1. Introduction: China Shakes the World System

UCD is conceived here as only being operative under conditions of capitalism, rather than a transhistorical phenomenon (Ashman 2009). Davidson (2010) suggests even stricter criteria—UCD is only operative in states that are experiencing rapid development, but are unable to reach the developmental level of the advanced capitalist economies. It seems extremely premature to make a firm judgement on this question in China’s case, but it seems self-evident that China is experiencing such a process, regardless of whether it makes it to the other side of advanced capitalism or not.

I take the term ‘statist political economy’ from the work of Ben Selwyn (2014). It aims to capture the broad set of approaches which crystallised in opposition to the Washington consensus on global development, celebrating the Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese developmental states; this through an intellectual lineage originating with the work of Friedrich List and Alexander Gerschenkron, among others (Chang 2002; Amsden 2001; Wade 1990; Johnson 1982).

Two prominent exceptions stand out here. The first is Arrighi’s (2007) Adam Smith in Beijing, which (ambitiously) attempts to characterise China’s rise as a response to the decline of US imperialism. Despite its promising title, however, the work only considers in a curtailed form those contemporary developments internal to China—and its analysis here is fatally hampered, I suggest, by Arrighi’s reluctance to understand development in China as capitalist (preferring the epithet non-capitalist market economy). This allows for creative theorization, but delimits the possibility for understanding China as part of the capitalist global political economy. The second, Hung (cf. 2009, 2015) is in my view the most incisive political economist working on contemporary China. His conclusions regarding the incorporation of China into the US-dominated global political economy suggest, however, that he cleaves somewhat too strongly to the ‘state internationalisation’ theses of Panitch and Gindin (2012) and Poulantzas (2014). I prefer to show how capitalist production has a territoriality of its own which tends to produce geopolitical conflagration.

This most recent formulation runs against the grain of some of Cammack’s (2012) previous work, however, which does recognise the significance of exploring emerging ‘varieties of capitalism’ and explores the significance of heavy state regulation in Asia.