Globalization With Chinese Characteristics

Globalization with Chinese Characteristics:
Externalization, Dynamics and Transformations
Jeffrey Henderson, Richard P. Appelbaum and Suet Ying Ho
ABSTRACT
This article introduces a special issue on globalization ‘with Chinese char-

acteristics’, but also makes its own contribution to the debates. It does so by
focusing on the implications of China’s rise for the nature and consequences
of globalization as a distinct formation. It argues that globalization needs
to be understood, in part, as the externalization of particular national forms
of capitalism in particular historical periods. In this context, it explores the
Chinese form in some detail, arguing that this form is likely to provide much
of the initial character of a new, emergent version of globalization now in
train. The ways China (and other ‘rising powers’) are beginning to impact
other parts of the developing world presages the need for a new approach
to the analysis of ‘development’. This article is critical of traditional dis-
courses, and argues that innovation around the concept of ‘transformation’,
including a focus on ‘conjunctures of critical transformation’, may lead to
more appropriate and adequate analyses of development and open up those
analyses more effectively to ‘non-Western’ voices. The authors discuss the
‘vectors’ by which China’s externalization is transforming the developing
world. They mobilize arguments from the other articles in the special issue,
in order both to introduce their contributions to the relevant debates and to
use their arguments as materials for the particular contribution this article
provides.
INTRODUCTION
Sometime in the early 2000s commentators on global affairs began to take

cognisance of the fact that the re-emergence of China as an economic and
We are grateful to Development and Change’s referees for their insightful comments on earlier
drafts of this and the other articles that compose the special issue. Additionally, Jeffrey Henderson
wishes to thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding some of the research on which the introductory
article draws.
Earlier versions of all the articles in this special issue were presented at a conference jointly
organized by the Universities of Bristol, Hong Kong and California at Santa Barbara and held
in Bristol, 5–6 December 2011. We wish to thank our Hong Kong colleague, Ian Holliday, for
working with us on the conference. Generous financial support for the conference was provided
by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation (Grant: CS009-U-10) and the Bristol Vice Chancellor’s
East Asia Fund. Additional funds came from the British Inter-Universities China Centre and the
Colston Research Society. We are grateful to all these agencies for their support.
Development and Change 44(6): 1221–1253. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12066

C 2013 International Institute of Social Studies.
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA
1222 J. Henderson, R.P. Appelbaum and S.Y. Ho
political power was having major implications for other parts of the world.
By then, these implications were already significant in terms of their breadth
and depth and ranged from questions of economic growth and development
to those of geopolitics and military security. The vast majority of research on
the consequences of China’s rise has had particular national and/or world-
regional foci. Among these, the implications for the USA (and to a lesser
extent, ‘the West’1 more generally) and for sub-Saharan Africa have been
paramount. Contributions on other parts of the world (‘developing’ and
‘developed’), however, are growing in number and theoretical import as
China’s engagements continue to spread and deepen, spatially and institu-
tionally (see, for instance, Fernández Jilberto and Hogenboom, 2012; Fornés
and Philip, 2012; Gallagher and Porzecanski, 2010, on Latin America; and
Wilson, 2013 on Australia).
In contrast to this explosion of research at particular territorial levels,
there remains surprisingly little that seeks to analyse the consequences of
China’s rise for the wider global totality. While the work of Frank (1998) and
Arrighi (2007) stand as beacons here, and have been complemented by other
important contributions such as those by Breslin (2007) and Hung (2009),
work on the implications of China’s rise for the nature of globalization is still
thin on the ground (though see Henderson, 2008 and Nederveen Pieterse,
2008, 2011). This article, and the special issue of which it is a part, are
attempts to help correct this imbalance: attempts, in other words, to explore
the nature and consequences of ‘globalization with Chinese characteristics’.
The articles that follow this introduction deal with China’s involvements
in particular national or world-regional spaces and with globally significant
issues. Though in this sense they partly follow the pattern set by previous re-
search, they do so by working on issues that are relatively under-researched
and/or on territories where China’s economic and political involvement has
just begun to emerge. Additionally, some of them bring new theoretical in-
sights to bear on problems that, empirically, are reasonably well understood.
In the context of their collective contribution to the special issue, this intro-
ductory article focuses explicitly on the global level of analysis, which is at
least immanent in all of the other articles. It does so in two ways: it discusses
how China’s rise may be reconstituting the nature of globalization; and it
argues that this may have significant implications for the conceptualization
and policy-practice of ‘development’. In the latter context it argues for a dis-
course of ‘transformation’ and a re-orientation of analytic attention around
‘conjunctures of critical transformation’.
We begin by outlining our contention that globalization, in part, needs
to be seen as an ‘externalization’ of given national capitalisms and aspects
of their attendant social formations. Referring to the debates on ‘varieties
1. ‘The West’, ‘Western’ etc. are used here in inverted commas to denote their ideological,
Cold War roots.
Globalization with Chinese Characteristics 1223
of capitalism’, we briefly sketch the salient features of the US form that

provides much of the character of contemporary globalization. Against this
backdrop we then explore the unusual, hybridized and highly complex form
that is contemporary Chinese capitalism. It is this form that is now being ex-
ternalized and may be on the way to transforming the nature of globalization
and thus its consequences ‘on the ground’. In the second substantive section
we outline why we believe the rise of China (and of the other ‘rising powers’
more generally) foregrounds the need to re-think some of the categories and
discourses through which we seek to analyse ‘development’. Here we sketch
the reasons why ‘transformation’ discourses are likely to hold more promise
than traditional ones for the investigation and policy-practice of economic,
social and political change. In the penultimate section, we mobilize the other
articles in this special issue to help us explore the nature of the China-driven
‘vectors of transformation’ that are helping to transform the current content
of, and future possibilities for, ‘development’.
CHINA AND GLOBALIZATION
There seems to be a consensus in scholarly and development policy circles

that the Rising Powers — or BICs: Brazil, India and China (Scott et al.,
2010) — are helping to forge a world historic transformation in the global
political economy, its social consequences in terms of poverty reduction at
the very least, and probably also its politics and geopolitics.2 Given this,
it seems reasonable to pose the question of whether the Rising Powers, in
general, are impelling a change in the nature of globalization and if so,
what might be the content, dynamics and direction of this change? While
this could well be a relevant question for the future, we suggest it is too
early to say (with a reasonable degree of confidence) whether the recent
externalization of the Indian and Brazilian political economies is making a
significant contribution to the nature of globalization and its inherent power
relations. With regard to China, however, such an analysis is clearly possible
and appropriate. In terms of the state (via involvement in global governance
and the spread of its ‘soft power’, for instance), corporate activity (whether
state or privately owned) and international migration, China is, for now, a far
more prominent global actor than the others, and is arguably the key driver
2. Among a considerable literature that points to this conclusion and has emerged in recent
years from international development agencies see, for instance, Santos-Paulino and Wan
(2010); UNDP (2013); Winters and Yusuf (2007). Our focus on the BICs rather than the
BRICs (which includes Russia) arises from our belief that Russia’s economic trajectory —
increasingly and overwhelmingly energy based (70 per cent of goods exports in 2011 or
nearly 90 per cent when other minerals and chemicals are included; EDRB, 2012) — is
dramatically at odds with the other three economies and raises important questions about
whether or not it belongs in this ‘group of four’ (see, for example, Flikke, 2012).
in what may, in the longer term, emerge as a wider Asian-influenced form

of globalization: a Global Asian Era.
While reflection on the wider hypothesis would thus be premature, current
circumstances do allow us to begin to gauge the consequences of the rise of
China for the nature of globalization. We begin this task by advancing an
important proposition: that the conceptualization of globalization needs to be
grasped, at least in part, as an externalization of particular national political
economies, their capitalisms and social formations in particular historical
periods.
Globalization as Externalization
In order to explore ‘globalization with Chinese characteristics’ effectively,

we first need to engage in some brief conceptual ground clearing. Specif-
ically, we need to be clear that globalization is not a reflection of some
idealized, monadic notion of capitalism as many of the standard texts seem
to assume (e.g. Hirst and Thompson, 2000; Stiglitz, 2002).3 Rather, while
it certainly needs to be understood as the spatial dispersal of capitalism’s
universal core, it also needs to be comprehended as a consequence of the
gradual externalization of the socio-political character of particular national
forms of capitalism in particular historical periods. Consequently, if we want
to know what constitutes a given form of globalization, where it has come
from, what its dynamics might be and how it might be changing, we first
need to understand capitalism’s inner core (explored and theorized initially
by Marx, 1990/1867), but we also need to know the nature of the dominant
national capitalism (and its historical, institutional and social origins and
constructions) that gives that form of globalization its particular character.
While there is no need here to reprise the ‘varieties of capitalism’ de-
bates, we should note that in their concern to elucidate national differences
in the sources of competitiveness, in welfarism, economic policy, corpo-
rate managerial priorities, economic governance, firm structures, innovation
etc., this literature has evolved in ways that have tended to disconnect it
from analyses of the sources and forms taken by the multi-layered pro-
cesses of globalization.4 The view taken here, however, is that globalization
and national capitalisms are far from being constellations of (ultimately)
profit-seeking activity that have emerged as if in separate galaxies. Rather,
particular national capitalisms have been the institutional sources of some
of the predominant driving forces of globalization in particular historical
periods and have thus tended to provide it, if not with its economic, then
with its political and social logics. As a result, globalization is perhaps best
3. Held et al. (1999) is a partial exception to this.

4. For contributions that provide overviews as well as original interventions in the varieties of
capitalism debates, see Coates (2000); Walter and Zhang (2012); Whitley (1999).
understood not merely as a reflection of the universal core of capitalism,5

but also as an externalization of a given national form (or related forms).
Enter the Eagle
This perspective implies that since the late 1940s it has been possible to
identify the economic, social, political and cultural dynamics of the US form
of capitalism as the principal source for the characteristics of contemporary
globalization. Among these dynamics, the following now seem to have been
particularly important.
Transnationalization of private corporate power. Subsequent to the var-
ious East India companies associated with classical European colonialism
(seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), US companies became the spearhead
of economic globalization. From the 1880s, US capitalists had pioneered the
large, multidivisional firm and it was from among their number that modern
transnational corporations were forged (Chandler, 1977). Not only did they
invent and drive Fordist systems of production and consumption, and go on
to create and dominate what by the 1980s had become known as the ‘new
international division of labour’ (Frobel et al., 1980), but it was often those
same US companies (in garments, electronics and automobiles, for instance)
that reduced costs while maintaining control over the highest value-adding
functions (research and development, innovation, brand names and so on)
via multiple layers of subcontracting associated with global production net-
works (Henderson et al., 2002). Even in the contemporary period, with the
challenge of first Japanese, German and other European corporations and,
more recently, Korean, Chinese and Indian ones, the USA has continued to
be home to over 26 per cent (in 2012) of the world’s largest corporations
(132 of the leading 500, by revenue, according to Fortune6 ).
Cyber networks and space–time compression. It was US companies, some-
times in close association with the US government (particularly the Pen-
tagon), that pioneered and subsequently drove ICT innovation first in hard-
ware and subsequently in software (from Fairchild Semiconductor and the
origins of Silicon Valley in the 1950s through to Apple, Microsoft, Google
and beyond today). In so doing they have been predominantly responsible
for creating the globally networked, ‘real time’ decision making that has
become a sine qua non for the transformation of global commerce, politics,
social life and military security (Castells, 2000).
5. Which Gary Runciman has reminded us may be no more than ‘a mode of production in
which formally free labour is recruited for regular employment by ongoing enterprises
competing in the market for profit’ (Runciman, 1995: 33).
6. See http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2012/countries/US.html?iid=smlrr
(accessed 10 May 2013). China, however, is now home to nearly 15 per cent of the world’s
largest companies.
Neoliberalism. Crucially for contemporary globalization, it was in the

United States, in the mid-1970s, that the policy agenda we now refer to as
‘neoliberalism’ began to emerge (Harvey, 2005). From then on, neoliberal
agendas have been rolled out across much of the world and have involved
the reconstruction of the operations of the state and welfare provision via
the application of radical free-market doctrines. These have elevated ‘the
market’ (not the state, no matter how democratic the polity) to the dominant
role in economic governance and in decisions over the flows of goods and
capital (including ‘human capital’, namely workers) and their prices. Along
with this, neoliberalism has helped secure for the private sector and private
property — and the interests and values associated with them — the dominant
role in society and, relatedly, has served to legitimate a politics designed to
maintain these interests and ends.
Financialization. Consistent with the expansion of neoliberalism, the pe-
riod since the 1980s has seen the emergence of a new global regime of
accumulation: ‘financialization’. Driven forward initially by the Reagan
government in the US and the Thatcher government in Britain, financial-
ization has involved the subordination of all forms of capital (in whatever
sectors and whether productive or not), as well as governments and the daily
lives of human beings, to the particular interests and vicissitudes of finance
capital (cf. Glyn, 2006; Williams, 2000). This subordination has ensured
that there has been a direct line from the liberalization of financial markets
in the 1980s to the economic and political turmoil that many parts of the
world have endured since 2008.
Militarization of US foreign policy. Paralleling and, indeed, imbricated
in the rise of neoliberalism, has been an increasing tendency to quickly
revert to military solutions for foreign policy dilemmas (Harvey, 2003;
Johnson, 2004). While this first emerged after World War II and under
the guise of the hot wars associated with the Cold War (Korea, Vietnam
and interminable anti-revolutionary and/or anti-democratic interventions:
Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Cuba, 1961; Indonesia, 1965; Chile, 1973;
Nicaragua, 1987; etc., etc.), there has perhaps been a step change since
the Cold War morphed into the ‘war on terror’. From the US and NATO
interventions in Bosnia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia in the
early 1990s to the invasion of Iraq (2003) and the ongoing occupation of
Afghanistan, the tendency for military options to quickly displace the search
for diplomatic solutions in the US government’s foreign relations has been
particularly evident.
Enter the Dragon
Without the externalization of US capitalism, particularly its innovations

in the organization of production, consumption and governance and the
deregulation of markets, China’s rise would have been both slower and less
spectacular than it has been.7 In these senses, US capitalism and the form of
globalization that it forged can be seen as the midwives of Chinese capital-
ism. Notwithstanding this fact, if we are witnessing the gradual emergence
of a new form of globalization, consistent with the rise of China and per-
haps, eventually, other Asian powers, then it is likely that this form will
be fashioned initially from the Chinese version of capitalism and related
features of the social formation from which it has emerged. In that case, the
coming globalization is likely to be driven by an emergent ‘great power’
that in many ways is quite distinct from those that have driven earlier forms
of globalization.
At issue here is not China’s year on year double-digit growth rates or
the rapidity with which its industrialization project has been put into opera-
tion and achieved considerable success. Those have been matched by other
East Asian economies in earlier periods (see Henderson, 2011: 3, Table 1.1;
Winters and Yusuf, 2007: 9, Figure 1.1) and probably by the Soviet Union
between the early 1930s and the late 1960s (cf. Krugman, 1994). Even the
fact that in 2010 China overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy
and on current projections is destined to overtake the USA as the world’s
largest economy within the next twenty years (McCurry and Kollewe, 2011)
is important largely for its symbolic rather than substantive significance —
especially given China’s low per capita gross national income (GNI: US$
2,940 in 2008) and very high income inequality (a gini coefficient of 0.47 in
2012).8 More significant than the numeric size of China’s economy per se,
is the extraordinary scale at which labour is being combined with capital to
transform raw materials into commodities and, as part of that process, the
considerable potential for innovation that is embedded within China’s polit-
ical economy and society. While this is yet to be strongly reflected in, say,
7. For more on this see some of the essays collected in Hamilton et al. (2012), particularly
Appelbaum (2012).
8. China’s low GNI per capita can be compared that same year (2008) with, for in-
stance, US$ 6,970 in Malaysia, US$ 7,350 in Brazil, US$ 21,530 in South Korea, US$
38,210 in Japan, US$ 42,440 in Germany and US$ 47,580 in the USA (Henderson,
2011: 3, Table 1.1). In 2004, according to Chen’s (2007) gini coefficient calculations,
income inequality in China was 0.45, about 50 per cent higher than official calcula-
tions at that time. In 2012 official Chinese government calculations placed the gini
score at 0.47 (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/18/us-china-economy-income-gap-
idUSBRE90H06L20130118, accessed 10 May 2013), though other Chinese calcula-
tions placed the score for 2010 at a shocking 0.61 (http://english.caixin.com/2012-12-
10/100470648.html, accessed 10 May 2013). If accurate, this latter calculation would
locate China as one of the most unequal countries in the world. In comparison the lat-
est available gini scores for other major economies are: USA (2007), 0.45; South Korea
(2011), 0.42; Britain (2009), 0.40; Japan (2008), 0.38; France (2008), 0.33; and Germany
(2006), 0.27. The gini scores for the two other principal territories of ‘greater China’ —
Hong Kong and Taiwan — were respectively (in 2011) 0.54 and 0.34. The gini for the
European Union in 2011 was 0.31 (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html, accessed 10 May 2013).
export data on manufactured commodities,9 the vast sums the government

is investing in, for instance, the development of nanotechnologies (with the
Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing alone employing over 1,200 prin-
cipal researchers in this area; Appelbaum et al., 2011), the rapidly growing
presence of China in natural science research publications and registered
patents (OECD, 2008), and the increasing technological sophistication of
the products of companies such as Huawei and Lenovo, all suggest that this
potential could soon be realized.
Coupled with the huge scale of resource mobilization, it is the particular
nature of the ‘engine rooms’ (the state, capital, corporate forms, labour
exploitation, etc.) and other features of Chinese capitalism and its social
formation that mark it off from any other form that has dominated the
global economy. Even though all capitalisms are hybrids,10 current Chinese
capitalism is perhaps a unique case (see Peck and Zhang, 2013). In their
important paper on differing forms of corporate governance and the sources
of investment finance, Nee and Opper (2007) describe the Chinese economy
as ‘politicized capitalism’. Though their use of this term is a reflection of the
way the Chinese state permeates the institutional fabric of capitalism there,
it seems an inadequate depiction: all forms of capitalism are, after all, to
some degree ‘politicized’.
In developing an adequate understanding of Chinese capitalism we clearly
need to take cognisance of the multiplicity of corporate forms in contem-
porary China. These include central, provincial and municipal state owned
enterprises (SOEs);11 those owned by the People’s Liberation Army (such as
Poly Technologies, which as well as having weapons and civil engineering
divisions, is involved in real estate speculation and in the sale of Maserati and
Ferrari cars; Henderson, 2011: 34); private companies that were former SOEs
and reportedly continue to have close links with government ministries (e.g.
the telecommunications giant, Huawei); private companies dominated by
Party cadres (‘red capitalists’); ‘ordinary’ private companies; joint ventures
with foreign companies; peasant agriculture; the huge informal economy;
and the webs of corruption that imbricate the business networks — and in
some cases provide the gel that holds them together (ibid.: 33–38; see also
Breslin, 2012). Having marked this diversity, however, we need to recog-
nize that while Chinese capitalism is a highly contradictory form, it remains
9. In an age when production is organized and governed through global networks, interpreting
export data in terms of its meaning for innovation needs care. For an example of the problems
that can arise from misinterpretation — in this case of the supposed presence of innovation
in Malaysia’s electronics industries — see Phillips and Henderson (2008).
10. Especially so in the developing and industrializing countries where pre-capitalist social
and social-structural elements combine with capitalist ones to produce ‘over exploitation’,
as with new and revived forms of forced labour (see Phillips, 2013) and significant value
transfers from the informal to the formal economies.
11. The best known of the latter is the ‘white goods’ manufacturer, Haier, which is owned by
the city of Qingdao.
one in which a particular type of party-state continues to be decisive to its

operational logics. That party-state remains a variation on the classic Lenin-
ist form developed in the Soviet Union and instituted in China after 1949.
Consequently the Chinese economy may perhaps be most appropriately con-
ceptualized, at this point in time, as a version of ‘market neo-Leninism’.12
What, then, are the components of market neo-Leninism that seem to be
the key constitutive elements of an emergent form of globalization? The
following appear to be significant.
Transnationalization of state-owned corporate power. Unlike current and
earlier forms of globalization, where private sector firms have been the
principal foreign economic actors (together with military and aid agencies,
depending on the country in question), a key element of China-driven global-
ization has been the significance of SOEs. While SOEs from other countries
have had limited roles in overseas investment in the past or contemporary
periods, the difference with China is the scale of SOE involvement and the
extent to which this may imply a concern with political-strategic issues as
well as commercial ones. In all the sectors in which Chinese companies are
currently, or are becoming, among the world’s most active,13 in countries as
disparate as South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Libya and Greece, the com-
panies that constitute the cutting edge of China’s economic externalization
are wholly or partially owned by the central government14 or by provincial
or municipal governments.
In assessing the significance of Chinese SOE involvements overseas, we
confront the fact that relevant data on Chinese foreign direct investment
(FDI) are largely unavailable. However, a recent World Bank report on pri-
vate sector involvement in Africa (Shen, 2013) provides some insight into
the situation there. Although no data on the financial scale of SOE investment
relative to private investment are provided, in terms of the numbers of invest-
ment projects in 2011, 45 per cent were by SOEs and 55 per cent by private
companies. Superficially this might imply a larger role for the private sector,
but a number of things need to be borne in mind. Firstly, of the SOE opera-
tions, 60 per cent were in mining and construction and only 6 per cent in man-
ufacturing. For the private companies the reverse was the case, with 58 per
cent of the projects in manufacturing and services, 16 per cent in mining and
5 per cent in construction (Shen, 2013: 7). This sectoral split suggests that the
private sector projects were mainly small-scale, labour-intensive operations
relative to the larger, more capital-intensive ones associated with mining and
oil drilling, for instance. This observation is supported by average invest-
ment data. While the average investment across Africa was US$ 4 million
12. The other principal version of market neo-Leninism is Vietnam.

13. Such as oil, gas, some renewable energies, mining, construction and some financial services
(asset acquisitions by its sovereign wealth funds).
14. Technically, since 2003, by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Com-
mission.
per project, it was US$ 10 million in Nigeria and only US$ 167,000 in Ghana
(ibid.: 15). The former is typified by investment in infrastructure and energy
production, and thus SOE involvement, while the latter is dominated —
to the tune of 60 per cent — by service sector investments, and thus private
sector involvement. These data are limited to just one world-region, but
their implication — at least as far as the developing world is concerned —
is that Chinese SOE involvement in globalization is now both decisive and
historically unprecedented.
Besides SOE involvement per se in globalization, another concern has
been that the SOEs might be elements in a wider Chinese political and se-
curity strategy. This matter has particularly exercised US neo-conservative
think tanks and the US Government (see, e.g., Scissors, 2009) and led to
the blocking of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s (CNOOC)
attempted takeover of Unocal in 2005 and of purchases of telecommuni-
cations equipment from Huawei and ZTE in 2012 (although private firms,
they were suspected of close ties to the Chinese Government). The idea
that Chinese SOEs (or, indeed, some private companies) are pawns in a
strategic plan to dominate Africa and other world-regions stems in part from
an ideologically-driven misreading of the nature of the Chinese state and
political economy and from the further assumption that all Chinese SOEs
are owned and governed in the same way and, consequently, have the same
objectives.
In spite of the fact that China is a federal state, the assumption of many
‘Western’ commentators is that it is a monolithic, top-down, highly co-
ordinated structure in which provincial and city governments and the com-
panies within their domains operate in accordance with central government
directives. While this may have been the case in the past, since the constitu-
tional reform of 1982 (which transferred certain responsibilities from central
to provincial and municipal levels), and given that some provincial govern-
ments have particular leverage within the Standing Committee (Politburo)
of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), provinces and some municipalities
have developed considerable relative autonomy, including with regard to
economic planning (Chen and Jian, 2011).15 In addition to SOEs linked di-
rectly to central government ministries (e.g. oil companies such as Sinopec
and CNOOC, China Telecom etc.), the provinces have long had their own
SOEs and some have become increasingly active in terms of overseas in-
vestments. Chen and Jian (ibid.: 11, Table 4) report that in 2007, 21.5 per
cent of China’s accumulated FDI globally came from provincial and mu-
nicipal sources, principally from their SOEs. Investment projects in Africa
driven by provincial or city-owned enterprises include the economic zone
in Ogun state, Nigeria, developed by Guangdong Xinguang International
15. For instance, Guangdong, Sichuan, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and, of the municipalities, Shanghai,
Beijing, Tianjin and Chongqing, which have provincial government status.
Group, which is owned by the Guangdong Provincial Government, and the

industrial zone developed by Tianjin’s TEDA Investment Holdings near
Suez, Egypt (ibid.: 12).
In the absence of research relevant to this issue, it seems reasonable to
assume that with the multiplicity of ownership and influence over Chinese
SOEs indicated above, there are unlikely to be coherent, unified objectives
that govern their activities when operating overseas.16 Having said this,
the fact that they are SOEs means that they are not encumbered with the
constraints of private companies, such as obsessions with short-term prof-
itability, and the need for year on year dividend returns to shareholders.
Their investment risk is shared with the government agencies that are their
owners and thus, in principle, they are likely to have a higher propensity
to adapt to strategic requirements, including non-commercial and political
ones, than most of their private ‘Western’ counterparts.
Authoritarian, neo-Leninist state. The second issue of relevance to the
proposition that China’s externalization is likely to result in an historically
unprecedented form of globalization is the fact that its political economy
and society continue to be organized and governed by a party-state founded
on Leninist principles. It becomes pertinent to ask, therefore, whether au-
thoritarianism (including ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’) may be
the best political shell for nourishing industrial capitalism in the context of
low-income societies. Such a suggestion goes completely against the grain
of liberal democratic argument, but with the rise of China, and of Taiwan
and South Korea in earlier decades (both controlled by authoritarian, non-
democratic regimes until 1987), it is one that deserves attention. Robert
Wade (2004: 372–5) concluded from his analysis of ‘governed markets’ in
East Asia that as long as competent, developmental authoritarianism was
in place, it might be better for the emergence of industrial capitalism to
delay the onset of democratization until GDP per capita had reached about
US$ 4,000.17 If developmental authoritarianism is a better political shell for
helping to build dynamic capitalism, at least in its initial stages, then what
might its record on social development be?
While this is not the place to discuss this issue in any detail, in regard
to poverty reduction there is work that provides a few clues. For instance,
Henderson et al. (2007) studied the relation between poverty reduction and
the existence of bureaucratically competent ‘Weberian’ state agencies. They
16. Only in crises, such as periods of severe conflict when their investments might be threatened,
would unification around central government objectives be anticipated.
17. Wade’s logic was that in conditions of ‘underdevelopment’, competent, non-predatory, au-
thoritarian states had a better chance of developing and embedding the institutions necessary
for ‘governing the market’ (including an economic bureaucracy engaged in strategic plan-
ning) than democratic ones that would inevitably be mired in tensions and conflicts over
resource distribution etc. This is an assessment that is implicitly echoed in Ha-Joon Chang’s
(2002) work on the myths of ‘Western’ industrialization.
do not distinguish between democratic and authoritarian states, but given the
timeframe of their empirical work (1970–90), and the fact that their analysis
points to the superiority, in terms of poverty reduction, of some of the states
in the East Asian region, there is a clear implication that effective poverty
reduction in developing and industrializing countries seems mainly to have
been associated with states characterized by ‘authoritarian Weberianism’.
If we gauge China in relation to its closest comparator, India — the world’s
largest democracy — on this and other matters essential to the material basis
of a decent life, stark contrasts are evident. Even going back to the foundation
of the two modern states in the late 1940s it can be argued that for most of
the period since then China has done a far better job than India of housing,
rendering literate and keeping its population healthy. While China’s record
on feeding its population is massively scarred by the famine associated with
the ‘great leap forward’ (1959–62: estimates vary but possibly 30 million
dead), and while a democratic state in China would probably have avoided
or checked the policies that led to such destructive insanity, it remains the
case that India and China today are still widely divergent on a number of
quality of life indices. For instance, life expectancy at birth in China is 74
years; in India it is 64. The infant mortality rate in China is 17 per 1,000; in
India it is 50 per 1,000. In 2011, the adult literacy rate in China was 94 per
cent, against only 74 per cent in India (Sen, 2011).18
The future, indeed the survival potential, of China’s neo-Leninist state,
is a matter for debate. A number of scholars (e.g. Hutton, 2007; Pei, 2006)
have argued that unless it is thoroughly democratized — placed firmly on
a path to political transition — the growth potential of Chinese capitalism
and the social benefits that are likely to accrue from it will be constrained if
not choked off. This, however, is by no means certain. As Desai argues in
his debate with Hutton (Hutton and Desai, 2007), the history of successful
capitalism shows that many types of state system have been associated with
it, including some that have been profoundly undemocratic. Extrapolating
from these arguments it is possible to suggest that while China is clearly
in transformation (economically, politically, socially), it is not clear that
it will be, or needs to be, in transition, if the goal is continuing dynamic
capitalism and deepening innovation-driven industrialization. The inherent
danger here, however, is that the tensions and social conflicts associated with
corruption and inequality (and their likely exacerbation by China’s growing
overaccumulation crisis; Hung, 2008), could lead to direct challenges to the
party-state which result not in democratic transition, but in the transition of
‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ to national socialism (with Chinese
characteristics).
18. For an analysis of the institutional sources of the differences in China and India’s economic
performance, see Saith (2008).
A developing country. In addition to the economic agents and the state,

there are a number of wider social and historical issues that are likely to
have consequences for the nature of a China-driven globalization. Among
these, the fact that China is a great power emerging from the countries of
the global South needs to be taken seriously. Associated with this reality are
the following.
Firstly, China represents a country that is now beginning to forge the nature
of globalization but that was previously subject to direct colonization.19 The
historical memories derived from colonization, embellished and fanned by
the CCP, communicated through the media and reproduced through the
education system, seem to have embedded a sense of humiliation (at the
hands of foreigners) in the national consciousness.20 Though evident during
Maoism, this phenomenon has resurfaced in the contemporary period as
can be seen, for instance, in the ‘popular’ responses to the ‘accidental’
US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, the ongoing
propaganda and military stand-offs with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku
islands and the seeming widespread resonance of anti-foreign, nationalist
tracts such China Can Say No (Song et al., 1996; see, in general, Chang,
2001; Gries, 2005; Li, 2013).21
Consistent with being a developing country, China is set to emerge as
the first driver of globalization to be populated by peoples who are non-
white (Japan not withstanding22 ). As a consequence, perceptions of racial
identity are bound to influence social and political relations, as China’s
challenge to the currently dominant order continues to unfold. What is more,
this will be very much a two-way street: perceptions in the US of China,
and in China of the US. Negative perceptions of the racial other have long
been central to the nature of US foreign economic and geopolitical policy
as Vitalis (2009) shows in his investigation of the emergence of the US
oil industry in Saudi Arabia. Similarly, Han Chinese perceptions of racial
superiority have influenced Chinese foreign relations for centuries, if not
19. Brutally so in the case of Japan’s occupation of Manchuria and its subsequent invasion of
other parts of the country between 1931 and 1945.
20. A perceived history of humiliation, as a constitutive element of nationalism, is not unusual.
This was evident in Nazi Germany and, today, in countries such as Poland, Hungary and
Serbia. With the exception of the German example, however, it is unusual in the nationalism
of a putative great power.
21. It is perhaps notable that in one of his first public presentations after assuming the presidency
in 2012 (in a speech given, significantly, at the National Museum’s ‘Road to Rejuvenation’
exhibition), Xi Jinping proclaimed that ‘After the 170 or more years of constant struggle
since the Opium Wars, the great revival of the Chinese nation enjoys glorious prospects . . . .
Now everyone is discussing the Chinese dream, and I believe that realizing the great revival
of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream of the Chinese nation in modern times’ (quoted
in Wong, 2012).
22. While Japan emerged as second only to the USA in terms of its economic power, the fact
that it chose not to realize its potential as a political and geopolitical power meant that it
remained an adjunct to the US as a driver of globalization.
millennia.23 Diamond (1998: Ch. 16) reports that there is evidence going
back 3,000 years that attests to Chinese perceptions of superiority vis-à-
vis non-Chinese, and Dikötter (1992) has interrogated at length the cultural
sources of contemporary Chinese racism. The issue here is not merely the
presence and persistence of racist perceptions — though these clearly exist
as much in China as in the US, Europe and Japan (see Jacques, 2009:
Ch. 8, for Chinese examples) — but rather the extent to which they influence
China’s relations with other developing countries, Japan, the US and other
parts of ‘the West’ and become interpolated in the latters’ perceptions of
China with other negatively loaded connotations (such as ‘Communist’).
Alternative modernization. Consistent with the nature of Han identity,
China arguably represents an alternative to the European–American influ-
enced modernization project which has ‘guided’ development (for increasing
parts of the globe and for better or for worse) for over five centuries. As
Jacques (2009: Ch. 5) has persuasively argued, China, and East Asian coun-
tries more generally, project a very different sense of the future from that
evident in ‘Western’ societies. It is a version of modernity where, because
of the rapid transition from rural, agrarian societies to urban industrial ones,
the past and tradition imbricates the present and frames the future to a far
greater extent than in Europe or the US. Partly as a result of this, kin-based
relations and networks are far more significant to individual identity than
is true of most ‘Western’ societies. Complementing the primacy of kinship,
the persistence — indeed the reproduction — of Confucian values and ethics
in China ensures the continued primacy of group over individual identity.
The former, reinforced by the absence of a multi-ethnic cosmopolitanism, is
readily reconstituted as a national identity that has long been synonymous
with the state. Furthermore, the reproduction of Confucian values within
the family and via the education system has ensured a continued emphasis
on social conformity and the respect for authority. All of this represents a
divergence from and contestation of ‘Western’ notions of modernity. The
question is whether, as China externalizes, its sense of modernity will as-
sume a sense of cultural superiority as is evident in ‘Western’ notions. While
that currently remains unclear, what is clear is that the rise of China both
contests and threatens ‘the West’s’ perceptions of its own superiority.
Militarization. While a significant feature of the US political economy
and society — and those of its European counterparts, particularly during
colonialism24 — has been the militarization of foreign relations, this has
not been true historically of China. With the exception of the invasion and
23. The Han Chinese constitute about 90 per cent of China’s population and have been the
dominant cultural influence for millennia. Even where the ruling dynasties emerged from
other ethnic groups — such as the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1912) — they typically
assimilated to Han culture.
24. Note, for instance, recent revelations about British atrocities during the Mau Mau anti-
colonial struggle in Kenya in the 1950s (The Guardian 6 June 2013).
subjugation of Tibet in the early 1950s, China’s relations with other coun-
tries had for centuries been associated with the creation of ‘harmony’. The
institutional vehicle for this was the tributary system whereby countries on
its borders recognized the economic and cultural dominance of China and rit-
ualistically re-affirmed its position at the centre of a collective civilizational
cosmos (see Zhang and Buzan, 2012).
The Chinese government’s concern to ensure harmonious relations with
foreign powers stems as much from this experience and the perceptions
associated with it as it does from a realistic assessment of its chances of
surviving a military confrontation with the United States. While the Chinese
government is committing considerable sums to developing its military ca-
pacities — including its navy, given the vital role it may need to play to
protect its oil supplies transiting the Indian Ocean (Henderson, 2009) — as
a proportion of GDP these sums are dwarfed by US military expenditure.
The World Bank reports that in 2011, 2 per cent of China’s GDP equivalent
was spent on the military compared with the US’s 4.7 per cent, or about US$
146.4 billion compared with US$ 704.6 billion.25
The Chinese government will continue to engage in military skirmishes to
protect what it considers its sovereign territory (for instance with Japan over
the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands or The Philippines over the Paracels). Addition-
ally, it may well commit to foreign military escapades in the future, partic-
ularly where nationalist and other uprisings threaten its investments or oil
supplies. For the moment, however, its foreign relations history and modal-
ities and its current desire principally to project its soft power (Kurlantzick,
2007), suggest that militarization is not yet one of the significant features of
its social formation that is about to be externalized.
DEVELOPMENT OR TRANSFORMATION?
If, in combination, the features of Chinese capitalism and the country’s

social formation are giving rise to a new and qualitatively different form of
globalization, what might this mean for the analysis and policy-practice of
‘development’?
With the rise of China, a ‘giant’ country from the global South with its
alternative vision of modernity and its externalization of a form of capitalism
that differs dramatically from what has gone before, we may need to ques-
tion the utility of traditional conceptions of ‘development’ and the policy-
practices that flow from them. As Escobar (1995), Rist (2002), Wallerstein
(2001: Ch. 7) and others have argued, the conceptions of development that
dominate contemporary discourses, analytic schemes and affiliated policy
25. Calculations from World Bank Data (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.

GD.ZS and http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD) (accessed 6 June
2013).
agendas are imbued with European/American-centric notions of ‘progress’

and ‘modernization’ that emerged from the European Enlightenment of the
eighteenth century, were elaborated and deepened during the classical colo-
nialisms of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries and have
continued to inform perceptions and thinking through the post-colonial pe-
riod — including the Millennium Development Goals — and beyond. To take
but one development arena — education — the transmission of ‘Western’
values and curricula in the creation of educational systems (thus denying the
histories and devaluing the identities of indigenous peoples), has arguably
constituted a form of ‘cultural imperialism’ (Carnoy, 1974). Similarly, in
regard to official development assistance (‘aid’), Hayter (1971; Hayter and
Watson, 1985) argued long ago that the World Bank and other development
agencies have been engaged in the communication of neo-colonial policy-
practices. On a wider plane, Chang’s (2002, 2007) work implicitly shows
how the conception of ‘development’ reflected in orthodox economic the-
ory and notions of ‘good governance’ has not merely been inappropriate,
but has created serious problems for the peoples of the global South, while
Rist (2002), in his trenchant critique, regards ‘development’ as a delusional
‘global faith’.
Behind the policies and practices of development are major intellectual
problems. One of these is that the notion of development serves to restrict
the remit of the policy-practices of economic, political and cognate forms
of change to developing countries only. Change-as-development, therefore,
becomes an issue solely for the global South. The global North is assumed to
be ‘developed’ and thus the development process there is presumed to have
finished. In this way the notion of development and its attendant discourses
serve to fracture the unity of global change; the reality of the global political
economy and its constituent societies as a dialectical whole in constant
transformation, is effectively denied.26 With this intellectual background it
is no surprise that notional hierarchies of development emerged, in which
the global North was at the top and the global South (in varying levels of
human degradation) at the bottom. From there it was but a short step to
the assumption — indeed the ontology — that development is a process
of historical change in which the ‘developed world’ assists the ‘developing
world’ to ‘develop’; but crucially, to develop largely in the image — or at
least drawing on the ideas, models and practices — of the former.
Given this background, and with the rise of China, India and Brazil
as ‘development actors’, we have to ask in what sense can parts of the
developing world be seen as assisting other parts of the developing world to
‘develop’? Clearly, on an intellectual plane, we cannot, unless we innovate
26. ‘Subaltern’ discourses such as dependency or world systems theory have obviously taken
the unity of global change seriously in the analysis of uneven development, but they have
rarely been allowed to penetrate mainstream discourses.
on the categories we use to think and guide development and, in the process,
open up different conceptions of possible futures.
With the beginnings of a shift in the axis of globalization, we suggest it
is now time to build on earlier critiques and re-think the appropriateness
of ‘development’ discourses and the policy-practices they have encouraged
and legitimated. If we are to be intellectually adequate for this task, we need
to alter the constructs we use to imagine and analyse historical change, its
rhythms and trajectories. Although in the first instance a macro level enter-
prise, it is one that is vital if we are to build the middle range concepts that
are necessary for guiding development (and globalization) ‘on the ground’
and thus the policies and interventions that will hopefully enable us to do
better in the future than we have in the past. While this is not the place to
elaborate these matters in any detail, we can sketch a few elements of the
broad architecture.
If the notion of development and its attendant discourses are inadequate
(or inappropriate) to the task of grasping the consequences of China’s rise for
globalization and the developing world, what might be an alternative? We
suggest that the most appropriate lens is one associated with ‘transformation’.
The key to the notion of transformation, and thus to the likely superiority of its
attendant discourses for the analysis of economic, political and social change,
is that while a known starting point for the change process is obviously
assumed, unlike transition discourses for instance (see Henderson, 2011:
Ch. 1), it does not presuppose that we know the end point. In transformation
discourses, the end point of the change process is recognized to be unknown.
As a consequence, transformation discourses have the capacity to avoid
the a priori reasoning associated with much of the orthodox social science
that is brought to bear on the study of development. In helping to avoid
analyses that implicitly (and unconsciously) incorporate a pre-defined end
point for whatever change process is being studied (from the evolution of
the Chinese party-state, say, to the deepening commercialization of African
agriculture), transformation discourses allow for the possibility of serious
but, crucially, open-ended reflection on the dynamics and consequences of
change.
Adopting a discourse of transformation for an analysis of the evolution
of the Chinese political economy and for the changing nature of global-
ization and its consequences for the developing world, seems particularly
appropriate in current circumstances. This is because unlike development
(and transition-type) discourses — such as those informed by neoclassical
economic theory, modernization theory, related versions of neoliberal the-
orizing, as well as by some forms of radical political economy — those
focused on transformation should be better equipped to avoid premature
theoretical closure and thus many of the pitfalls of earlier and current pol-
icy engagements with economic and social development (the IMF/World
Bank ‘structural adjustment’ agenda being a case in point). Secondly and
relatedly, transformation discourses will help encourage analysts to
transcend the Euro/American-centrism that continues to inform ‘Western’

social-scientific analyses of the global South and other parts of the ‘non-
Western’ world. Thirdly, the vectors of transformation discussed below are
potentially driving economic, political and social change towards what we
might call ‘conjunctures of critical transformation’.
Critical Transformations
Transformations are inevitably uneven over space and time. Their dynamics
arise in particular locations from the dialectical relation of what Castells
(2000) calls the ‘space of places’ (indigenous economic, social, political,
institutional, cultural and environmental assets and practices) to the ‘space
of flows’ (externally derived assets and practices associated with capital
investment, transnational corporations, migrant labour, power in its various
forms, knowledge, cultural imagery etc.). The dialectic of places and flows
impacts particular cities and other sub-national spaces and, where external-
ized, other parts of given world-regions at different times and in different
sequences. In some historical periods (indeed throughout most of recorded
history through to the first wave of capitalist industrialization in the eigh-
teenth century) change is relatively slow and evolutionary, though in others
it becomes compacted. Contradictions that have their origin in, for example,
environmental or social disruptions (e.g. increasing desertification leading
to rising rural unemployment), become superimposed on one another and
the velocity of the change process increases. Such periods can be conceptu-
alized as ‘conjunctures of critical transformation’ (CCTs).27 If we take just
one world-region — for instance, Southeast Asia — then it is possible to
identify a number of impending CCTs, such as those associated with defor-
estation in Indonesia or increasing Chinese economic and political influence
in Laos and Cambodia. Arguably CCTs may be emerging in Malaysia and
Thailand, in part as a result of stalling industrialization inflicted by Chi-
nese competition for FDI and in third markets and the shifting architectures
of global production networks (Phillips and Henderson, 2009; Yusuf and
Nabeshima, 2009). In the case of Malaysia, the electoral threat to the ruling
Barisan Nasional coalition government from the opposition Pakatan Rakyat
coalition (expressed in the federal elections of 2013 by the former’s worst
performance since decolonization in 1957), may well have had some of its
structural origins in these dynamics.
Depending on their composition and the consequences of unanticipated
contingencies (e.g. political assassinations or environmental catastrophes
27. The notion of ‘critical transformation’ is informed by Scheffer’s (2009) work on envi-
ronmental change and the emergence of what he calls (correctly from our point of view)
‘critical transitions’. We are grateful to Glenn Smith of the Centre Asie du Sud-Est, Paris,
for introducing us to Scheffer’s and related work.
such as volcanic eruptions, hurricanes etc.) CCTs can sometimes evolve

into a third form: political-economic or more widely developmental crises.
The East Asian crisis of the late 1990s, which disrupted three decades of
robust economic development in parts of the region (and, inter alia, led to
the overthrow of the Suharto dictatorship and the onset of democratization
in Indonesia), is an example of a key moment in the history of neoliber-
alism and financialization that clearly could be reinterpreted by mobilizing
CCT categories (Henderson, 2011: Ch. 4). Similarly, the murder of possibly
thousands of the Rohingya minority in the northwest Burmese province of
Rakhine could be interpreted as a product of an evolving CCT and one in
which Chinese investment may have been a decisive element. Specifically,
land dispossessions associated with the construction of the Chinese oil and
gas pipelines from Kyaukphyu on Burma’s Indian Ocean coast to Kunming
in China’s Yunnan Province, may well have exacerbated existing tensions
between the Rohingya and the Rakhine-Burmese majority (Rowell, 2013).
The intellectual innovations sketched here have a general import for the
analysis of the multiplicity of change processes associated with development.
Pursuing these further at this point, however, would lead us far beyond the
remit of this article and the special issue of which it is a part. Consequently
our focus on transformation from now on leads us in a particular direction: to
the dynamics through which China’s global externalization is transforming
other parts of the developing world. We proceed by examining some of
these dynamics and, in the process, incorporate arguments from the other
contributions to this special issue into our analysis.
VECTORS OF TRANSFORMATION: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE

SPECIAL ISSUE
While the contributions that compose this special issue do not adopt the
terminology used here, nor adhere to its theoretical project, it is possible
to draw on their arguments to help us understand how the processes of
China’s global externalization are carried along by a series of transmission
belts or ‘vectors’. These vectors are constituted, variously, by a series of
cross-border flows — finance (including portfolio investment and currency
dynamics), direct capital investment, trade, migration, aid, ideas, imagery,
knowledge and power — and by institutional issues associated with global
and regional governance (trade and intellectual property regulations ema-
nating from the WTO, for instance). Diffused amongst them are elements of
Chinese culture and values and visions of modernity. These vectors typically
operate in complex combinations with one another. For instance, in the way
that globalization works ‘on the ground’ in Africa, Latin America, Southeast
Asia etc., investment, trade, migration and corporate power (and often state
power), are typically packaged together and, with regard to the vectors orig-
inating in China, aid flows are often key elements in the mix. Consequently
we begin this section by discussing two of the issue’s contributions that

highlight some of the combinations which the vectors often take.
Giles Mohan’s contribution to this special issue, focusing on Africa, serves
to emphasize the need to grasp combinations of vectors and their conse-
quences in their totality. In his article, Mohan provides one of the few
attempts to grapple theoretically in toto with China’s economic initiatives
in sub-Saharan Africa. Adopting a critical political economy approach to
the task, he argues that the combinations of investment by Chinese SOE
and private companies, aid flows that subsidize some of that investment and
encourage participation by political elites, as well as trade and migration dy-
namics, have diverse outcomes that can be spatially specific. Thus in some
circumstances, Mohan suggests that Chinese operations may be emerging
with a neo-colonial, enclave-like character with African workers subjected
to harsh labour regimes (cf. Lee, 2009), while in others the experience is
rather different and much more positive, including for workers (cf. Yan and
Sautman, 2013). Inserting African agency (political and economic elites,
workers, trade unions, etc.) as a relatively autonomous actor capable of al-
tering the impacts of the vector combinations (an example of the significance
of Castells’ ‘space of places’), Mohan focuses on the logic of the latter argu-
ing that they predominantly need to be understood in terms of a new phase in
the dialectic between combined and uneven development that is intimately
associated with the processes of capitalist expansion (cf. Rosenberg, 2006).
As such, Mohan hints at the need for a debate on whether a discourse of
‘development’ is the most appropriate for grasping China’s global impacts
and emphasizes that we need to be much more nuanced in our assessments of
China’s developing world impacts (cf. Power et al., 2012) than is currently
the case.
In his article, Shaun Breslin argues that dominant perceptions of ‘China’
and ‘The South’ treat them as monadic wholes. He shows that in order
to develop an empirically sensitive and intellectually credible understand-
ing of China’s impact on the global South, it is necessary to deconstruct
these currently monolithic notions. Constituting both of them, he argues, are
enormous variations in corporate, political and strategic priorities as well
as visions of possible futures. For instance, he deconstructs the Chinese
state showing the tensions between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the
Ministry of Commerce over aid and foreign investment and he emphasizes
the different interests and objectives that exist among the various economic
actors (SOEs of varying ownership, private companies etc.) and the various
countries that are the objects of investment. In the process, Breslin endorses
Mohan’s call for more nuanced analyses of the content of China’s global
externalization and its developing world impacts. He shows that not only
does a state-led globally coherent strategy of ‘China Inc.’ — to which all
developing countries are supposedly subject — make no sense, but given
the differences within and between Chinese actors and those acted upon, it
is reasonable to interpret ‘China’ in ‘The South’ as both a liberating ‘saint’

and a neo-colonial ‘sinner’.
In addition to their specific contributions, the articles by Breslin and Mo-
han provide a welcome note of methodological caution about our need to
comprehend the vectors, their local impacts and the latters’ reciprocal deter-
minations of the former as a dialectical whole (essentially echoing Castells’
dialectic of the ‘space of places’ and the ‘space of flows’). For heuristic
purposes, however, we now proceed in ways that largely disaggregate the
vectors one from another. Of the vectors that could be examined to help gauge
the impact of China’s global externalization, only one — global production
networks — will be discussed in any detail. Because of space constraints,
discussions of other vectors will be limited to the ways in which they feature
in the articles that constitute the special issue.
Global Production Networks
One vector that encapsulates facets of a number of the cross-border flows

mentioned above, and foregrounds the business enterprise as a primary actor
in the transformation process, is the global production network (GPN). A
GPN refers to:
the nexus of interconnected functions and operations through which goods and services are
produced, distributed and consumed . . . . . Such networks not only integrate firms (and parts of
firms) into structures which blur traditional organizational boundaries . . . . but also integrate
national economies (or parts of such economies) in ways which have enormous implications
for their well-being. At the same time, the precise nature and articulation of firm-centred
production networks are deeply influenced by the concrete socio-political contexts within
which they are embedded. (Henderson et al., 2002: 445–6)
It follows from this that the ‘architecture’ of GPNs, the nature of the lead
firms, the institutional power that can be mobilized in those locations incor-
porated into the GPNs, have enormous implications for value creation and
capture, for employment, wages, labour standards, human rights, technology
and knowledge transfers, innovation, etc. They have, in other words, enor-
mous implications for the possibilities of industrial upgrading to the benefit
of the host economy and society.
Prominent and privately owned Chinese companies such as Lenovo and
Huawei are beginning to forge significant production networks outside of
China, including in India and Mexico.28 Additionally, as the contributions
by Raphael Kaplinsky and by Shamel Azmeh and Khalid Nadvi (in this
issue) respectively show, small and medium sized privately owned Chi-
nese companies are increasingly becoming a feature of manufacturing and
28. http://www.lenovo.com/ww/lenovo/pdf/Lenovo-Factsheet-2012-Mar-ENG.pdf (accessed

11 June 2012).
service industries in parts of sub-Saharan Africa (see also Shen, 2013) and
of manufacturing in the Arabian Peninsula. While the private companies
are emerging as an important element in China’s global externalization and
will undoubtedly become a significant (and perhaps predominant) actor in
the future, it remains the case for now that of the globally active Chinese
companies — certainly in terms of investment and their consequences for
economic, social and geopolitical transformation — it is the predominantly
state owned ones in energy, mining and construction that are decisive. Cur-
rently they have a particular presence in sub-Saharan Africa and include
Sinopec in Angola, CREC29 in DR Congo and NFC Africa Mining (NFCA)
in Zambia.
In the first two cases, the companies involved in oil extraction (Angola)
and copper and cobalt mining (DR Congo) are constituted as joint-ventures
between the Chinese companies and their African state owned counterparts:
Sonangol in Angola and Gecamines in DR Congo (Vines et al., 2009; see
also Afdevinfo30 ). NFCA’s copper mine in Zambia, however, is entirely
Chinese owned (Fessehaie, 2012; Haglund, 2009). Where sub-contracting
and supplier arrangements have developed with locally-owned companies
or subsidiaries of other foreign-owned companies, as in the case of NFCA’s
operation in Zambia, Fessehaie’s (2012) research suggests that incorporation
into its production network has resulted in fewer upgrading opportunities for
the upstream suppliers involved, compared with those for suppliers incorpo-
rated into the production networks of the Canadian, Swiss and South African
mining companies in the Zambian copper belt. The implication of her work
is that when it comes to the contribution of foreign mining companies to
positive economic transformation, developing countries may be better off
with ‘Western’ rather than Chinese investors.31
As regards the benefits of Chinese investment for local employment and
improved working conditions, current research is equivocal. For instance,
with the exception of mining, much of the research reports a reluctance
to employ African workers, preferring to use imported (and, effectively
‘indentured’, i.e. contractually tied) workers from China (Ferreira, 2008;
Haglund, 2009; Vines et al., 2009). Additionally, the Chinese managers and
workers often live in separate compounds and have almost no relationship
with the local communities, in some cases not even at a petty commercial
level, such as buying food and other supplies. As a consequence, and with
the primary exception of the DR Congo case, it seems unlikely that knowl-
edge and skill transmissions are part of the transformational contribution
Chinese-led GPNs are making. Additionally, as Lee (2009) has shown, the
Chinese companies that do employ African workers (she studied NFCA in
29. A joint-venture between the China Railway Engineering Corporation and Sinohydro.
30. http://www.afdevinfo.com/htmlreports/org/org_68389.html (accessed 6 October 2011)
31. Fessehaie (2012) also studied the Zambian operations of an Indian company and came to
similar conclusions about its contributions to industrial upgrading as those of NFCA.
Zambia and a textile company, the Tanzania-China Friendship Mill, in Tan-

zania) have imported the neoliberal labour practices now typical in China
(particularly where migrant workers are employed). They have resisted pre-
existing unionization, broken the formerly secure employment contracts and
instituted the wholesale casualization of their workforces. Additionally, the
Chinese companies studied by Lee are reputed to pay the lowest wages of
all the foreign owned companies in their sectors (see also Haglund, 2009).
Recent work by Yan and Sautman (2013) on the Zambian copper belt,
however, suggests that the situation is not as clear cut as earlier research
has suggested. The extent to which imported Chinese workers are used
seems to depend on the nature of the particular investment project and on
the local availability of appropriately skilled labour. Additionally Yan and
Sautman (2013) argue that wages paid by Chinese firms, the extent to which
they tolerate unions or the health and safety standards they adopt, are not
significantly different from those of other, non-Chinese, firms operating in
the copper belt. What is more, the Chinese companies seem to be sensitive
to civil society mobilizations around working conditions etc., and as a result,
improvements are in train.
While the rounded story of the labour impacts of Chinese companies in
Zambia will have to await further analysis, it seems for now that Chinese in-
volvement in DR Congo’s copper and cobalt mining industries may hold out
better prospects for assisting that country’s economic transformation. While
many of the problems identified in the Chinese corporate engagements in
Angola and Zambia are likely to be reproduced in DR Congo, in forming the
Socomin joint venture, CREC and Gecamines agreed to commit 0.5 per cent
of all investment to training the workforce and to technology transfer, while
3 per cent will be spent on social provision (health, education) for the local
community. Furthermore, Socomin is specifically required to subcontract 12
per cent of its work to Congolese companies and limit its Chinese workforce
to 20 per cent of the total (Komesaroff, 2008). While, in principle, these ar-
rangements may have set a new benchmark for the Congolese government’s
future contractual negotiations with foreign mining companies, there seems
to be no evidence, as yet, that they are been reproduced elsewhere in Africa.
As these two examples suggest, transformations (unlike ‘development’
with its implicit assumptions about progress), including those associated
with incorporation into GPNs, can run in multiple directions — positive,
negative and sometimes complex combinations of the two. The contributions
to this special issue that deal, at least in part, with GPNs (those by Kaplinsky
and Azmeh and Nadvi) bear out the potential multi-directional consequences
of China’s externalization.
While casting his net wider than GPNs to include trade and migration,
Kaplinsky is at pains to stress the multiplicity of transformational out-
comes arising from China’s externalization into Africa. He argues for a
much more nuanced approach to China’s engagements with sub-Saharan
Africa (and by extrapolation, the developing world more generally) than is
evident in much of the research published to date (see also Brautigam,

2009; Power et al., 2012; Tan-Mullins et al., 2010). His principal concern
is with the consequences of China’s economic engagements for poverty re-
duction. Sensitive to variations in the economic, political and social agents
involved — both Chinese (state owned and private companies in particular)
and African (where he builds in issues of location, class and gender) —
Kaplinsky argues that while there are dangers to African development, and
thus its capacities to reduce poverty, arising from Chinese competition in
manufactured goods, there are circumstances in the transformational oppor-
tunities that Chinese involvement affords in certain countries, which are
beginning to outweigh the negativities. He points especially to the welfare
benefits of cheap manufactures imported from China; to the significance of
the Chinese market for African products; to the Chinese drive for African
minerals and the emergence of production networks associated with this; and
to the benefits that Chinese entrepreneurial migration seem to be bringing to
Africa.
Azmeh and Nadvi (in this issue) focus on the emergence of Chinese GPNs
in the Arabian region. Investigating garments production in Jordan and rec-
ognizing that, with this industry, it is important to treat investments from
Hong Kong and Taiwan as part of a ‘greater China’ externalization, they
explore the logic and consequences of Chinese firms producing for the US
market. Emphasizing the utility of the GPN perspective for analysing the
transformational consequences of foreign investment, Azmeh and Nadvi
show that Chinese investment in Jordan seems to have few positive im-
plications for that country’s economic and social prosperity. They suggest
that while some of this has little to do with the Chinese firms themselves
(but rather with the power of US brand-name buyers and the regulations
governing the economic zone in which they are located), the fact that they
employ overwhelmingly migrant (from China, Pakistan, etc.) rather than Jor-
danian workers raises questions about the developmental efficacy of those
firms.
Finance
Financial flows have been a key vector of global transformation since at

least the emergence of the Dutch empire in the seventeenth century and
the stock market crises that have become a recurrent feature of capital
accumulation since the South Sea Bubble of 1720.32 While the vast majority
of attention paid thus far to China’s investment flows has been to foreign
direct investment (dealt with here under the GPN vector), the articles in
32. Generated by unsustainable speculative investments in Britain’s South Sea Company which
operated a trading empire in South America.
this issue by Ho-fung Hung and Paul Bowles and Baotai Wang highlight
another crucial dimension: the extent to which the rise of China and its global
externalization might threaten the US dollar as the world’s principal reserve
currency. This is an issue most immediately ‘Northern’ in its implications
(i.e. with regard to the US, the EU, Japan and the OECD more generally), but
clearly, in terms of its resolution, one that would have dramatic consequences
for the global South.
In his article, Hung is concerned to unpack the currency conflict in which
China and the US are currently engaged. He argues that the idea that the
reserve status of the US dollar is threatened by the Chinese government —
because of its US$ 1.2 trillion holding of US Treasury bonds — is a fantasy.
It is so because the Chinese and US governments have, in effect, struck a
faustian bargain. With its holding of Treasury bonds, China not only as-
sists the US in the management of its enormous deficits, but helps maintain
the relatively high exchange rate of the dollar to the renminbi. This rela-
tive suppression of the renminbi’s exchange rate, while crucial for China’s
export-dependent development model, damages the US’s own export per-
formance and contributes further to the Federal government’s deficit and
thus the inherent instabilities of the global currency/financial system. Partly
as a result of the China–US currency arrangements, there is a certain lock-
in of export dependence in China’s development model, even though this
model is ultimately unsustainable (among other things because of a growing
over-accumulation crisis; Hung, 2008). Hung reminds us that should the
effectivity of China’s export-oriented development model decline before
a substantial switch to domestic-led growth has been achieved, the result
would be growing unemployment and the rising social conflict of which the
Chinese government is deeply fearful.
In their article Bowles and Wang assess the possibilities of the Chinese
renminbi emerging as an internationally significant trading currency that
might ultimately threaten the US dollar’s global dominance. Assessing and
rejecting the utility of the standard analyses of currency internationaliza-
tion, they argue that the very limited renminbi internationalization that has
occurred already should not be regarded as indicative of some grand strat-
egy designed to help secure Chinese financial hegemony. On the contrary,
they suggest, its limited internationalization has been largely a pragmatic
response to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and the subsequent,
and current, global crisis. Their firm conviction is that the renminbi will con-
tinue to be internationalized, but only in a manner consistent with China’s
significance as a major economic power.
The contributions by Hung and by Bowles and Wang point to the fact that
the Chinese currency is not yet a significant element of the transformational
dynamics that is the finance vector as a whole. By implication their analyses
pose a cautionary note: that it is important at this stage in China’s global
externalization not to overestimate the current extent of the transformations
taking place.
Migration
International migration has been an important vector of all forms of glob-

alization. With the emergence of a form based on China’s externalization,
attention has been focused particularly on Chinese migration to Africa,
although some research on reverse flows (African migration to China) is
beginning to emerge (see Bredeloup, 2012). With regard to the former, Mo-
han and Tan-Mullin’s (2009: 590, Table 1) compilation of the estimated
data (and ‘hard’ data are difficult to access so estimates vary widely) sug-
gests that by 2007 there may have been nearly 600,000 Chinese migrants
in sub-Saharan Africa: workers, entrepreneurs, traders, etc. As Mohan and
Tan-Mullins (2009) and Mohan and Kaplinsky (both in this issue) acknowl-
edge, however, the contribution of Chinese migrants to transformation in
Africa is likely to have been substantially positive.
In terms of the contribution this special issue offers to the analysis of the
migration vector, the focus is on entrepreneurial migration in the Greater
Mekong region of Southeast Asia. In his article for this issue, Nyı́ri Pál
assesses the ways in which Chinese entrepreneurial migrants in the region are
engaged, among other things, in the ‘cultural habituation’ of local workers
to their standards and requirements. In the context of the absorption of local
peoples into the factory system that Chinese entrepreneurs are establishing
in Cambodia and adjacent countries, Cambodians and others are effectively
being turned into a first generation industrial proletariat.
Since the dawn of Britain’s industrialization in the eighteenth century and
particularly since Henry Ford’s innovations in mass production a hundred
years ago, the process of proletarianization has been recognized as involv-
ing (sometimes brutal) cultural habituation to work discipline (Henderson
and Cohen, 1991). Nyı́ri shows how Chinese driven cultural habituation —
stemming from what he calls the ‘developmental cosmopolitanism’ of Chi-
nese entrepreneurs and managers — is a central element in Chinese style
‘social modernization’ in developing countries. Laced with rich detail from
ethnographic fieldwork, Nyı́ri argues that while China’s engagements with
the peoples of the developing world are not as loaded with the racist conno-
tations typical of earlier periods of European colonialism, it is still the case
that Chinese business migrants have considerable distain for the routines
and the daily lives of the new working class peoples who are their economic
subjects.
Imagery
The transmission of cultural imagery, derived from the dominant social

formation and including its perceptions of the ‘other’, have always been
a feature of global externalization. They were essential, for instance, to
the process of ‘orientalizing’ colonized peoples and to how the comprador
bourgeoisie of classical European colonialism came to perceive of them-

selves vis-à-vis the colonizers on the one hand and their colonized compatri-
ots from lower social classes on the other. More recently, what Sklair (2002)
calls the ‘culture-ideology of consumerism’ has been vital to building mass
markets for foreign manufactured commodities across the developing world.
In his contribution to this special issue, Yongjin Zhang seeks to understand
the imagery that has contributed to US anxieties in the perception of the Chi-
nese ‘other’. While his concerns lie within wider issues about how actions
and images projected by China end up, when filtered through US perceptual
lenses, as distorted and misunderstood, his particular focus is the intellectual
images constructed of China in Anglo-American discourses.
Zhang advances three principal arguments. Firstly he suggests that the
anxieties represented by the intellectual imagery are increasingly about the
purpose and direction of China’s rise and externalization; a concern, in
other words, about ‘what does China want and where is it going?’ (or more
accurately, what does its party-state want and where does it see China in the
world?). Secondly he suggests that this ‘cauldron of anxiety’ is generated
through the intellectual disorientation of those involved in the discourse.
Thirdly, he focuses on the seeming resurrection of authoritarian states as
global powers (of which China is the primary example) and the possible
implications of this for the extension and even the survival of the liberal-
democratic global order. In addition to all the concerns about China as a
military power and potential challenger to US hegemony, Zhang suggests
that ultimately it may be the latter that generates the most anxiety within
Anglo-American discourses because it so fundamentally challenges their
sense of ‘the West’s’ political contribution to progress.
CONCLUSION
In our attempt to understand the nature and consequences of ‘globalization

with Chinese characteristics’, we have tried to accomplish three broad tasks.
Firstly, we have advanced a proposition that globalization in given periods
should be conceived, in part, as the externalization of the form of capitalism
(and cognate features of the wider social formation) of the country whose
economic and political agents have been its predominant driving forces.
After briefly discussing some of the key features of US capitalism that have
contributed to the character of contemporary globalization, we turned to an
extended analysis of the Chinese form which, via its externalization, seems
to be constituting an emergent and new form of globalization: a Global Asian
era.
Our second task was to consider what the implications of China’s global
externalization (and by implication, the externalizations of other rising pow-
ers also) might be for the conceptualization of ‘development’. We argued that
in circumstances where rising powers from the global South were beginning
to re-constitute the nature of the global political economy, the categories

that have traditionally been mobilized to comprehend change and its tra-
jectories in the developing world were flawed and in need of an overhaul.
We suggested that a way forward might be to re-think the enterprise of ‘de-
velopment’ on the basis of the concept and discourses of ‘transformation’.
Among the reasons for this argument was our belief that ‘transformation’
had considerable potential for opening up the study of ‘development’ and
its policy-practices to ‘non-Western’ discourses with (in some cases) their
alternative priorities and conceptions of future possibilities.
Our third task has been to investigate some of the dynamics — or
‘vectors’ — by which China’s global externalization is beginning to trans-
form the present and thus the future of many parts of the developing world.
In doing this we drew on the analyses of investment, production networks,
imagery, currency contestations, migration etc. evident in the other contribu-
tions to this special issue. Those contributions, together with this introductory
article, collectively address aspects of the world-historic shift in the (literal
and metaphorical) fortunes of humanity that is now underway by dint of the
rise of China and its global reverberations.
As China assumes a growing role on the world stage, its impacts on
global transformation remain unclear and much debated, as is evident from
this special issue. For example (and among the issues raised in this arti-
cle), although China’s outward economic expansion is driven largely by
state-run enterprises, they are neither monolithic in terms of control and
interest, nor clear cut in their local impacts. While China’s expansion
into Africa, and other parts of the developing world, has neo-colonial as-
pects, it has also brought important benefits. One thing that does seem
to be clear, however, is that China’s externalization has been accompa-
nied by many of the harsh labour conditions associated with US and Eu-
ropean expansion in earlier periods, including a similar disdain for local
workers.
While China is clearly asserting itself more openly in world affairs —
a stance which may be pursued more aggressively under Xi Jinping than
under his predecessor — its government is likely to move slowly in its
geopolitical ambitions. In military terms, China seems more likely to assert
itself regionally than globally; in economic terms, its strong financial and
manufacturing interdependence with the United States, and to a lesser extent
Europe, make it likely that China will continue to support the dollar —
including as the world reserve currency — at least into the foreseeable
future.
China’s rise, however, seems certain to generate growing anxiety in the
‘West’, both because of its perception as a hegemonic challenger and because
such anxiety will likely fuel nationalist responses — ones that may well take
on racial overtones. Globalization, thus far, has been a ‘Western’ project. To
the extent that it becomes a Chinese one, transformational trajectories and
their outcomes will remain uncertain for some time to come. It is hoped that
the essays in this special issue may help reduce that uncertainty and thus the
anxieties associated with it.
REFERENCES
Appelbaum, R.P. (2012) ‘Transnational Contractors in East Asia’, in G. Hamilton, M. Petrovic

and B. Senauer (eds) The Market Makers: How Retailers are Shaping the Global Economy,
pp. 255–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Appelbaum, R.P., R. Parker and C. Cao (2011) ‘Developmental State: Nanotechnology in China’,
Global Networks 11(3): 298–314.
Arrighi, G. (2007) Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century. London: Verso.
Brautigam, D. (2009) The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Bredeloup, S. (2012) ‘African Trading Post in Guangzhou: Emergent or Recurrent Commercial
Form?’, African Diaspora 5(1): 27–50.
Breslin, S. (2007) China and the Global Political Economy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Breslin, S. (2012) ‘Government–Industry Relations in China: A Review of the State of the Art’,
in A. Walter and X. Zhang (eds) East Asian Capitalism: Diversity, Continuity and Change,
pp. 29–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carnoy, M. (1974) Education as Cultural Imperialism. New York: David McKay.
Castells, M. (2000) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume I: The Rise of
the Network Society (2nd edn). Oxford: Blackwell.
Chandler, A.D. (1977) The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chang, H-J. (2002) Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective.
London: Anthem Press.
Chang, H-J. (2007) Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing
World. London: Random House Business Books.
Chang, M.H. (2001) Return of the Dragon: China’s Wounded Nationalism. Boulder, CO: West-
view Press.
Chen, J. (2007) ‘Poverty and Income Inequality in China’. PhD thesis, Manchester Business
School, University of Manchester.
Chen, Z. and J. Jian (2011) ‘Chinese Provinces as Foreign Policy Actors in Africa’. Occasional
Paper 22. China in Africa Programme. Johannesburg and Cape Town: South African Institute
of International Affairs.
Coates, D. (2000) Models of Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Diamond, J. (1998) Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000
Years. London: Vintage Books.
Dikötter, F. (1992) The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press.
EBRD (2012) Diversifying Russia: Harnessing Regional Diversity. London: European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development.
Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fernández Jilberto, A.E. and B. Hogenboom (eds) (2012) Latin America Facing China: South–
South Relations beyond the Washington Consensus. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Ferreira, M.E. (2008) ‘China in Angola: Just a Passion for Oil?’, in C. Alden, D. Large and R.
Soares de Oliviera (eds) China Returns to Africa: A Rising Power and a Continent Embrace,
pp. 275–94. London: Hurst.
Fessehaie, J. (2012) ‘The Dynamics of the Zambia Copper Value Chain’. PhD thesis, School of
Economics, University of Cape Town.
Flikke, G. (2012) ‘Russia – A BRIC Country?’. NIPI Policy Brief 8–2012. Oslo: Norwegian
Institute of International Affairs.
Fornés, G. and A.B. Philip (2012) The China–Latin America Axis: Emerging Markets and the
Future of Globalisation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Frank, A.G. (1998) ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press.
Frobel, F., J. Heinrichs and O. Kreye (1980) The New International Division of Labour: Structural
Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gallagher, K.P. and R. Porzecanski (2010) The Dragon in the Room: China and the Future of
Latin American Industrialization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Glyn, A. (2006) Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization and Welfare. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Gries, P.H. (2005) China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics and Diplomacy. Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Haglund, D. (2009) ‘In It for the Long Term? Governance and Learning among Chinese Investors
in Zambia’s Copper Sector’, The China Quarterly 199: 627–46.
Hamilton, G., M. Petrovic and B. Senauer (2012) (eds) The Market Makers: How Retailers are
Shaping the Global Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hayter, T. (1971) Aid as Imperialism. London: Penguin.
Hayter, T. and C. Watson (1985) Aid: Rhetoric and Reality. London: Pluto Press.
Held, D., A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton (1999) Global Transformations: Politics,
Economics, Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Henderson, J. (2008) ‘China and Global Development: Towards a Global-Asian Era?’, Contem-
porary Politics 14(4): 375–92.
Henderson, J. (2009) ‘China’s Naval Gazing’, Prospect 160 (4 July). http://www.
prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/chinasnavalgazing/#.UbHV-Oe1GSo (accessed 6 July
2009).
Henderson, J. (2011) East Asian Transformation: On the Political Economy of Dynamism,
Governance and Crisis. London: Routledge.
Henderson, J. and R. Cohen (1991) ‘Work, Culture and the Dialectics of Proletarian Habituation’,
in R. Cohen, Contested Domains: Debates in International Labour Studies, pp. 31–53.
London: Zed Books.
Henderson, J., P. Dicken, M. Hess, N. Coe and H.W-C. Yeung (2002) ‘Global Production
Networks and the Analysis of Economic Development’, Review of International Political
Economy 9(3): 436–64.
Henderson, J., D. Hulme, H. Jalilian and R. Phillips (2007) ‘Bureaucratic Effects: “Weberian”
State Agencies and Poverty Reduction’, Sociology 41(3): 515–32.
Hirst, P. and G. Thompson (2000) Globalization in Question: The International Economy and
the Possibilities of Governance (2nd edn). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hung, H-f. (2008) ‘Rise of China and the Global Overaccumulation Crisis’, Review of Interna-
tional Political Economy 15(2): 149–79.
Hung, H-f. (ed.) (2009) China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hutton, W. (2007) The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century. London:
Little, Brown.
Hutton, W. and M. Desai (2007) ‘Does the Future Really Belong to China?’, Prospect 14 Jan-
uary. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/doesthefuturereallybelongtochina/#.
UZYDnqK1GSo (accessed 23 January 2007).
Jacques, M. (2009) When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End
of the Western World. London: Allen Lane.
Johnson, C. (2004) Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic. New
York: Metropolitan Books.
Komesaroff, M. (2008) ‘China Eyes Congo’s Treasures’, Far Eastern Economic Review 171(3):
38–41.
Krugman, P. (1994) ‘The Myth of Asia’s Miracle’, Foreign Affairs 73(6): 62–78.
Kurlantzick, J. (2007) Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
Lee, C.K. (2009) ‘Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of
Casualization in Africa’s Chinese Enclaves’, The China Quarterly 199: 647–66.
Li, L. (2013) ‘Nationalism among University Students in Contemporary China: An Exploratory
Study’. PhD thesis, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of
Bristol.
Marx, K. (1990 [1867]) Capital, Volume I. London: Penguin.
McCurry, J. and J. Kollewe (2011) ‘China Overtakes Japan as World’s Second Largest Econ-
omy’, The Guardian 14 February.
Mohan, G. and M. Tan-Mullins (2009) ‘Chinese Migrants in Africa as New Agents of De-
velopment? An Analytical Framework’, European Journal of Development Research 21(4):
588–605.
Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2008) ‘Globalization, the Next Round: Sociological Perspectives’, Fu-
tures 40(8): 707–20.
Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2011) ‘Global Rebalancing: Crisis and the East–South Turn’, Develop-
ment and Change 42(1): 22–48.
Nee, V. and S. Opper (2007) ‘On Politicized Capitalism’, in V. Nee and R. Swedberg (eds) On
Capitalism, pp. 93–127. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
OECD (2008) OEDC Reviews of Innovation Policy: China. Paris: Organization for Economic
Development and Cooperation.
Peck, J. and J. Zhang (2013) ‘A Variety of Capitalism . . . with Chinese Characteristics?’, Journal
of Economic Geography 13(3): 357–96.
Pei, M. (2006) China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Phillips, N. (2013) ‘Unfree Labour and Adverse Incorporation in the Global Economy: Com-
parative Perspectives on Brazil and India’, Economy and Society 42(2): 171–96.
Phillips, R. and J. Henderson (2008) ‘On the Stalling of the Malaysian Industrialization Project:
A Reply to Narayanan’, Economy and Society 37(4): 602–12.
Phillips, R. and J. Henderson (2009) ‘Global Production Networks and Industrial Upgrading:
Negative Lessons from Malaysian Electronics’, Journal für Entwicklungspolitik (Austrian
Journal for Development Studies) 25(2): 38–61.
Power, M., G. Mohan and M. Tan-Mullins (2012) China’s Resource Diplomacy in Africa:
Powering Development? London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rist, G. (2002) The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (3rd edn).
London: Zed Books.
Rosenberg, J. (2006) ‘Why Is There No International Historical Sociology?’, European Journal
of International Relations 12(3): 307–40.
Rowell, A. (2013) ‘Is Oil One Reason for Genocide of Rohingya in Burma?’, The Price of Oil
(Oil Change International) 18 March. http://priceofoil.org/2013/03/18/is-oil-one-reason-for-
burmese-genocide/ (accessed 28 May 2013).
Runciman, W.G. (1995) ‘The “Triumph” of Capitalism as a Topic in the Theory of Social
Selection’, New Left Review I/210: 33–47.
Saith, A. (2008) ‘China and India: The Institutional Roots of Differential Performance’, Devel-
opment and Change 39(5): 723–58.
Santos-Paulino, A.U. and G. Wan (eds) (2010) The Rise of China and India: Impacts, Prospects
and Implications. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Scheffer, M. (2009) Critical Transitions in Nature and Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Scissors, D. (2009) ‘Chinese Foreign Investment: Insist on Transparency’. Back-
grounder 2237. Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/
research/reports/2009/02/chinese-foreign-investment-insist-on-transparency (accessed 16
May 2013)
Scott, J., M. vom Hau and D. Hulme (2010) ‘Beyond the BICs: Identifying the “Emerging Middle
Powers” and Understanding their Role in Global Poverty Reduction’. BWPI Working Paper
137. Manchester: Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester.
Sen, A. (2011) ‘Quality of life: India vs China’, New York Review of Books 12 May.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/12/quality-life-india-vs-china/?
pagination=false (accessed 16 May 2013).
Shen, X. (2013) ‘Private Chinese Investment in Africa: Myths and Realities’. Policy Research
Working Paper No. 6311. Washington, DC: Development Economics Vice Presidency, The
World Bank.
Sklair, L. (2002) Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives (3rd edn). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Song Q., Z. Zhang, B. Qiao, Q. Gu and Z. Tang (1996) Zhongguo keyi shuo bu: Lengzhan-
hou shidai de zhengzhi yu qinggan jueze [China Can Say No: The Political and Emo-
tional Choice in the Post-Cold War Era]. Beijing: Zhonghua Nonggongshang Lianhe
Press.
Stiglitz, J. (2002) Globalization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin.
Tan-Mullins, M., G. Mohan and M. Power (2010) ‘Redefining “Aid” in the China–Africa
Context’, Development and Change 41(5): 857–82.
UNDP (2013) Human Development Report 2013. The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a
Diverse World. New York: United Nations Development Programme.
Vines, A., M. Weimer and L. Wong (2009) Thirst for African Oil: Asian National Oil Companies
in Nigeria and Angola. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Vitalis, R. (2009) America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. London: Verso.
Wade, R. (2004) Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East
Asian Industrialization (2nd edn). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wallerstein, I. (2001) Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms
(2nd edn). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Walter, A. and X. Zhang (eds) (2012) East Asian Capitalism: Diversity, Continuity and Change.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whitley, R. (1999) Divergent Capitalisms: The Social Structuring and Change of Business
Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, K. (2000) ‘From Shareholder Value to Present-day Capitalism’, Economy and Society
29(1): 1–12.
Wilson, J.D. (2013) Governing Global Production: Resource Networks in the Asia-Pacific Steel
Industry. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Winters, A.L. and S. Yusuf (eds) (2007) Dancing with Giants: China, India and the
Global Economy. Washington, DC: The World Bank; Singapore: The Institute of Policy
Studies.
Wong, E. (2012) ‘Signals of a More Open Economy in China’, New York Times 9 December.
Yan, H. and B. Sautman (2013) ‘“The Beginning of a World Empire”? Contesting the Discourse
of Chinese Copper Mining in Zambia’, Modern China 39: 131–64.
Yusuf, S. and K. Nabeshima (2009) Tigers Under Threat: The Search for a New Growth
Strategy by Malaysia and Its Southeast Asian Neighbors. Washington, DC: The World
Bank.
Zhang, Y. and B. Buzan (2012) ‘The Tributary System as International Society in Theory and
Practice’, Chinese Journal of International Politics 5(1): 3–36.
Jeffrey Henderson is Professor of International Development and Director

of the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. He
taught formerly at the Universities of Birmingham, Hong Kong and Manch-
ester and has held Visiting Professorships or Fellowships at other leading
universities in the USA, Australia, Japan, Poland and Britain. In addition to
his research on China and global transformation, he has worked extensively
on global production networks and economic development and on the re-
lation of economic governance to inequality and poverty. His most recent
book is East Asian Transformation: On the Political Economy of Dynamism,
Governance and Crisis (Routledge, 2011). He can be contacted at e-mail:
Jeffrey.Henderson@bristol.ac.uk
Richard P. Appelbaum is MacArthur Foundation Chair in Global and In-
ternational Studies and Sociology at the University of California at Santa
Barbara (UCSB), USA, where he co-founded the Global and International
Studies Programme. He is also a Principal Investigator at UCSB’s Centre for
Nanotechnology in Society. Professor Appelbaum has published extensively
in the areas of emerging technologies, particularly in China; the globaliza-
tion of business; the sociology of work and labour; and social theory, urban
sociology and public policy. His books include Behind the Label: Inequality
in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry (with Edna Bonacich; University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 2000). He can be contacted at e-mail: Rich@global.ucsb.edu
Suet Ying Ho is a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for East Asian Studies,
University of Bristol. She taught previously at the University of Liver-
pool. She co-edited International Development Planning Review between
2002 and 2005 and her books include Taiwan: After a Long Silence
(Asia Monitor Resource Centre, 1990). She can be contacted at e-mail:
Suetying.ho@bristol.ac.uk
Copyright of Development & Change is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may
not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.

Globalization With Chinese Characteristics

Transféré par

Informations du document

Copyright

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Globalization With Chinese Characteristics

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Globalization with Chinese Characteristics:

Externalization, Dynamics and Transformations

Jeffrey Henderson, Richard P. Appelbaum and Suet Ying Ho

This article introduces a special issue on globalization ‘with Chinese char-

Sometime in the early 2000s commentators on global affairs began to take

Development and Change 44(6): 1221–1253. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12066

of capitalism’, we briefly sketch the salient features of the US form that

CHINA AND GLOBALIZATION

There seems to be a consensus in scholarly and development policy circles

in what may, in the longer term, emerge as a wider Asian-influenced form

In order to explore ‘globalization with Chinese characteristics’ effectively,

3. Held et al. (1999) is a partial exception to this.

understood not merely as a reflection of the universal core of capitalism,5

Enter the Eagle

Neoliberalism. Crucially for contemporary globalization, it was in the

Enter the Dragon

Without the externalization of US capitalism, particularly its innovations

export data on manufactured commodities,9 the vast sums the government

one in which a particular type of party-state continues to be decisive to its

12. The other principal version of market neo-Leninism is Vietnam.

Group, which is owned by the Guangdong Provincial Government, and the

A developing country. In addition to the economic agents and the state,

If, in combination, the features of Chinese capitalism and the country’s

25. Calculations from World Bank Data (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.

agendas are imbued with European/American-centric notions of ‘progress’

transcend the Euro/American-centrism that continues to inform ‘Western’

such as volcanic eruptions, hurricanes etc.) CCTs can sometimes evolve

VECTORS OF TRANSFORMATION: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE

we begin this section by discussing two of the issue’s contributions that

is reasonable to interpret ‘China’ in ‘The South’ as both a liberating ‘saint’

Global Production Networks

One vector that encapsulates facets of a number of the cross-border flows

28. http://www.lenovo.com/ww/lenovo/pdf/Lenovo-Factsheet-2012-Mar-ENG.pdf (accessed

Zambia and a textile company, the Tanzania-China Friendship Mill, in Tan-

evident in much of the research published to date (see also Brautigam,

Financial flows have been a key vector of global transformation since at

International migration has been an important vector of all forms of glob-

The transmission of cultural imagery, derived from the dominant social

bourgeoisie of classical European colonialism came to perceive of them-

In our attempt to understand the nature and consequences of ‘globalization

to re-constitute the nature of the global political economy, the categories

Appelbaum, R.P. (2012) ‘Transnational Contractors in East Asia’, in G. Hamilton, M. Petrovic

Jeffrey Henderson is Professor of International Development and Director

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi