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Given China’s size and the enormity of the country’s recent policy changes, most analysts have been content to explain China’s economic experience largely in terms of national factors, especially state decisions. While understandable, especially given the popularity of the hunt for development models, this framing leads to a misleading understanding of Chinese accumulation dynamics. Among other things, it encourages the misguided belief that China can serve as an anchor for a new (non-U.S. dominated) global economy.
The reality is that China’s transformation is not occurring in a vacuum or solely in response to Chinese initiatives. Rather, East Asian economies, including that of China, are being linked and collectively reshaped by broader transnational capitalist dynamics, in particular by the establishment and intensification of cross-border production networks organized by transnational corporations.[16] As a result, China’s own accumulation dynamics are increasingly being tied to dominant patterns of investment and trade, thereby reinforcing rather than offering an alternative to them.
One consequence of this reshaping is that all East Asian economies have become more trade oriented, with exports playing an increasingly central role in driving growth. The region’s export/GDP ratio rose from 24 percent in 1980 to 55 percent in 2005; by comparison the world average in 2005 was only 28.5 percent (Asian Development Bank 2007b: 68).
More importantly, this reshaping has also produced significant changes in both the geographical direction as well as the composition of East Asian manufacturing export activity. Over the period 1992–2003, China (defined here as the mainland and Hong Kong) shifted its export orientation from East Asia, especially developing East Asia (defined as East Asia excluding Japan), to NAFTA and the European Union (EU). Specifically, the share of Chinese exports to developing East Asia fell from 53.8 percent to 30.4 percent while the share to NAFTA and the EU rose from 33.8 percent to 48.6 percent. Over the same period, the rest of East Asia shifted in the opposite direction. For example, Southeast Asian nations increased the share of their exports going to developing East Asia from 28.0 percent to 38.0 percent and reduced the share going to NAFTA and the EU from 46.9 percent to 34.9 percent (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2007: 24).[17] China is now the region’s largest exporter to the U.S. and the EU in absolute and relative terms (Asian Development Bank 2008a: 17). And, as Table 6 shows, East Asian trade in manufactures is steadily narrowing to the export and import of parts and components rather than final goods. China is the only country (besides Indonesia) whose exports remain predominantly final goods (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2007: 25).
These developments reflect China’s new position as final production platform in a transnational corporation structured regional production system. As the Asian Development Bank explains, “The PRC has a special role to play. At the center of MNCs’ regional supply networks, it is important in boosting both intra- and interregional trade” (Asian Development Bank 2007b: 67). In other words, the region’s growing focus on trade in parts and components is largely a consequence of China’s development as an import dependent producer of increasingly high technology exports. China’s unique position is highlighted by the fact that it is the only country in the region that runs a regional trade deficit in parts and components. Thus, the mirror image of China’s surplus in trade with the United States and the European Union is its deficit in trade with East Asia (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2006: 12, 15-6).
The sharp increase in intraregional trade has encouraged many analysts to believe that China’s import dependent production will enable East Asian countries (and those in Latin America and Africa that also export to China) to ”uncouple” from the U.S. dominated international economic order. However, since this trade activity largely involves an intraregional trade of parts and components culminating in China-based production, with final sales directed outside the region (especially to the U.S. and the EU), quite the opposite is true; East Asia’s overall dependence on developed capitalist markets has actually grown. As the Asian Development Bank explains, “even though intra-Asian trade has been expanding more rapidly than Asia’s trade with the rest of the world, Asia has become ever more closely linked by globalization to the major global markets of the G3 [the U.S., EU, and Japan]. This stems from the nature of Asian trade, with intra-Asian trade driven by vertically integrated Asian production chains and extra-Asian trade driven by G3 demand for the final goods produced in these networks” (Asian Development Bank 2008a: 13).
The rapid growth in the region’s dependence on the U.S. market, in particular, is illustrated by the following trends: the correlation between the growth in East Asian intraregional exports and U.S. non-oil imports increased from.01 during the 1980s, to.22 during the 1990s, and.63 during the first half of the 2000s. Similarly, the correlation between the growth in East Asian exports and U.S. non-oil imports rose from.21 during the 1980s, to.34 during the 1990s, and.77 during the first half of the 2000s (Asian Development Bank 2007b: 69-70).
This regional perspective illuminates that fact that China’s market reform strategy, despite its domestic origins, soon became enmeshed in a broader process of transnational restructuring, one that accelerated the reforms in ways guaranteed to ensure the dominance of capitalist imperatives in China. It also enables us to see more clearly the ways in which China’s economic dynamism is based on unstable pillars and destructive of working class interests both inside and outside of China.
The most obvious problem is that East Asian growth has become ever more dependent on satisfying market demands outside the region as opposed to national or even regional needs. In particular, as China’s economic activity (and thus the region’s production) became geared to exporting to the U.S., the result has been ever larger U.S. trade deficits. Since it is doubtful that the U.S. economy can continue to sustain such large and growing trade deficits, it is difficult to see how China (and by extension the other countries in the region) can avoid painful adjustments involving lower rates of growth and a further worsening of majority employment and living conditions.[18]
Chinese growth dynamics remain problematic even if international trade imbalances can be sustained. For example, China’s emersion in transnational cross-border production chains will further complicate Chinese efforts at technological upgrading. As an UNCTAD study points out, “participating in international production chains” often leaves the host country “locked into its current structure of comparative advantage... thereby delaying the exploitation of potential comparative advantage in higher-tech stages of production” (UNCTAD 2002b: 75). Five years after China’s 2001 accession to the WTO, the Chinese economist Han Deqiang recalls that he had “argued the greatest damage [of membership] would be to China's capacity to control its industrial and technological development autonomously. I think it's safe to say these last five years have more than proven that true. In China, any industry that wants to develop its own technology or markets has encountered increasingly great barriers” (Philion 2007).
Some scholars have argued that China is overcoming this limitation, pointing to a recent decline in imports from other East Asian countries as proof that China is successfully developing its own backward production linkages.[19] However, the data does not support this argument. The trade improvement appears to be temporary, reflecting a one-time increase in foreign investment in the garment industry motivated by reduced foreign trade restrictions on Chinese garment exports. More generally, “the idea that the PRC has been able to replace imported supplies with domestic components is not supported by [existing] trends. The claim that the PRC now provides an important source of demand in final goods markets for other Asian countries also sits ill with the data” (Asian Development Bank 2008a: 23).
Even more problematic is the fact that as China’s growth has become dependent on the country’s participation in crosscutting and competing transnational production networks, the Chinese state has come under ever greater pressure to keep wages down and productivity up in order to sustain or improve the country’s position within these networks. And, because of its key position, Chinese conditions have become the benchmark by which transnational corporations evaluate the investment environment in other countries. As a result, workers throughout East Asia have become pitted against each other in a contest to match the level of labor exploitation achieved in China.[20] Among other things, this “competition” works to reinforce the bias of the system toward exports, thereby also intensifying the risk of regional overproduction. Thus, far from opening up new possibilities for working people, China’s reform strategy has actually strengthened a transnational accumulation process that is generating serious national and international imbalances and tensions that will eventually require correction at considerable social cost.[21]
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