Li Minqi - "The Rise of China and the Future of the Capitalist World System"
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- Опубликовано: 30 июн 2024
- Li Minqi studied at Beijing University between 1987 and 1990, and participated in the 1989 student democratic movement -- subsequently becoming a political prisoner from 1990 to 1992. He later came to the U.S, and received a PhD in economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2002, and is now Professor of Economics at the University of Utah.
His research interests include the long-term movement of the profit rate in the capitalist world-economy, the structural contradictions of neoliberalism and global financial imbalances, global environmental crisis, and the historical limit to capitalism. His recent books include The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy (2009), Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the Limits to China’s Economic Growth (2014), and China and the 21st Century Crisis (2015).
The topic of this talk will be the rise of China and the future of the capitalist world system.
0:00 OES Intro
0:03 Summary
0:40 Introduction
1:48 Talk
32:51 Q&A
The biggest battle today is the battle for the financial future of the world... Private vs Public banking. West vs East
nonsense, public banking is not going to fix capitalism.
The latest in depth analyses of China's economic relations with the other developing countries in the BRI etc. does not confirm that China is pursuing an imperialistic or classic capitalist role. Surely, the building of infrastructure, power plants etc. in the poorer countries is helping expand their capacities and living standards. And how is that not progressive?
The West is afraid that China's approach will be hugely succesful and this will immediately raise the question if the West didn't had a similar effective approach because their economics are totally inept, to help the countries of the global south or if it was by design all along.
Are you actually serious? Is China giving interest free loans for indigenous capital circuits to develop the infrastructure? No. It just basic export of capital. Loans are given from infrastructure development that pay out Chinese contractors and if resulting debts are not paid, management and ownership rights are given over to the Chinese.
Stop living in your bubble
@@ShineThePath Yes, but I would say it's more China exporting excess capacity as they've hit a wall at home. They're exporting their model of development through win-win cooperation. It's still neoliberal, I agree, but it's far more progressive than any model the West has given the Global South. For that it should be supported against western imperialism. I am not completely sold that China is trying to fundamentally restore capitalism. I truly believe that the CPC believes in this Bukharian-like Marxist revisionism of "socialist market economy" as the primary stage for future communism. I also believe that there are highly influential capitalist roaders within the party that act as a corrupting force that need to be purged. There are too many neoliberals, social democrats and other non-MLs in China who have way too much say in affairs. I really hope the New Left, the Maoists and the orthodox MLs will take over the CPC and steer the ship back on the right course before it's too late.
Did I hear Li's comment correctly that the public owned sector in China's economy is now only 10%? This really doesn't make sense given that China publicly owns its own banks, has massive state owned enterprises with a myriad of subsidiaries, plus a huge public services sector. I have seen various estimates of between 70-80% of the economy being publicly owned.
I think public sector is now under 50%, but not down to 10%
Output ratio of SOEs to total Chinese GDP only represents 30% last I checked with nearly 80% of labor force in the private sector. In regards to finacialization, despite all of Xi's pontifications about socialism, as of last year there will be increasing private finacialization, even of international sources in China.
China has a huge portion of private owned bank sector, and virtually all public services sectors have been greatly privatized. As a Chinese who lived there for my first 24 years I won't be surprised by the number 10%. No wonder why David Harvey calls Deng Xiaoping, along with Thatcher and Reagan, the Big Three of neoliberalism.
Based on comments, you seem truly interested in China's rise vs anti-China propaganda. That said, have you looked at work by Economists Michael Hudson and Radika Desai? China's rise (apart from State run banks, Industrial Capitalism and a mixed economy) is a reaction to the inherent faults of American Imperialism since the 20th Century. Understanding American dominance via US dollar reserve currency and Neo-liberal Finance Capitalism is essential. Here is a video link to a series of talks (18 as of today) by the above economists to get you started: ruclips.net/video/6adqdNCSVhU/видео.html
中国如果有80%公有制经济那中国青年失业率就不会高达34%。李先生是了解中国国内的具体情况的，他说的也没什么错误，目前中国经济增长放缓，中国人口生育率降低，中国工人阶级对目前中国特色社会主义政府的“无所作为”已经有所反感。同时中国内部左派力量也在不断发展
The problem with the professor's analysis of China is that he fails to explain why China has been so successful. This would identify the major differences between China's system and the usual capitalist approach. And would help better assess the likely perspectives for the Chinese economy.
it's all about the ecological crisis - just look at China' global warming emissions
Socialism is superior to capitalism. State capitalism is superior to free market fundamentalism. China's approach to neoliberal growth is different in that they have no neo-colonies such as imperial countries do, they exploit their peasantry. Accumulation by dispossession comes from the dismantling and privatization of the communal farmland, then sending the rural peasants to become proles in the major cities. Then they sell off state owned assets to the foreign investors, while retaining enough control of key industries to remain in their eyes "sovereign", The CPC laughably thinks they can control this neoliberal model and steer it toward socialist ends. At best they will create a moderately prosperous social democracy by 2049, but by no means will they create the communist society they seek.
we'll have to see if the cultural differences in china lead to different outcomes than happened in america, but i'm going to make a suggestion as to what i think is likely to happen.
for a long time, america had more jobs than there were people able to do those jobs, and that allowed for a union movement to develop that won substantive rights for the american working class, allowing it to usurp levels of wealth that are supposed to be reserved for the bourgoisie - and stabilizing the system, in the process. but, capital is always seeking to undercut everything it can to maximize profit by _any means possible_ so it couldn't deal with that, and migrated to a society that had more people than jobs, thereby allowing it to exploit the labour more effectively once again - and create higher levels of profit. if the number of jobs in china is catching up to the number of people, what effects will that have? will capitalism transform itself under the more communitarian concepts of chinese culture?
i might rather suggest that you're _already_ starting to see capital begin to move out of china and into countries like vietnam, but that in the long run the most likely destination point is africa.
and, so the question is perhaps a little bit different - will china react to it's abandonment by capital in the same way that the west did, or will the cultural differences, including a culture of stronger state interference, lead it to react differently to this ongoing and inevitably accelerating abandonment?
China is already anticipating that Africa will be the future for low-skilled labor, which is why they are already starting to set up companies in Africa and also building the necessary infrastructure and framework for private companies to do business with african countries. The West mostly interacts with the bourgeoisie in Africa, while China is much more focused on interacting with the working class and with the states.
@@souljaaking94 well, i think there's some naivete, here. but, this is the sort of great experiment in front of us - will marx be better realized in china, or will they just self-destruct and collapse into themselves like the west did? and, will capital _allow_ itself to be transformed in china, or can it escape the transformation and flee elsewhere?
@@jessicasfakeaccount We can't forget that socialist countries who fail, are usually under fierce attack by the west, either by military force and/or by economic embargos. People have been predicting the collapse of China for decades but it is growing stronger and stronger instead. And lets not forget that the capitalist countries caused the last financial crisis and if China continues to rise like this it will cause the collapse of the Dollar, similar to the colapse of the British currency in the last century. Since China is a dictatorship "of the proletariat" it has not really trouble in controlling the capitalist class and there are many strict rules for the movement of capital, but also classical ways in which capitalists establish their power. Without propaganda from corporate media, corporate think tanks and lobbyist, it is quiete difficult to cause political transformations
@@souljaaking94 did you watch the video? china is the current dominant capitalist state, and the video is about what happens when capitalism inevitably collapses there. i'm not wasting my time with people that think china is a communist state, or allowing you to base arguments on the absurd idea that china is repressing capitalism. what has happened is that china has stolen capitalism from the west, but now the question is whether it can keep it from abandoning it, as well. the rest of what is in this reply is utter nonsense.
@@jessicasfakeaccount China might be a pretty "capitalistic" state, but there is of course a huge difference between China's economic system and western economic systems and describing both as simply "capitalists" isn't helpful at all. China is repressing political capitalism and attempts of companies to rival or control the state in certain areas. like they do in the West (www.marketwatch.com/story/ant-group-to-fall-under-chinese-government-oversight-as-alibabas-jack-ma-yields-to-regulators-11618229440)
also: while the term "global south" may be looked down upon nowadays, china is neither geographically nor historically a member of that demographics. china exists in the northern hemisphere; it snows in beijing. and, it's also, historically, one of the centres of global trade. there's really no context at all where a discussion of china in the global south is at all coherent.
China is a huge country and it has in the north a border with Russia and in the south a border with Vietnam (Australia is in the southern hemisphere, but is of course part of the conceptual west). Also the "global south" is used to describe mostly income-low countries, but also countries which fought against the imperialistic forces of the "north".
@@souljaaking94 but, china was never colonized in that sense, either. it suffered a decline, but there were never colonial governors in china the way there were in india. and the chinese are even mostly _white_ too. so, could it be that the brandt line had a little bit of specious racism baked into itself in assigning china to the south rather than the north?
@@jessicasfakeaccount China was a semicolony. Hong Kong was under British rule till 1997 with a british Governor and Macau was under the rule of Portugal. Also several other territories of China were either partly controlled by other countries or the imperealists had at least a very strong influence in those regions. Chinese people might have quite white pigmented skin, but white supremacy is not a function of skin pigmentation (in the US irish and italian people weren't considered as white for a time). Asian people aren't accepted as white in the west
@@souljaaking94 the fact that china was able to license a port and maintain sovereignty around it indicates that they were not colonized, not that they were. it's important that you don't confuse colonialism - which involves eradicating the culture and sometimes even the people of a vanquished nation - with just losing a war. china lost the opium wars, but they were not colonized as a consequence of it. and, what white supremacists imagine that whiteness is - which often involves the integration of semitic religious values that did not exist, historically, in northern europe - has little to do with the phenotypic and genotypic fact that the chinese are ethnically and culturally white.
@@jessicasfakeaccount "licensed" a port??? Seems you missed quiet a lot of chinese history: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Hong_Kong
And Chinese are obviously neither genotypic nor phenotipic white, I mean you can of course clearly distinguish between Chinese people and white poeple en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color
And the chinese culture has almost nothing to do with western culture and many white people actually look down on their culture (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism)
These perspectives for the Chinese economy are not all convincing. Sophisticated planning, public investment and identifying and driving forward innovation are clearly a core part of the Chinese system. Thus all these capitalist criteria that the professor is trying to apply to China which are based on private flows of investment and unplanned development are not really relevant. I see no reason why China's impressive growth and development will not continue after 2030.
I agree, state controlled capitalism has been working well.
Pat, China has chosen a neo-liberal albeit revisionist path for its growth model. It's purely Bukharian revisionism on Deng's part. They truly believe they're laying down some sort of base for socialism, but it's merely restoring capitalism and creating a bourgeois class which acts a corrupting force. There are true Marxist-Leninists in China but they're not the majority faction, sadly. I used to be a big Dengist and thought highly of the CPC, whom I still support against Western imperialism. The CPC and the PRC are still a progressive force in the world despite their revisionist "socialist market economy" which is really just another way of creating a social democratic country with Marxist aesthetics.
@@damienfill9028 I'm still undecided on whether Dengism is right or wrong, whether maoist economic policies should have stayed. I think the New Left in China is fantastic and contrasts well with western ,,new left" clownery.