China And Historical Capitalism

Download or read book China and Historical Capitalism written by Timothy Brook and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the historical relationship that has arisen between the concept of capitalism and the idea of China. Formulated by European intellectuals in order to identify the social formation in which they found themselves, capitalism was portrayed as unique to Europe and as an organic outgrowth of Western civilization. In this way, China was rejected as a model of civilization, and seen merely as despotic, feudal or stagnant. This Eurocentric judgement has hung over all subsequent thinking about China, even influencing Chinese perceptions of their own history. The aim of this collaborative project is to examine how the experience of capitalism as a European social formation and as a world-system has shaped knowledge of China. In addition the volume aims to establish new foundations on which a theory of Chinese society might be built, in order to perceive and understand Chinese development in less Eurocentric terms.

Download or read book China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism written by Ho-fung Hung and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explains China's economic rise and liberalization and assesses how this growth is reshaping the structure and dynamics of global capitalism in the twenty-first century. China has historically been the center of Asian trade, economic, and financial networks, and its global influence continues to expand in the twenty-first century. In exploring the causes for and effects of China's re surging power, this volume takes a broad, long-term view that reaches well beyond economics for answers. Contributors explore the vast web of complex issues raised by China's ascendancy. The first three chapters discuss the global and historical origins of China's shift to a market economy and that transformation's impact on the international market system. Subsequent essays explore the ability of large Chinese manufacturers to counter the might of transnational retailers, the effect of China's rise on world income distribution and labor, and the consequences of a stronger China for its two most powerful neighbors, Russia and Japan. The concluding chapter questions whether China's growth is sustainable and if it will ultimately shift the center of global capitalism from the West to the East.

Download or read book China and Capitalism written by David Faure and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the most distinguished experts on China's economic and business history, China and Capitalism provides a highly original and at the same time clear and readable approach to understanding the development of business in China from 1500 to the 1990s. David Faure then uses the picture he has assembled to shed new light on the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese business today. The book is written to be accessible to people with little background in China or Chinese business practice. Dr Faure describes three phases in the development of Chinese business from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. In the traditional phase, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Chinese business relied on contracts as well as on ritual propriety. In the modernizing phase, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese business had to adapt to the introduction of company law and legal standards of accounting. In the contemporary phase, from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day, China emerged from a control economy to a vibrant market by embracing once again the changes introduced in the modernizing phase. General readers, including students and teachers in courses touching on but not primarily devoted to the Chinese experience, will find in this book the most comprehensive account of China's business development in the last five centuries and many insights into the workings of China's modern business scene. Specialist readers will find a highly original approach to the history of business in China.

Download or read book Tea War written by Andrew B. Liu and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of capitalism in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries “Tea War is not only a detailed comparative history of the transformation of tea production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it also intervenes in larger debates about the nature of capitalism, global modernity, and global history.”— Alexander F. Day, Occidental College Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.

Download or read book China's Capitalism written by Tobias ten Brink and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1978, the end of the Mao era, economic growth in China has outperformed every previous economic expansion in modern history. While the largest Western economies continue to struggle with the effects of the deepest recession since World War II, the People's Republic of China still enjoys growth rates that are massive in comparison. In the country's smog-choked cities, a chaotic climate of buying and selling prevails. Tireless expansion and inventiveness join forces with an attitude of national euphoria in which anything seems possible. No longer merely the "workshop of the world," China is poised to become a global engine for innovation. In China's Capitalism, Tobias ten Brink considers the history of the socioeconomic order that has emerged in the People's Republic. With empirical evidence and a theoretical foundation based in comparative and international political economy, ten Brink analyzes the main characteristics of China's socioeconomic system over time, identifies the key dynamics shaping this system's structure, and discusses current trends in further capitalist development. He argues that hegemonic state-business alliances mostly at the local level, relative homogeneity of party-state elites, the maintenance of a low-wage regime, and unanticipated coincidences between domestic and global processes are the driving forces behind China's rise. He also surveys the limits to the state's influence over economic and social developments such as industrial overcapacity and social conflict. Ten Brink's framework reveals how combinations of three heterogeneous actors—party-state institutions, firms, and workers—led to China's distinctive form of capitalism. Presenting a coherent and historically nuanced portrait, China's Capitalism is essential reading for anyone interested in the socioeconomic order of the People's Republic and the significant challenges facing its continuing development.

Download or read book How China Became Capitalist written by R. Coase and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How China Became Capitalist details the extraordinary, and often unanticipated, journey that China has taken over the past thirty five years in transforming itself from a closed agrarian socialist economy to an indomitable economic force in the international arena. The authors revitalise the debate around the rise of the Chinese economy through the use of primary sources, persuasively arguing that the reforms implemented by the Chinese leaders did not represent a concerted attempt to create a capitalist economy, and that it was 'marginal revolutions' that introduced the market and entrepreneurship back to China. Lessons from the West were guided by the traditional Chinese principle of 'seeking truth from facts'. By turning to capitalism, China re-embraced her own cultural roots. How China Became Capitalist challenges received wisdom about the future of the Chinese economy, warning that while China has enormous potential for further growth, the future is clouded by the government's monopoly of ideas and power. Coase and Wang argue that the development of a market for ideas which has a long and revered tradition in China would be integral in bringing about the Chinese dream of social harmony.

Download or read book Unending Capitalism written by Karl Gerth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What forces shaped the twentieth-century world? Capitalism and communism are usually seen as engaged in a fight-to-the-death during the Cold War. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party aimed to end capitalism. Karl Gerth argues that despite the socialist rhetoric of class warfare and egalitarianism, Communist Party policies actually developed a variety of capitalism and expanded consumerism. This negated the goals of the Communist Revolution across the Mao era (1949–1976) down to the present. Through topics related to state attempts to manage what people began to desire - wristwatches and bicycles, films and fashion, leisure travel and Mao badges - Gerth challenges fundamental assumptions about capitalism, communism, and countries conventionally labeled as socialist. In so doing, his provocative history of China suggests how larger forces related to the desire for mass-produced consumer goods reshaped the twentieth-century world and remade people's lives.