12 Readings for Seeing China Differently

Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash

I don’t consider myself a China hand (or any other kind of hand). But I pay a lot of attention to anything that I deem important, including China, and I’ve been dialed into the country one way or another my entire career.

I majored in Asian studies as an undergrad, focusing more on Korea, but if you go far enough in Korean Studies, eventually China begins looming large—and not just on a map. Working in Obama’s Pentagon, I started as a Korea desk officer…but at a certain point China issues took over my professional life there too. While inside the war machine, I moonlighted as a PhD student, which led me to make sense of China in the context of mainstream security studies. And of course, working on Asian international relations as a scholar, there’s simply no getting around trying to understand China; can’t make sense of Asia or US foreign policy without having some kind of perspective on China.

But as readers of this newsletter know, I’m critical of many conventional wisdoms about China. My perspective puts me at odds with power players in Washington, and probably in Beijing too. One thing that distinguishes me is that I try to be transparent about how I think about China. We all make sense of the world as it comes at us, but with what analytical priors? What assumptions, frameworks, or points of reference color how we process the goings-on of the CCP, Chinese political economy, or Sino-US relations?

Well, in The Rivalry Peril, Mike Brenes and I have a chapter that explicitly details our “theory” of China, which takes even China’s domestic issues in their global context.

Anyway, I thought I’d share some readings on China that have shaped how I see things.¹ I think our book has a better account of China than you can find in most places, though if I were writing it again today I might spend more time addressing China’s technology innovations (which don’t change our assessment but might force more nuance in how I explain China when I talk about it to audiences today).

You won’t be surprised to find that in my recommended readings about China below, my overriding concern is with the Chinese working class, which has more in common with America’s working class than anyone in Washington would like to admit.

---

Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, and Pun Ngai, Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers

This book foregrounds the daily grind—including repression and protest strikes in response—of Chinese workers who exist at the point of production for iPhones. A classic, vivid example of how our mode of living is very much an imperial one, extracting surplus value from workers a world away and alienating them from the fruits of their labor so that we can have foo-foo conveniences. China doesn’t come off well in this story, of course, but before you vilify China too much, you must recognize that the book here is simply a very large case study for how manufacturing works pretty much everywhere under modern capitalism.

---

Manfred Elfstrom, Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness

Not a beach read! Rather, it’s a thorough examination of protests, strikes, and labor repression in China. It’s very academic, as Cambridge books always are, but it shows a CCP preoccupied with keeping society and its workers pacified—whether through accommodation, co-optation, or outright repression—at almost any cost short of sharing power with organized labor.

---

Vincent Wong, “Racial capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: analyzing the political economy of racialized dispossession and exploitation in Xinjiang”

This article fundamentally changed how I see Xinjiang. It makes a compelling case that the issue with Uyghurs is not simply Chinese authoritarianism or evil or some static identity attribute gone wrong with the CCP: It’s the political economy, stupid.

Specifically, it’s racial capitalism: “the rise of the corporate state, greater integration of the region’s economy into domestic and international energy and trade markets, the colonial imperative to eradicate Indigenous claims to the land”…these factors all conspire together to incentivize what Darren Byler called “terror capitalism” in Xinjiang. No matter how sincerely a politician or activist might decry Chinese repression in Xinjiang, they need an account of why China has become so heavy-handed there if moralizing about it is to do any good.

---

Alastair Iain Johnston, “China in a World of Orders: Rethinking Compliance and Challenge in Beijing’s International Relations”

I had always known and thought well of Iain’s research on China, but I really went down a rabbit hole reading his work after he came to Wellington last year as an honorary chair and gave an amazing lecture. We got to chatting one day while he was in residence, and he made a compelling case that China is less of a “revisionist” actor than is commonly assumed.

This piece, “China in a World of Orders,” challenges empirically the idea that China aims to overturn the “rules-based international order” as it actually exists. Across issue areas and international institutions, China is mostly satisfied with global order; not entirely, but enough that the CCP doesn’t feel compelled to seek hegemony or global domination, which, as Paul Heer also believes, China couldn’t achieve even if it wanted to (and it doesn’t).

---

Ho-Fung Hung, “Repressing Labor, Empowering China,” Phenomenal World (July 2, 2021), https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/repressing-labor-empowering-china/.

I got to hang out with Ho-Fung earlier this year and it was a real treat. His 2014 book, The China Boom, shaped how I think about China for sure, exposing how, from the perspective of political economy, China cannot become a hegemon. But this 2021 piece is more up-to-date, free, and more accessible in its prose than that book.

One key takeaway is that China’s economy contains imbalances that mirror-image ours. While they are not sustainable, they have been maintained by CCP interventions to ensure that the balance between capital and labor in China skews decidedly in favor of capital. Translation: economic growth has been powered by labor repression, even as workers’ share of national income has risen.

---

Jake Werner, “Why Confrontation with China Threatens the Progressive Agenda,” The Nation (August 1, 2019), https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/china-schumer-kanna/.

Jake and I are in overlapping policy networks and we see China very similarly—maybe even the same. He was also one of the thinkers I was able to touch base with in Washington during my visit last year. He’s written a number of good pieces, but this one propelled my writing of what became The Rivalry Peril w/ Mike Brenes. There is a politics attached to China policy, and the valence of that politics is pretty dark when it takes the form of “great-power competition.” This piece is admittedly not about China but rather “us.”

---

Feng Zhang and Richard Ned Lebow, Taming Sino-American Rivalry (Oxford University Press, 2020).

A criminally neglected book! I’ll share a review of it with readers soon, but I think it was a victim of timing (released amid Covid lockdown) and zeitgeist (lamenting the rise of “great-power competition” at a moment when that hollow framework had become hegemonic in foreign policy circles).

The book, which offers some practical suggestions for steering China hands away from jingoism, is an excellent complement to Pacific Power Paradox, and a nice aperitif ahead of The Rivalry Peril.

---

Timothy Cheek and David Ownby, “Make China Marxist Again,” Dissent (Fall 2018), https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/making-china-marxist-again-xi-jinping-thought/.

A very useful intervention—Marxism permeates Chinese officialdom, but it’s a rhetorical co-optation that reduces down to a kind of capitalist Leninism. China is not meaningfully Marxist as that term is understood in the West, and is far better understood as a right-wing ethnonationalist oligarchy functioning on a model of state-led capitalism (right-wing ethnonationalist oligarchy is also precisely what the US state has become).

Grand implications follow from this understanding. The lament built into the authors’ argument—that we should want China to meaningfully re-embrace Marxism even though it won’t—is provocative but correct insofar as Marxifying governance means a better deal for Chinese workers.

---

Kanishka Jayasuriya, “The Age of Political Disincorporation: Geo-Capitalist Conflict and the Politics of Authoritarian Statism,” Journal of Contemporary Asia Vol. 53, no. 1 (2023), pp. 165-78, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00472336.2022.2092535.

This article is actually a critical review of two important books. Jayasuriya does a better job than any other explaining why Sino-US rivalry is happening in the first place. To grasp that, you can’t look at China in a vacuum—you must situate it in its world-system context at this particular historical conjuncture. China’s choices are bound up with America’s, but not in the way that Washington thinks they are.

---

Yueran Zhang, “The Chongqing Model One Decade On,” Made in China Journal (January 11, 2021), https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/01/11/the-chongqing-model-one-decade-on/.

A pretty long, detail-laden essay that makes one crucial observation very well: the CCP has within it progressive-leaning reformists and they were vying for power quite effectively not so long ago…but Xi Jinping’s ascension in 2012 was something of a death blow to them.

It’s hard to read pieces like this and still buy the Washington meme that “We bet that economic engagement with China would lead to political liberalization and that bet failed.” Did it though? China had liberalized politically in meaningful ways that Western narratives ignore, but theirs was a gradual march. If that’s not good enough for us, that’s our problem.

---

Kaiser Kuo and William Yuen Yee, “White Privilege, American Hegemony, and the Rise of China,” The China Project (August 21, 2020), https://thechinaproject.com/2020/08/21/white-privilege-american-hegemony-and-the-rise-of-china/.

The first, and maybe the only, China piece I ever read that related US policy to the Black Lives Matter critiques of racial capitalism. Great-power competition is racialized, and America’s double standards that justify its innumerable hypocrisies owe something to that.

This piece helped me start reckoning with the role of our foreign policy in making some of the worst aspects of the world we inhabit.

---

David Ownby, “How China’s New Left Embraced the State” China Books Review (May 16, 2024), https://chinabooksreview.com/2024/05/16/how-chinas-new-left-embraced-the-state/.

[China’s] New Left, who had previously been critical of inequality in China’s society and economy, gradually became out-and-out statists.

China’s New Left of the ‘80s and ‘90s combined socialism with pragmatism—their intellectual source material was wide-ranging, borrowing heavily from the West. And the world they sought to make was one that we would have benefited from.

But the repression of civil society in China has shrunk, silenced, and co-opted the left within China. There is little meaningful room for dissent. And that has had gendered, jingoistic, and oligarchic consequences.

Among other things, this intellectually rich essay reminds us that China had been much more politically pluralistic than our conventional narratives suggest. This matters because most non-confrontational strategies for engaging China rely on the existence of “moderates” or dissenters within the ruling elite. When China had a New Left to speak of, that group was our allies. How we engage with China might encourage that blossoming once again, which would be in our interest and theirs.

1. There is a thirteenth reading that is arguably better than everything on this list, but it came out after Mike and I wrote The Rivalry Peril. The author, Eli Friedman, has written a number things about labor in China that I’ve found useful. But his recent piece on how Taiwan and Hong Kong fit in the larger web of labor exploitation and how that connects to tensions today (and a notable lack of tensions yesterday) is singularly good: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-cost-of-chinas-prosperity/.