China as a Rising World Power and Its Response to 'Globalization' (review)

Although some of the individual essays in this very thin volume are world-class, the editor has not imposed a unifying theme. Despite the title, the contributors do not focus on China's response to globalization as it is commonly understood. Instead, the book is an olio, offering seven short chapters of varying quality.

Sun Zhuangzhi, Director of the Central Asian Department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, offers a solid analysis of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. He never mentions globalization, although it is the transnational spread of political Islam facilitated by the more porous borders brought on by the processes of globalization that created a shared interest among the SCO governments to defeat political Islam.

Sun presents China as "a big power," "a great nuclear power" with an interest in helping the republics of Central Asia resist pressures from NATO and the United States. He sees China as a model of developmental authoritarianism, a better economic partner than Russia for these Muslim countries, because Russia still operates on selfish command-economy criteria, which privilege the metropole (Moscow-dominated Russia and not the non-Russian peoples far from Moscow). Also, China politically is a better partner for authoritarians than the United States, since the latter tends to promote democracy. Indeed, since Sun wrote this essay, the dictator of Uzbekistan has crushed democrats, distanced his country from the United States, and moved closer to China. Sun's analysis is first-rate.

There are three essays on the economy, and all are very good. Alan Smart and Taiwan University's Jinn-Yuh Hsu explore the large role of the Chinese diaspora in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the PRC. Their solid work exemplifies the Guha/Ray thesis that "in low wage countries, particularly those lacking transparent investment environments, expatriates have advantages." But as China goes high tech, "flexibility, tolerance for uncertainty, social connections and political knowledge"-the advantages of the diaspora in a low-tech economy-decline. The PRC has thus benefited from postmodern networks into Taiwan and via Taiwan into Silicon Valley. The Taiwan government has been powerless to halt the flow of knowledge, capital, and engineers from Taiwan to China via the United States. In addition, the PRC has built science parks and offered incentives for returning engineers-tactics pioneered by Taiwan. These China-Taiwan-Silicon Valley ties are built on joint membership in technology associations and common work/ knowledge experiences, in contrast to low-tech light industry, where diasporic ties are built on kinship and hometown ties. The Smart-Hsu chapter is excellent.

Margaret Pearson finds that China's behavior in the WTO is not unique. Pearson shows the continuing importance of the Chinese regulatory state within WTO rules. While the government lacks the autonomy of the Japanese developmental state and while it promotes decentralization, fragmentation, competition, and FDI, as in the Anglo-American model, the CCP regime seeks development-state goals and grapples with negative Leninist externalities. The government increasingly resorts to anti-dumping measures and promotes IT usage nationwide. The resulting amalgam is readily comprehended by the existing international political economy literature.

Kevin Cai analyzes the PRC's move toward an ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in the wake of the 1997-1998 Asian Financial Crisis (AFC). Watching Indonesia implode economically and democratize politically, the authoritarian CCP anxiously concluded that globalization's negative effects included enhancing American power through the spread of democratization. Therefore, a regional FTA could check the United States and protect China and its neighbors, especially authoritarian regimes. Checking the spread of democratization became so important that even international monetary cooperation with Japan was approved. Hiding the fact that China, too, was hurt by the AFC, the CCP strongly committed itself to regional economic initiatives by 1999 in Manila and 2000 in Chiang Mai, believing that otherwise China (i.e., the authoritarian system) would become too vulnerable. Cai is a good guide to the mixture of...