It can be somewhat amusing - if you can avoid those familiar incandescent feelings of frustration and rage that can well up in such circumstances - to read the steady stream of pearl-clutching Western economic analyses that wail on about how hopeless and irrational China's national economic policy is, and how it is all going to come toppling down any moment.
I mean really, why did China build all of those ghost cities? Why are they pouring all of this money and all of these resources into profit-losing infrastructure domestically and internationally? What about all of their shadow banks and all of that overhanging debt? What's with all that unfair currency devaluation and mercantile behavior? Irrational Asiatic despots!
OK, barring the racist caricature at the end, there are some legitimate questions in there that can lead to legitimate analysis. There are serious analysts pointing to some of these problems, offering their own sobering concerns through thoughtful argument. And China does have some very serious and very difficult problems to deal with as a nation, even setting aside the intractable problems we collectively face as industrial societies.
But also, China is a society that is structured very differently from the West's, where energy moves through it very differently as a result, and so collective action problems will emerge very differently and be solved very differently as a result. Ah, if only China could become a good neoliberal free-marketer and get behind the US' trade program, harmony could be restored. But I jest. Simple projection ain't gonna get it. There is more going on here than a simple misunderstanding of a rival power though.
To go back to our Western economic pundits (I know, shooting fish in a barrel), it was as if their society existed completely removed from the rest of the world system, and for that matter, those very pundits could stroll outside and break into a hover, never actually touching the dirt below their feet. For one thing, the ostensibly "global" financial crisis was really just a disembodied hiccup, a cloud of "mistakes that were made" which dissipated into the nothing it mysteriously emerged from. And this is the bizarre solipsistic perception that pervades the Western ruling class, and which informs their equally bizarre decision-making process, which in the end threatens all of us, which I'll get to.
No, no, the global financial crisis couldn't have been a traumatic cardiac event - as David Harvey more or less put it - for the whole world system, in which the global designated-consumer of the West seized up in a fit of delusion and self-dealing, blowing up the financial system, and then through economic superstition and panic, retreating into contractionary and senile fits of austerity, while all the while lashing out at the failing states most vulnerable to such policies as those states buckled, threatening to derail the global processes of resource extraction, production, and manufacturing, which feeds that consumption, along with the constant circulation of monies facilitating those flows.
Why do they think China poured all of those record-breaking masses of concrete in record time, and built out those historic masses of infrastructure, jumpstarting the resource extraction economies around the globe, filling in the global demand for concrete and energy and steel and other materials, so as to stave off that circulating blood slowing and turning to stone? Who do they think kept that multitude of resource flows pumping?
I think of that famous I Love Lucy episode, in which poor Lucy and Ethel get trapped on an assembly line on the factory floor of a chocolate producer, increasingly unable to cope with a working pace that is constantly accelerating, and so the wreckage of the backed up chocolates grows and grows in front of them, the results growing ever more chaotic and desperate, no matter how many surplus chocolates they absorbed by eating them and stuffing them down their shirts.
Concerning the global financial crisis, it was as if in that moment of assembly line distress, a bowling ball was tossed into Lucy's arms as she frantically manipulated the assembly line, and then the Western pundit proceeded to concern-troll her for suddenly handling the bowling ball and letting all the surplus chocolates continue to pile up somewhere else, while somehow maintaining the integrity of the assembly line.
It would be one thing if this ignorance appeared intentional and malign, which would be contemptible and unfair, but also understandable. Which is something that you could call out. And sure, some of it certainly is. But I'm not so sure that a lot of mainstream Western commentators are even aware of the actual workings of the world system, beyond a pinpoint perception of a particular actor, in this case China as a circumscribed nation, a perception that wanders from subject to subject in accordance with whatever happens to be fashionable and expedient to comment on at the moment. Do they have a clue about what they don't know? Maybe some of them? That seems a little bit more difficult to address, which is all the more pressing as foreign policy makers continue to turn the economic screws while the sabers rattle.
Therein lie some of the frightening consequences of a solipsistic hegemonic power as it wrestles with the growing wreckage of a global system intimately bound up with its own flailing activity. Which bears a macrocosmic relation to that of the monopolist, residing as a paradigmatic economic actor in its bosom: the monopolist fought and clawed to control every aspect of its domain and stamp out any sort of competitor. And then, having a wide open and desertified arena to act in, the monopolist was left with a complete lack of any sort of self-governing province internal to it to correct dysfunction, a problem which grew worse as the monopolist peaked, and then degraded and weakened, its faculties of governance degrading with it.
Concerning this poverty of understanding, you can make out very real consequences of the decision-making processes connected to this understanding, which are more readily felt in the kinetic arenas of the Ukraine War and the Israeli destruction of Gaza. Even setting aside the human and moral horror of either conflict, and the serious complex of consequences stemming from that horror, it is clear to see growing economic dysfunction, which causes its share of problems downstream, connected to the progression of those conflicts. And you could certainly point to that dysfunction and address the moral fool: "Look, by your own abominable interests and metrics, this ain't workin'!"
The lighting on fire of inadequate military resources for one thing, and the destruction of Europe's industry, and then the failure of sanctions and the disruption of supply chains in the form of resources such as grain and energy on the one hand, and the intensifying strain put on the Arab world on the other, with the agitated Yemenis alone greatly disrupting shipping traffic in the Red Sea, forcing the rerouting of commercial shipping, doubling and tripling (and more) shipping costs in many cases, putting ever more inflationary pressure on the entire system, prompting senile Western institutions like the Fed to continue to put pressure of their own on interest rates, intensifying the debt strain and slowing economic activity, and so on. And all of this undisciplined destruction and its consequences only puts ever more pressure on an already over-strained world system.
Which of course is something that usually motivates and accelerates the rise of rivals to edge out the failing monopolist and refill the vacuum left in its wake.
It has been somewhat encouraging to see China surge ahead on various technological, infrastructural, economic, and governance questions. However inadequate these measures might be for the collective action problem concerning the climate, I'll take what encouragements I can get while living in the late neoliberal world, which more or less refuses to do anything other than cobble some disembodied images together and watch numbers go up as the world burns, largely by its own hand. But one thing I find very concerning is the underlying dynamic between the powers in relation to a greater system.
You have a very old, vast, highly populated, and advanced nation like China - with the incredible geopolitical center of gravity all of that implies - acting the way it did when a global shock like the global financial crisis dropped, transforming that global cardiac event into great standing deposits of whole ghost cities and tottering shadow banking instruments loaded up with mind-numbing masses of debt, deep in the heart of that nation. And China had just emerged stronger out of its century of humiliation, discovering the necessity of rapidly industrializing and liberalizing to cope with the movements of global capital, unleashing Covid in the tumultuous processes of production, among other things.
If that is what survival in the world system and its tightly coupled instruments of production and supply chains demanded of a giant like China, what about the rest of us? Of course, I suspect much of this is what has been motivating China and the rest of the world to decouple, to be sure. Time to unhitch from the bozos asleep at the wheel. But is there enough time to complete such a delicate, complex, and fraught process while avoiding systemic catastrophe? Is it even possible?
Granted, we've seen this sort of thing occur throughout history, in which multiple great powers eventually become more and more economically and politically integrated, only to gradually and then rapidly pull out of those commitments and either re-align towards simpler and smaller alliances or pursue ever more autarky, or both simultaneously at varying rates and scales, based on what is working, as the existing larger scale political and economic agreements break down.
What we've also seen however is an unprecedented level of global integration and the corresponding breadth and depth of global trade and division of labor in the modern age, which is in the process of breaking down. Nations like China and Russia do have more recent experience with rapid contraction and simplification, and a more direct experience of what approximates autarky, even in the face of such extensive global integration. As for the US and the rest of the West? There's quite a long way to fall still. And historically, it takes quite a long time - along with heaps of trauma - to get back up again.
Oh, and that falling monster is pretty tightly coupled to everything else.
