by Indeed, the real issue ahead is the battle for trade and investment globally between China and the US. The US is out to curb and control China’s ability to expand domestically and globally as an economic power. At the workshop, Jude Woodward, author of The US vs China: Asia’s new cold war?, outlined the desperate measures that the US is taking to try to isolate China, block its economic progress and surround it militarily. But this policy is failing. Trump may have launched his tariff hikes, but what really worries the Americans is China’s progress in technology. China, under Xi, aims not just to be the manufacturing centre of the global economy but also to take a lead in innovation and technology that will rival that of the US and other advanced capitalist economies within a
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Mike Norman considers the following as important: China, Chinese economy, Chinese Marxism, development economics, Marxian Economics, Marxism, Sino-American rivalry
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Indeed, the real issue ahead is the battle for trade and investment globally between China and the US. The US is out to curb and control China’s ability to expand domestically and globally as an economic power. At the workshop, Jude Woodward, author of The US vs China: Asia’s new cold war?, outlined the desperate measures that the US is taking to try to isolate China, block its economic progress and surround it militarily. But this policy is failing. Trump may have launched his tariff hikes, but what really worries the Americans is China’s progress in technology. China, under Xi, aims not just to be the manufacturing centre of the global economy but also to take a lead in innovation and technology that will rival that of the US and other advanced capitalist economies within a generation.China's options.
There was a theoretical debate at the workshop about whether China was heading towards capitalism (if not already there) or towards socialism (in a gradual way). Marx’s view of socialism and communism was cited (from Marx’s famous Critique of Gotha Programme) with different interpretations. For me, I reckon Marx’s view of socialism and/or communism starts from two realistic premises; 1) that communism as a society of super-abundance where toil, exploitation and class struggle have been eliminated to free the individual, is technically possible now – especially with the 21st technology of AI, robots, internet etc; and 2) socialism and/or any transition to communism cannot even start until the capitalist mode of production is no longer dominant globally and instead workers’ power and planned democratically-run (not dictatorships) economies dominate. That means China on its own cannot move (even gradually) to socialism (even as the first stage towards communism) unless the dominant power of imperialism is ended in the so-called West. Remember China may be the second-largest economy in the world in dollar terms but its labour productivity is less than one-third of the US.In my view, Michael Roberts gets both of these issues right and together they from the basis of the geopolitical dynamic that is driving geopolitics at this stage of the great game.
His conclusion.
There is a (permanent) struggle going on within the political elite in China over which way to go – towards the Western capitalist model; or to sustain “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. After the experience of the Great Recession and the ensuing Long Depression in the West, the pro-capitalist factions have been partially discredited for now. President for Life Xi now looks to promote ‘Marxism’ and says state control (through party control) is here to stay. But the only real way to guarantee China’s progress, to reduce the growing inequalities and to avoid the risk of a swing to capitalism in the future will be to establish working class control over Chinese political and economic institutions and adopt an internationalist policy a la Marx. That is something that Xi and the current political elite will not do.Time will tell.
China faces a dilemma. It needs the capitalist means of production to grow commensurably with capitalist countries and capitalism entails imperialism (think China's BRI). But for a peaceful transition to socialism when capitalism runs its course, China has to moderate its level of capitalism, while maintaining a balancing level of socialism. This is the aim of socialism with Chinese characteristics as it stands, and one can expect a flexible approach in the face of change.
A fundamental 19th century point of Marx & Engels is that societies are complex adaptive systems subject to reflexivity and emergence, which implies that economies are dynamic and subject to the historical dialectic. This stands in contrast to to the 18th century bourgeois liberalism based on static "natural law" that Marx criticized but which is held as convention in the West. So it is more likely that the Chinese leadership can be more agile and adaptive than Western leaders. Whether they will be able to rise to the occasion is another question. Moreover, there is a strong possibility that if Western leaders perceive that the West is falling behind, they will initiate war (think Thucydides trap).
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China workshop: challenging the misconceptions
Michael Roberts