Re: "rise of china" and wst

Whether China is peripheral or semiperipheral is debatable; and I'm not
sure who exactly within WST is making the case for China's contention for
hegemony (incidentally, this week's Far Eastern Economic Review has an
article on the debate in Chinese ruling circles about whether to admit
owners of private enterprises to the Communist Party; this is not
necessarily a sign of China's advancement to core status, but, more likely
to my mind, a herald of its coming implosion due to the "cognitive
dissonance" it will create in the edifice of Chinese collective identity).

The bigger issue, however, is (as always) the (mis)conceptualization of
WST as a positivist theory.  Of course, the Owl of Minerva business
applies to it as much as to any other theoretical framework.  In this
case, however, we have Wallerstein's explicit statement that we are in a
period of systemic transition, when traditional rules no longer apply, and
free choice dominates over established structures (he makes this point
repeatedly, e.g. in  _Utopistics_).  This means that past precedents of
hegemonic transitions may be largely useless in elucidating (much less
predicting) the outcome of the current transition (though Wallerstein
himself sometimes forgets this in practice).

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu