Chinese State Capitalism: Labor, Corporate, and International Strategic Issues

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel focuses on issues of Chinese state capitalism, with studies at several levels of analysis. It considers government policies on workers’ rights, corporate regulation and promotion, and international trade practices to paint a comprehensive picture of the nation’s current economic development model.

The panel begins at the level of individual labor, and assesses government policy on the social rights of workers. Alexsia Chan argues the Chinese economic model allows local governments to unfairly rely on rural migrant workers to provide needed services in urban areas, without offering them necessary social benefits and safeguarding their basic rights. While this system serves to sustain the state-managed progress of the national Chinese economic model, Chan warns that entrenched labor inequality at the local bureaucratic level may lead to long-term damage to the whole nation’s well being.

Abigail Coplin next turns the focus to the corporate level, and considers the ways agro-biotechnology firms take different shapes to conform to the needs of the state capitalist system. Specifically, in order to manage relations with local officials while paying attention to national political-economic goals, firms in this sector strategically transform themselves, as necessary, into commercial enterprises as well as academic laboratories. This firm-level strategy allows the companies to prosper within the state capitalism model, and shows the way for firms in other fields to navigate the system to be both nationalistic as well as prosperous.

Eric Harwit continues the analysis of firm strategy within the context of China’s state-regulated social media environment, and introduces the element of global spread of Chinese mobile app technology. He considers whether and how the app WeChat, currently used by more than one billion people mainly within China, can expand to include non-Chinese citizens. In part because the Chinese state insists on controlling and monitoring information on the app, its spread to a global audience is greeted with suspicion and concern over information privacy. However, if WeChat is essentially limited to use within China or by overseas Chinese, the resulting communications disconnect with foreign nationals could lead Chinese citizens and firms to face disadvantages as they seek foreign markets and expand larger economic and social ties outside PRC borders. The result would be detrimental to the state’s goal of continued economic expansion outside China’s borders, and, for many citizens, information isolation within the WeChat app environment.

Finally, Seung-Youn Oh takes the panel to the inter-state level of China’s state capitalism model. In considering the case of the national government’s coordinated economic sanctions on South Korea, Oh illustrates the extent to which the Chinese state’s reach can affect a key economic partner. She also chronicles the targeted nature of the state-formulated sanctions, noting that in allowing in Korean semiconductors, China was signaling both its current dependency, as well as its intention to use state resources and guided subsidization to develop its own products to rival and eventually supplant Korea and other suppliers in this cutting-edge technology area.

Ling Chen, a specialist in China’s state-guided capitalism, provides discussion to tie together these multi-level threads of state capitalistic developmental model analysis.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 13: The Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• Inequality and the Individualization of Social Rights in China - Alexsia Tiffanie Chan, Hamilton College

• Building China’s Monsanto: Organizational Forms in Nationalist Knowledge Economy - Abigail E. Coplin, University of Pennsylvania

• Globalization of China’s Dominant Social Media App: Prospects for WeChat - Eric Harwit, University of Hawaii

• From China Fever to China Fear: Korea Between Chinese Sanctions and US Missiles - Seung-Youn Oh, Bryn Mawr College

Chair

• Eric Harwit University of Hawaii

Discussant

• Ling Chen Johns Hopkins University