Moreover, there is no chance that a one party dictatorship could pose a serious challenge to the US hegemony in the 21 century. Transition to a different form of bourgeois class rule in China may not be smooth and orderly. Whether China can preserve its territorial integrity (Xinjiang and Tibet) in the long run is also uncertain.
I write:
Isn't the "transition to a different form of bourgeois class rule in China" presently underway in China, in however tentative and uneven a fashion? Full-blown private sector capitalists are now allowed to hold CPC party cards (a policy announced in Fall 2002). There seem to be far fewer stories in the Western mainstream media these days about new Chinese moguls complaining about shakedowns in order to qualify for state-owned bank loans, to get export licenses, etc. What this might portend is less popular discontent with the effects of bureaucratic corruption pure and simple, and more with the effects of the economic policies of a state increasingly beholden to China's nouveau riches (and the top crust of the professional-technical strata employed by the TNC's).
IMO the more likely route to national disintegration is not independence movements in the far west but still worsening regional income inequalities (despite the CPC's much-vaunted "Go West" campaign to sponsor the building up of physical infrastructure in the interior). What with WTO rules and regs in the agirculture sector kicking in with more and more force, the CPC can only protect small peasants in the hinterlands from the global logic of the law of value for so long. Samir Amin has written very convincingly on this.
Ian wrote:
Forex is only part of this larger story of capacity/competence building within those institutions in China/India. The fact that so many very bright students come from those two countries to learn finance in the US frightens the hell out of me, but perhaps I'm being unreasonably skeptical.
I write:
Yes, I can relay a (painful) personal anecdote or two or three about piratical Anglo-American investment banks, accounting agencies, and corporate law firms hiring China's best and brightest at outrageous salaries, putting them to work in precisely those kind of jobs that will undermine China's administrative capacity to interface with the world market on its terms, rather than those of the DWSR. In most cases I've seen, these young and talented Chinese are not greedheads or social climbers, just respectably career-oriented and naive about the perniciousness of what they're signing on to. So many sad stories about promising mathematicians and writers and so on and so forth who get caught up in the hyper-competitive maelstrom that is life for China's twentysomething "talented tenth and end up getting their MBA's (ideally in the US or UK). Before they know it they're helping orchestrate the legal architecture for IPO's in what remains of China's state industrial sector.
But IMO the biggest obstacle in the way toward the restoration of China as a great power (which neither of you touch on) is that the global geophysical preconditions for 500 years of world capitalist expansion are eroding before our eyes (i.e. ample supply of commercially recoverable fossil fuels and feedstocks, and a relatively predictable and benign carbon cycle). The political key as always is not to interpret causes and effects in a reactionary Malthusian manner, as some of the peak oil folks are wont to do.
John Gulick