Globalization and the role of the state: Reflections on Chinese international and comparative political economy scholarship

ABSTRACT

China's rapid integration into the global economy has had undeniable implications for the Chinese state – it raises questions about how the state has simultaneously encouraged globalization and, at the same time, tried to control for globalization's impact on China's economy, its culture, and on state policy and the state itself. These implications have not been lost on PRC-based scholars of international and comparative political economy, who have focused considerable – if, as we shall argue, incomplete – attention on globalization's challenge to state sovereignty, to economic sovereignty, and on the economic role of the state. The article highlights features of the Chinese scholarship that are quite distinctive. This literature reflexively favours a strong role for the state in the context of globalization. We also observe that the literature in general is not oriented to theory-building. Instead, scholarship is largely policy-driven; there is a strong impulse to provide positive policy advice to Chinese policy-makers. Most striking, the understanding of the state in the Chinese literature remains partial; there is a marked reluctance to delve into either empirical or theoretical study of the Chinese state itself – the state itself as a subject of critical analysis is rarely considered.

KEYWORDS:

• globalization
• China
• role of state
• IPE
• comparative political economy
• Chinese IPE

Notes

¹Articles were selected and reviewed by Zhu Tianbiao. The selection of articles was based on the index for Chinese academic journals, Zhongguo Qikan Quanwen Shujuku (China Journal Full-text Database). As articles published earlier have a greater chance of being cited, Zhu intentionally includes more recent publications in his survey.

²IR specialist Qin Yaqing (2010) similarly laments the lack of theory-building in the field of International Relations.

³While the term, ‘multinational corporations’ (MNCs), is now commonly used in the West, in the Chinese literature, TNCs (i.e., kuaguo gongsi) is the standard concept.

⁴See also Strange (1996).

⁵See also Smith, Solinger and Topik (1999).

⁶Other strands are represented by Beeson (2003), who argues that domestic actors and their links to external actors must be considered, and Sassen (1996), who advocates consideration of international mediating organizations such as the United Nations and the European Community.

⁷For a similar argument, see Xu Xiaoming (2007).

⁸Representative scholarship includes Qiu (1999), Guo (2000), Ma (2000), Song (2004), Chen (2005), Yan (2006) and Cao et al. (2007). This position on China's own domestic security contrasts with the finding in the Wang–Chin contribution to this volume that there is a growing space for discussions of cooperation with regard to international financial issues.

⁹Zi Shan (2005) argues that the understanding of security has changed from single to multiple dimensions, from an absolute to relative term, from a static to a dynamic nature, and from an external to an internal arena.

¹⁰See Freeman and Yuan (2011), who identify key economic nationalist scholars as Zuo Dapei (Chinese academy of Social Sciences), Zhang Hongliang (Minzu University) and Lang Xianping (Chinese University of Hong Kong).

¹¹See, for example, Gills and Philip (1996), Radice (2000), Wolf (2004), Herkenrath et al. (2005), Kiely (2007) and Cao (2009).

¹²Such concerns were raised after the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, but because China's economy was relatively insulated from that crisis, the concerns seemed a bit more remote. The fallout from the 2008 crisis, however, saw an impact, not just in policy and academic circles, but in the popular media, including the commentaries of prominent scholars such as Wang Shaoguang (2011).

¹³Essays and commentaries posted on the website, Utopia, do engage in this criticism, but this idea is much more muted in mainstream academic work. See Freeman and Yuan (2011).

¹⁴On the importance of class analysis for understanding the PRC's current economic situation, see Li et al. (2012).

¹⁵The term, ‘Beijing Consensus’, is attributed to Goldman Sachs’ senior advisor, Joshua Cooper Ramo, who, in a 2004 article, used the term to contrast China's development path to that recommended by the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’. See Scott Kennedy (2010), ‘The Myth of the Beijing Consensus’, Journal of Contemporary China, 10(65) (June): 461–78. A critique of the idea of a ‘Beijing Consensus’ and, by extension, a ‘China Model’ has been done by MIT's Yasheng Huang (2011) in ‘Rethinking the Beijing Consensus’ in Asia Policy.

¹⁶An early example was a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) volume edited by Yu et al. in 2006, The China Model and the Beijing Consensus: Beyond the Washington Consensus.

¹⁷Other scholars, while not espousing a ‘China Model’, concur on some of the elements found in the model. A historically grounded discussion of the elements of policy flexibility can be found in Zhu (2012).

¹⁸In contrast, the East Asian developmental state literature drew strength – despite its flaws – from its willingness to examine state-led processes (including repressive processes) and their interaction with society.

¹⁹Curiously, perhaps, the Chinese government is cautious about using the phrase, ‘China Model’. See ‘The China Model: The Beijing Consensus is to Keep Quiet’, The Economist, 6 May 2010, <http://www.economist.com/node/16059990> (accessed 14 November 2011).

²⁰Li Yihu (2004) further states that Lenin's theory, classical realism and neo-realism are the three foundations of Chinese international relations thought and, if there can be considered a Chinese school of international thought, then it is Sinicized realism. Although a minority, some scholars – not all from within IPE – argue that the state will disappear as classes disappear (e.g., Chen, 2004; Jia, 2005).

²¹Political philosophy departments vary in the extent to which they are dominated by Marxism. Some universities maintain a College of Marxism, separate from departments of politics, which house the main scholars of Marxian political modes of analysis.

²²Promotions of scholars at Chinese universities are increasingly and self-consciously linked to publishing in SSCI-ranked journals, in English.