The first article published for a forthcoming special issue about Marxist Perspectives on East Asia is “The Future of the Chinese Economy: Four Perspectives (DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2019.1623906). It is authored by Minqi Li of the Department of Economics, University of Utah in the USA. The special issue is scheduled for 2020.
The abstract for the paper is:
This article studies the future prospect of the Chinese economy using four different perspectives: neo-classical, Marxian, world-system and climate stabilisation. While the neo-classical perspective suggests that China can maintain a relatively decent pace of economic growth for decades to come, the Marxian analysis finds that the Chinese economy will confront a major crisis in the coming years due to internal contradictions of capitalist accumulation. The world-system analysis suggests that there has been a “ceiling of development” that historically has limited the scope of development for the great majority of the world population and China will hit this “ceiling of development” within about a decade. Moreover, if China were to fulfil its climate stabilisation obligations, it may prove to be impossible for the current system to maintain economic and political stability.