China in the Rise and Fall of the “New World Order”: toward New Inter-Imperial Rivalry

Ho-Fung Hung, Johns Hopkins University

In the aftermath of the End of Cold War in the early 1990s, a “New World Order” grounded on economic globalism and US unipolar global power emerged. The US fomented open market around the world, and it also adopted a democracy-human rights promotion project, either in the form of Clinton’s humanitarian intervention or Bush’s regime change. One ironic cornerstone of this Order was US’s quasi-alliance with state-capitalist and authoritarian China. Given China’s “unlimited supply” of disciplined low cost labor which manufactured consumer goods for the world in exchange for US dollar to be cycled back to support expanding US fiscal deficit, this quasi-alliance helped cement the US-centered global circuit of finance and trade and warrant the global supremacy of the US military. However, the contradictions between US capital and China’s state capitalism, China’s newfound capability of sustaining authoritarian regime abroad, and the explosive inequalities under manufacturing offshoring in the Global North have been eroding the legitimacy and popular support of this New World Order in both Global North and South. When this Order is coming to crash today, the world economy is fragmenting into competing spheres of influence dominated by rival powers.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 247. Empire and World Order