As a 1989 Tiananmen Square veteran, author Minqi Li risked his own life to defend free market democracy twenty years ago. Now, after seeing the impact of free markets on the quality of life for working people around the world, Li has become a Maoist/Marxist. Li is not ambiguous or ambivalent. He concludes: “A socialist world-government with global democratic planning will offer the best hope for humanity to survive the coming catastrophes and preserve the most important accomplishments of human civilization.”
Li, an economics professor at the University of Utah, presents a China that is on the rise – although not as a military menace, but instead as the beacon of an alternative model country and one that will be asked to “provide system-level solutions to the system-level problems left behind by the US hegemony.” Up until now, Communist China through its export-led economic growth has merged with and indeed played a key role in the global system of US-led capitalism. Now, as this system is in a state of demise, argues the book, China as a rising power will have to redefine itself in this new climate.
But there is a problem: Li doesn’t see the leadership in China as quite up to the task. “Given the rules of the capitalist world economy,” he writes, “can we count on the Chinese capitalist elites … to act in accordance with human’s long-term common interest?” Li makes sure that the reader is well aware that this specific passing of the torch takes place in a moment in history that is fraught with seemingly insurmountable challenges: an economic trajectory oblivious to science and the ecological limits to growth. Moreover, capitalism, Li asserts, is contingent on a form of manifest destiny in which China and its cheap labor and lack of regulations was the last exploitable front. But that final source is drying up.
In the process of discussing the rise and fall of global systems, we also learn something about the current state of capitalism. Li argues that the interstate-competition that enables capitalism and a world system that fosters collective and cooperative responses to global problems such as poverty, climate change and war implemented and enforced by a credible and international institution are dynamics that by definition are mutually exclusives. Thus, one can surmise, if we want to effectively deal with these global problems, capitalism must be the first thing to go.
Although this book presents itself as a rethinking of China’s rise, it serves more as a rethinking of Maoist China, and through a rose-colored lens. This is where the credibility of the book wears thin. For example Li tries to illustrate that the 33 million deaths caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward from 1954-56 have been exaggerated. In fact, he argues, the Communist Revolution in China reduced the death rate so much that the death rate spike during the Great Leap Forward can be seen to represent no more than a return to the pre-revolution numbers.
But the book succeeds in bringing many important and thorny questions to the surface: “How will China’s internal social structure evolve as China assumes different positions in the existing world-system? Will China’s current regime of accumulation survive the potential pressures that will arise out of such a transformation? Will China become the next hegemonic power? How will the rise of China affect the underlying dynamics of the existing world-system itself?” As we watch America essentially nationalizing its banking industry and possible the automobile industry, too, and while China’s banking, communication and transportation systems become increasingly liberalized, these are certainly the questions to be asking.
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