Modern China

The theory and ideology of mainstream Anglo-American “marketism” do not accord with reality. Its core idea—equating all trade with equal and mutually beneficial market exchanges, and believing that such exchanges are certain to lead to division of labor and transformative changes in labor productivity—is a one-sided, idealized construction. It erases unequal exchanges under imperialism and ignores the realities of the use of cheap informal labor in developing countries by hegemonic capital in the globalized economy. It also disregards pervasive unethical pursuits of profit among producers and widespread human weaknesses among consumers. If we proceed instead from China’s actual experiences, we can come to see and grasp the many different varieties of trade that differ from the abstractions of conventional marketism, including the “commercialization of extraction” that long characterized the principally unidirectional “trade” based on severe inequities between town and country, as well as the “growth without (labor productivity) development,” or “involutionary commercialization,” that long characterized domestic Chinese commerce that emerged under severe population pressures on the land. If we turn instead to the “take-off” period of the recent decades in Chinese economic development, we can see also the great contrast between Chinese realities and the mainstream economics construct of a “laissez faire state,” and see instead the state engaging most actively in development, and state-owned enterprises working closely together with private enterprises. Those realities are perhaps most evident in the recent dramatic development of China’s mammoth real estate economy that has been the main engine of rapid development since about 2000—most especially in its immense process of the “capitalization of land.” We can also see how the tradition of the “socialist planned economy” has operated in unison with the new capitalist market economy, by combining the twin ideals and mechanisms of “people’s livelihood” and “private profit.” What is needed is a new kind of political economy that can grasp and illuminate such changes.

The theoretical focus of neoclassical economics experienced a significant change in the 1970s–1980s. General equilibrium theory lost its dominant position in theoretical economic studies, with its role of setting the research agenda taken over by what this article calls the “new microeconomic theories,” principally decision theory, game theory, and mechanism design. Mainstream economists, post-Keynesians, and historians of economic thought each give a different explanation of the hows and whys of that change, but all miss some critical methodological implications. That change, as this article discusses, shows that neoclassical economics has turned from “grand theory” toward “small models” with empirically delimited utility and that the ideology of marketism lacks a valid scientific foundation. This interpretation can help illuminate the deeper dynamics of the postwar development of neoclassical economics and provide insights for a new political economy that can come to grips with political-economic practices that cannot be fully grasped by the neoclassical tradition.

Neoclassical economics relies on highly formalized deductive logic to create an overly simplified picture of economic practices. Its universalized model of modernization assumes that the relationship between state and market is antagonistic. This presumption reduces China’s “economic miracle” to a simple transformation into a market economy and underestimates the role played by the government, making it impossible to construct a theory that considers China’s subjectivity. Studies on China’s economy should focus on its practices, which may appear to be paradoxical if seen only from the perspective of Western neoclassical economics, in order to construct an accurate depiction of the foundations of China’s development experience. Only through such an endeavor will it be possible to incorporate into any new theory of economic modernization the distinctive features of China’s development.

Despite the Chinese state’s long-standing wariness of strong horizontal linkages among nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and a deteriorating political climate for civil society activism, cross-regional alliances among NGOs have become a persistent phenomenon in recent years. This article draws on the case of the Zero Waste Alliance—a nationwide coalition of environmental NGOs engaged in waste-related matters—to identify structural conditions that encouraged its emergence and illuminate how alliance builders have interpreted their environment. The article argues that developments internal to the environmental NGO sector (an increased need to pool scarce resources and professional knowledge, a stronger inclination to collaborate among a new generation of NGO leaders, and the formation of epistemic communities), combined with conditional state lenience, have propelled activists to embark on a strategy of alliance building. This case illustrates how the perceived boundary of the permissible shifts when structural conditions incentivize entrepreneurial activists to explore new strategies, and these attempts do not provoke repressive responses. It also highlights that the state has remained conditionally tolerant of boundary-pushing NGO behavior in a sector aligning with its interests, while strengthening political control over civil society.

This article discusses two different attitudes toward elections and democracy among the early Chinese communists. It argues that apart from some communist leaders in Shanghai who saw nothing of value in participating in elections, there were members of the party who favored social democracy. Two Cantonese Marxists, Chen Gongbo and Tan Pingshan, heavily influenced by German social democrats, especially Karl Kautsky, attached great importance to elections and “the enlightenment of the masses” on the road to communism. This led them to oppose their comrades in Shanghai, and to support the federalist self-government movement advocated by Chen Jiongming. After 1922, this rift between communists in Guangzhou and Shanghai grew into a serious intra-party conflict. Eventually, the Cantonese social democratic approach was politically discredited and largely forgotten. Exploring this Cantonese approach will clarify the connection and tension between democracy, enlightenment, and socialism in May Fourth China.

This article traces the Chinese accommodation of foreigners in the lower section of the Pearl River delta during the Opium War to the region’s social ecology in late imperial times. With a long tradition of living with foreign sojourners and their vessels, Chinese people in the delta congregated on an unprecedented scale at the outer anchorages within the present-day Hong Kong region in 1839–1841 to trade with Euro-American merchants and the British expedition. As mobile and violent provisioners and opium dealers, they flourished in the littoral borderland between the Qing and British empires. Their cross-shore ventures constituted an intensification of their prewar activities and an economic adaptive strategy in the competitive society of mid-Qing Guangdong. Centering on the socioeconomic lives of ordinary Chinese people, this article problematizes the usage of “Hanjian” and “collaboration” as nationalist and statist labels to summarize Chinese assistance to foreigners in times of external war in modern China.