Sino-globalization: Politics Of The Ccp/tnc Symbiosis

This article critiques the “Beijing Consensus” that Joshua Ramo proposes as the ideal model for the entire developing world. The political dynamics of Sino-globalization have been given too much of a free ride by neoliberals. For investors with the right guanxi, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been a guarantor of profitability in an almost mercantile sense. The fact that the CCP is also an instrument of monumental oppression is not just incidental to this arrangement. The specifically anti-democratic nature of CCP authority is in fact its strongest recommendation, since this power is on loan to transnational corporations (TNCs) for the right price. Not only has the CCP made the “trains run on time,” but, more to the point, it has given the TNCs an inside track. They in turn have become de facto lobbyists for Beijing in Washington. The TNC/CCP symbiosis that defines Sino-globalization has resulted in a worst-of-both amalgam that has taken China from one of the lowest income differentials in the world to one of the highest. The unrest this spawns will eventually erode one of the main sources of China's globalist appeal: its presumed political stability. By then, however, Sino-globalization will have migrated to other cheap labor reservoirs. It is the model itself, rather than the PRC, that poses the greatest threat to liberal democratization in coming decades.