ABSTRACT
Contemporary China here is understood as a ‘contender state’ resisting subordination to the liberal West. Previous contenders, from France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union, all have had to submit to the West in the end, but the Chinese state class, by allowing a controlled capitalist development to energise its society and financing the US deficit from the proceeds of export-oriented industrialisation, has so far succeeded in neutralising Western aggressiveness. The article makes the case for continuing to see China as a distinct economy that, far from being the miracle saviour of a capitalism in crisis, may well veer back to a state-socialist line of development. The main grounds for such a turn are the continuing contender role and the incomplete subordination to capital, with labour locked in so-called ‘formal subsumption’ and the persistence of state control even as planning has withered. Caught between a strong state and an increasingly militant working class, the (semi-)private bourgeoisie after the Tiananmen repression of 1989 has apparently lost its interest in further liberalisation.
