ABSTRACT
Drawing on Lenin’s theory of imperialism and neo-Marxist theories such as dependency theory and world system theory, the majority of Chinese scholars working on issues of IPE share the following views about the nature of the current international political economy.1 The international political economy is characterized by the international capitalist mode of production with a clear division of labour between the advanced core and the underdeveloped periphery. The United States and its allies form the core and the great majority of the developing countries constitute the periphery. The capitalist world system is exploitative and is constituted by international conflicts and economic and social contradictions (Ru, 2009: 25-30; Zhou, 2008: 1-9). These inherent class contradictions and national conflicts cannot be resolved easily. Capitalism will, therefore, eventually
perish and socialism will eventually triumph, although it may take many years and there will be ups and downs on the road to socialist victory (Hu, 2000). Given this basic understanding of IPE, the post-war international order
centred on theUnited States is seen as having been built after the resolution of the major class and national conflicts evident in World War I andWorld War II (Fang, 2009: 153-9). American hegemony is based on its military supremacy and the US dollar. The transnational bourgeois alliance it has brokered with declining core states mitigated the inherent contradictions of capitalism, delaying its inevitable destruction. This explains the major setback of world socialism marked by the collapse of the former Soviet Union (Xing, 2009: 227-34). American hegemony and theUS-centricWorld Trade Organization (WTO) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are thus indispensable institutions only in the sense that they reinforce the stability of the world capitalist system (Fang, 2009: 153-9). However, serious conflicts and contradictions continue to exist in the
post-war international order due to the widening economic inequality between the core and the periphery, awakening national consciousness in the periphery, and in the internal social conflicts within the core countries. Since the late 1960s, the American economy has entered the downside of the Kondratieff cycle, with no sign of getting out of the long-term trend of recession, despite its short-term expansion in the late 1990s (Li, 2006). This is no mere rhetorical posturing. As Li Shenming, Vice-President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences suggested in 2009, the series of international financial crises witnessed during the 1970s and 1990s were manifestations of the inherent contradictions of theworld capitalist system centred on the US. The recent world financial crisis represented a further major setback for the world capitalist system (Li, 2009: 33-41). While China and Russia have been integrated into the world capitalist
system in recent years, there remain cultural, economic and political differences between China and Russia on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. There is a possibility that China and Russia may form an anti-systemic alliance to challenge the Western dominance in the world capitalist system (Li, 1993: 443-9; Li, 2000). However, rather than totally rejecting the international capitalist system, China should nonetheless take advantage of the opportunities afforded to be integrated into the world economic system while minimizing the risks of being too dependent on the core. China should seek to transform the system where the opportunity arises (Wang Zhengyi, 2006: 270-1). Consequently, according to these scholars, it is important to uphold the traditional notion of state sovereignty and China’s own independent national identity in the existing international economic system (Wang Hui, 2011). For such scholars, the notion of a ‘collective interest’ of something neu-
tral called ‘the international community’ is suspected of being little more
