China’s Global Rise: From Socialist Self-reliance to the Embracement of Economic Globalization

The essay examines China’s globalization from the perspective of neo-Marxist theories of capitalist development and the world systems approach. The first part of the essay will outline the economic and political impasse encountered by China in the 1970s that forced the country to turn away from socialist economic planning and experiment with neoliberal reforms. It will also examine the crisis of accumulation associated with Fordism–Keynesianism among the advanced capitalist economies, which induced them to welcome China’s reintegration into the capitalist world economy as a spatial fix to problems of rigidity and declining profit. The second part of this essay will analyze China’s “model” of development, namely state neoliberalism, and delineate its three features including neoliberal reforms, reliance on socialist ideology as the basis of political legitimacy, and the resultant hesitations and policy reversals. Finally, the third part of the essay will highlight recent changes in China’s approach, especially its embracement of globalization and formation of global institutions, and the resulting tensions with other countries that might exert far-reaching consequences on the nature of globalization.