form and expanded its functions. The book chronicles how this reliance on export surpluses, however, rendered China extremely vulnerable to external shocks — prompting a dramatic monetary and fiscal stimulus response to the crisis of 2008, even while sustaining the illusion of economic ‘decoupling’ from the global economy. Finally, it examines the growing role of the state in the current crisis-ridden economic model, as well as China’s current geoeconomic and geopolitical expansionism in areas such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the militarisation of the East and South China Seas.

• Uneven and Combined Development
• international political economy
• Chinese State Capitalism
• development economics
• Global Production Networks
• Belt and Road Initiative

“China's geopolitical and economic ‘catch up’ is usually discussed in terms of a new global ‘power’ challenging an established world order or of types of capitalism—Anglo-American vs. state-capitalist, and so on—rather than in terms of the intersection between global and national capitalisms, on the one hand, and different types of polity, on the other. In a powerful synthesis of original theoretical discussion and up-to-date detailed empirical analysis, Steve Rolf shows how much can be gained from reframing China's startling economic trajectory of the past thirty years by highlighting dynamic processes of uneven and combined development, rather than those of static comparative models that ignore necessary within-country as well as country-by-country differences in how economic growth takes place.”

—John Agnew, Distinguished Professor of Geography, UCLA, USA

“Through the lens of the Marxian theory of uneven and combined development, Rolf meticulously weaves together a coherent account of China’s rise from the initiation of market reform to the Belt and Road Initiative and the trade war with the US. It sheds new lights on the many contradictions within China and in the global geopolitical economy that the China boom brings.”

—Ho-fung Hung, Henry M. & Elizabeth P. Wisenfeld Professor in Political Economy, The John Hopkins University, USA

• Digit Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

  Steven Rolf

Steven Rolf is ESRC Research Fellow at the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre, based at the University of Sussex, UK. He has previously worked at the University of Bristol, Aston University, and Birkbeck, University of London. He has also held visiting positions at City University Hong Kong and UCLA, USA. 

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