Re: China the Hegemon?

I certainly agree that trying to turn China into a boogeyman for justifying
new levels of funding for the Pentagon is disgusting. In the Chase-Dunn/Podobnik
paper we focus on the structural situation that occurs during reactions
to capitalist globalization and hegemonic decline.  Wars among core
states are more likely during such periods and there may be another window
of vulnerability to world war in the next decades. It is supposed that
U.S. economic decline will resume after the current bubble bursts and that
the "burden of global order" will likely be financed by other economically
powerful core states that develop their own military instruments.

We agree with Weede that China will not be a contender for hegemony anytime soon.
It is Japan and German-led Europe that are more likely to take the role of challenger.

What follows from this is that the progressive forces of "globalization from below" need to be wary of potential future international conflict and to organize to prevent it.

In a recent essay (Humboldt Journal of Social Relations v.24,1-2 1998)on the relative potential of different semiperipheral countries to contribute support for global socialism Terry Boswell and I argue that the formerly communist states are not likely to contribute much.
But this may be a mistake in the case of China. It is possible that the Chinese could take their own ideology of "market socialism" more seriously in the direction of some large-scale experiments in collective ownership that would provide valuable examples for the rest of the world. I am thinking of the kind of ownership theorized by John Roemer. Terry Boswell and I have proposed how a version of market socialism could plausibly be organized on a global scale in our _Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism_ which is due out momentarily from Lynne Rienner.

Chris Chase-Dunn