Re: "rise of china" and wst

I feel a certain foolhardiness about "jumping in" to this -- and I'm
too busy to provide a whole lot of data (tho, I must confess, I'm
baffled by the suggestion that the "relevant data" would be what US or
Chinese leaders say).  I also have enormous respect and admiration
for BOTH Giovannia Arrighi's and Gunder Frank's detailed thoughtful
approaches to China in their respective books (THE LONG 2OTH CENTURY and
REORIENT).  (In fact, I would urge folks on WSN to READ THE BOOKS, rather
than just argue about stuff on line.)  But, as a student of East Asian
political economy, I think we might want to look at bit more critically
at the whole premise that we are seeing a dramatic "rise of China."

The PRC is huge and it is rapidly "industrializing" (but certainly
manufacturing isn't growing any faster than in Mexico, for example, but
I doubt that folks would make similar claims about the "rise of Mexico").
Much of the manufacturing that is coming to China is low-wage assembly
oriented (like in Mexico) (I did some "walk throughs" of garment factories
in Guangdong Province a couple of years ago -- the parallels were with
Indonesia or Vietnam, not Japan or the US).  There is a growing wealthy
class of businessmen, entreprenuers and financiers in the coastel cities.
But these "red capitalists" are riding an economic "growth" process that
is generating great socioeconomic polarization (think about huge new
"floating populations" of poor migrants in the urban areas).  I tend to
agree that China has been a peripheral country that may be moving into
the semiperiphery.  But I am not at all sanguine about the PRC moving
into the core (this seems unlikely), much less challenging for global
hegemony (this seems implausible).  I would like to see some
clarification of just what we mean by "the rise of China."  If folks are
claiming movement toward the core (much less world domination!), I'd like
to see some relevant data that might provide real supporting evidence!

cheers,

dave smith
sociology, uc-irvine

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001 wwagar@binghamton.edu wrote:

>
>       World-system theory, like all others, is applicable only to the
> past.  Anyone who sees it as more than a vague, fuzzy, and exceedingly
> general guide to future events is, like the undersigned, foolhardy.
>
>       Warren
>
>
> On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Richard N Hutchinson wrote:
>
> > Today in my Contemporary Sociological Theory course I led a discussion of
> > world-system theory.  I/we did not do justice to the topic, of course, as
> > part of a whirlwind tour of theories.
> >
> > But an issue came up that made me wonder about the theory, and that is the
> > so-called "rise of China."  Perhaps I'm a bit slow and this is what Gunder
> > has been trying to say for the past few years, but I found myself
> > wondering if it doesn't challenge the theory at a basic level.
> >
> > Here are some possibilities:
> >
> > A) Is a peripheral country actually set to become a contender for
> > hegemonic power?  If so, doesn't that knock a big hole in the theory?
> >
> > B) Is it actually the case that China, being a peripheral country, is
> > not really going to be a contender for hegemon/core power any time
> > soon?  (Perhaps, like the old USSR, it's really just moving up to
> > semi-peripheral status?)
> >
> > C) Perhaps the truth is some combination of the two (as in Kantor's recent
> > study) and China can become quite powerful without becoming part of the
> > "core" in terms of GDPPC?  What are the implications of that for the
> > theory?
> >
> > Are there other positions I've missed?  What is the evidence for each?
> >
> > Hoping to trigger a productive debate,
> >
> > Richard Hutchinson
> > Weber State University
> > remote Ogden, Utah
> >
> >
> >
>
>