16. Globalizing China: A Critical Political Economy Perspective on China’s Rise

Few developments in the global political economy of the 21st century have received so much scholarly attention as the “rise of China”. Although occupying only a small and relatively obscure niche in this wide-ranging literature, there have also been important contributions to studying the political economy of China’s recent development from the critical perspective identified by the editors in the introduction to this volume. There is however no widely recognized common core: the field is very young and only beginning to recognize let alone overcome certain key obstacles. First, there is the bifurcation—not absolute, but quite meaningful nevertheless—between the “old China hands” in the field, the China specialists trained and well versed in the history, language and culture of China and the wider region, on the one hand, and those (like the author of this chapter) whose scholarly interest in China has only emerged later and remained secondary to their engagement with broader themes in international political economy (IPE) thus depending on the literature available in English and other Western languages. Then, contributions to the field by Chinese scholars themselves are few in number. There is also relatively little communication between critical scholars within China and those based outside China. Critical Chinese scholars being published in English still form a rare species, with a few important exceptions such as Wang Hui (Wang 2009, 2014). In spite of all this, critical IPE scholars have made key contributions to our understanding of the dynamics and contradictions of China’s rise in the contemporary global political economy. This chapter aims to survey some of these quite disparate contributions (without any claim to comprehensiveness) and to put them into the context of a more or less coherent conceptual framework.