Abstract
Perhaps a common problem for any scholar is that when a new book is published in one’s area of academic specialization, after reading that book one experiences a sense of mild disappointment. Not because the book is of poor quality or because it does not make a significant contribution to the body of research in that area, but because one already knows to a certain extent the ‘story’ being told. In recent years, I have experienced this multiple times: enjoying a book that I have read on contemporary China and its development, yet feeling mildly unsatisfied after doing so because I did not learn anything new. Ho-fung Hung’s The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World is a welcome exception to this trend. The book is full of insights on China’s capitalist development and its global implications that will greatly benefit sociologists and other scholars with an interest in the area.
The overall goal of The China Boom is to challenge much of the conventional academic and popular wisdom on China’s recent economic development. In Hung’s view, many Western observers of China are influenced by their own political and/or economic biases, and therefore paint a distorted picture of Chinese development, often depicting the ‘China model’ of economic growth and autocratic government policy as being in some ways superior to the liberal democratic model of the United States and other Western countries. Thus, it is necessary, as Hung states, to promote ‘a balanced, undistorted, and holistic account of the development of China that brings China’s full complexity to readers’ (p. xiv). He presents this account in a number of different ways.
In Part I of The China Boom, Hung maps out the historical development of a capitalist economy in China. After first establishing the developmental preconditions for capitalism, Hung shows how the seeds for such development were sown, dating back to the 17th century and the Qing Dynasty. He explains how, in spite of China possessing one of the most advanced market economies in the world in the 18th century, capitalism failed to emerge as it did in Europe. This failure of capitalism to launch subsequently led China to fall developmentally behind the West, as well as Japan on a regional level as state-directed capitalism there was successfully fostered. Hung then explains in historical detail why it took approximately two centuries, until the 1980s, for the Chinese capitalist boom to eventually take place.
Part II of the book centers on the ramifications of China’s economic explosion, both internally and externally. In this portion of The China Boom, Hung effectively critiques many of the arguments regarding China’s positive, transformative impact on the global economy. First, he considers how China’s lifting of a significant proportion of its population out of poverty during the post-reform era has played a role toward potentially reducing global inequality, in the process reversing the long-run trend of income polarization between developed and developing countries (pp. 3, 87). Hung then challenges the assertion that China’s post-reform rise has also corresponded to a decline in Western – and American, specifically – global geopolitical hegemony. Finally, he addresses the arguments that in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, China rescued the world economy and in turn propelled global economic recovery from the ‘overconsumption, high indebtedness, and financial excess in the United States and Europe’ (p. 146) that spurred the crisis in the first place.
What are some of the most important contributions of The China Boom to the sociological understanding of Chinese development? Some of Hung’s most valuable insights pertain to the history of capitalist development in China. Most understandings (including my own) of capitalism in China start in the late 1970s after Mao died and the Deng Xiaoping government took the earliest, gradual steps of economic reform, such as the development of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), most famously in Shenzhen. What Hung convincingly shows is that many aspects of China’s developmental history from the 17th century forward successfully laid the foundation for the eventual growth of capitalism.
What is interesting is that Hung explains how some of Communist China’s Mao-initiated policies – such as investing in agricultural infrastructure, education, and health care for rural residents – served as a necessary precondition for capitalist development during the reform era. The large, healthy, and mostly literate rural population that this engendered served as the migrant labor force that attracted foreign investment and powered the export-oriented manufacturing economy that has been the primary impetus for China’s explosive economic growth since the 1980s (pp. 47–48). Where did much of this foreign capital originate? From ethnic Chinese who were descendants of the entrepreneurial elite in Qing era China who had migrated to European colonial outposts like Macau and Jakarta. These descendants formed part of a network of Chinese diasporic capital that included ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan, that once the reform era came about provided an important source of foreign direct investment (pp. 31, 170). Also, the isolation and developmental autarky of Mao era China meant that it did not fall into the trap of indebtedness to the West that many developing countries fell into during the 1970s. This lack of significant external borrowing meant that China could experiment with market reform in the 1980s on its own terms, and not be beholden to the World Bank or International Monetary Fund (IMF) and be forced to impose ‘shock therapy’ economic reform as many nations were forced to do as a condition of loan repayment (pp. 48–49).
Hung’s other major contributions with The China Boom are to convincingly show, as the book’s subtitle states, Why China Will Not Rule the World. What he documents in a number of ways is that China, although an indisputable economic power, is a beneficiary of the status quo in the global capitalist economic system, and is therefore not the disruptive nor future hegemonic force some analysts claim it to be. In particular, Hung shows how the post-reform Chinese development model is reliant upon consumption demand in rich (primarily Western) countries as well as ‘strong backward linkages to components and capital-goods exporters in neighboring Asian economies’ (p. 83). By relying so heavily on global free trade and the flow of investment capital, as well as its ‘addiction’ (pp. 125–133) to US Treasury bonds, Hung explains that China has neither the will nor the ability to transform the global economic order (p. 169).
For China scholars, Ho-fung Hung’s observations in this book send a sobering message. Considering how easy it can be to be swept up in the hyperbole surrounding China’s post-reform development, an objective, empirical account of capitalist growth in China and its implications for the world is welcome. Based upon the value of its contributions to the sociological understanding of capitalism and Chinese development, I recommend Hung’s The China Boom highly.