Structural Power, Hegemony, and State Capitalism: Limits to China’s Global Economic Power

Mingtang Liu and Kellee S. Tsai
Additional contact information
Mingtang Liu: Johns Hopkins University
Kellee S. Tsai: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Politics & Society, 2021, vol. 49, issue 2, 235-267

Abstract: A comparative historical perspective shows how globalization and the specificities of China’s rapid growth era limit its hegemonic potential in the twenty-first century global economy. Although state capitalism and openness to foreign capital facilitated China’s economic transformation, interactions among three forms of capital—state, private, and foreign—have produced developmental dynamics that constrain China’s capacity to assume the position of the world’s economic hegemon. These include (1) the compromised competitiveness of China’s corporate sector due to the domination of state-owned enterprises, (2) limits on the ability of Chinese firms to develop leading transnational corporations, and (3) early openness to and continued dependence on foreign capital. Moreover, the party-state’s efforts to ameliorate these constraints arouse external suspicion rather than support a Chinese-led hegemonic order based on consent and shared interests. These historically conditioned realities should temper expectations that China is converging teleologically toward a familiar hegemonic role in the international economy.

Keywords: China; hegemony; globalization; state capitalism; structural power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329220950234 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:49:y:2021:i:2:p:235-267

DOI: 10.1177/0032329220950234

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().