The Rise of China and the Global South
Is Part of a Century-Long Process
The Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research recently launched its dossier number 81 entitled “The Twentieth Century, the Global South, and China’s Historical Position”. The text was written by Chinese scholar Wang Hui who is a professor of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University.
The dossier seeks to fill a significant intellectual gap with regards to twentieth century Chinese history and to provide insights into the country’s role in the Global South movement against the hegemony of the Global North.
The dossier explores the twentieth century developments in China claiming that most of those changes attributed to the period did not begin on a particular date on the calendar but were continuation of the historical processes from the previous century. Those historical processes which shaped China and other countries continue to shape global politics today.
Hui argues in the text that the rise of the Global South and China today is a result of the churnings of the past century which has created a new political subject unable to make peace with the dominance of the Global North. This new political subject, which emerges from various countries, including China, will continue to strive for the creation of a just, peaceful and eco-friendly international order.
Revolutionary China and its position in world history
Revolutionary China was born amid various revolutions and wars in the twentieth century. Its social, economic, and cultural spheres were shaped through revolutions and national struggles, within the country and across the globe throughout the century.
The history of twentieth century China is a history of learning from each other and a proof of nonlinearity of human development, Wang Hui argues.
Starting from the 1905 Russian revolution until China’s War of Liberation in 1946-49, many events shaped the history of the world and the history of China, yet rejecting a somewhat dominant narrative, Hui writes that none of these revolutions or movements completely broke away from the past and continue to draw both productive and unproductive lessons from it.
In its 1949 constitution, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) acknowledges the contribution of events including the imperialist wars and revolutions of the 20th century, in influencing not only its foundations but also all the subsequent changes brought by it after the revolution creating a new China out of the old.
Noting the contributions made by pre-revolutionary Chinese scholars from Kang Youwei to Liu Shipei who deliberated on the notion of time, indicating the churnings about “unification of history and historical timeline,” Hui argues that this signified the vibrant intellectual interventions about the future of the country.
For example, Liang Qichao’s “A song for the Pacific Ocean in the twentieth century” published on 30 December 1900 brought together two important concepts of time (twentieth century) and space (Pacific Ocean) together providing a new spatio-temporal perspective for exploring China’s historical position in the twentieth century.
Among other things, the fate of China in the twentieth century was first shaped by the emergence of the US and Japan as centers of global capitalism. This imperialism which dominated and penetrated all spheres of life across the world, and particularly in the colonies, including in China, slowly created revolutionary elements in the peripheries giving birth to resistance and national independence movements. In other words, the revolutions in the peripheries were shaped by imperialist interventions.
Imperialism also created uneven economic and political developments between different countries and even within particular countries. This uneven development creates what Hui calls “Weak Links.” The uneven development gave birth to resistance in China and provided it the conditions to survive and grow in peripheral areas.
The Chinese Revolution was not like any revolution because it was not rooted in one nationality built out of many ethnicities. Unlike most of the European and Asian empires who disintegrated due to national movements which emerged post-1914, it was successful in retaining a multi-ethnic state.
Claiming that the length of its unfolding is one of the central reasons for its surviving the twentieth century when most other contemporary revolutions failed, Hui argues that the Chinese Revolution is a combination of transformation and continuity which combines its state building process with the birth of a new political subject and “its ever increasing capacity for political integration.”
In other words, unlike the French and Russian revolutions the Chinese Revolution was not the product of a single event. It was a result of a long process of mobilization and transforming society in all fields, creating a new political subject fresh and ready for a different world.
Chinese history will make little sense if we use the concepts such as class, state, nation, sovereignty, etc. which were developed in nineteenth century Europe without displacing them from their roots. Hui talks about careful re-rooting of these concepts to get the “internal perspective” on the Chinese revolution.
The Global South and China
Claiming that “geopolitically, the twentieth century was not just a post-colonial era but also a post-metropolitan era,” Hui argues that various revolutions and reforms in the peripheral areas transformed both their own regions and the nature of the center-periphery relations significantly affecting the central regions. In this churning, China has played and continues to play a crucial role.
The recent economic emergence of the Global South is a part of that long process.
“China and the Global South are no longer merely peripheral areas totally dominated by the colonial metropoles of the colonial era; they are the epochal forces that propelled the transition from the metropolitan era to the post-metropolitan era.”
The series of revolutions in the twentieth century signifies the birth of a new political subject called the Global South. The process of neoliberal globalization which was founded on monopoly capitalism in the twentieth century, is inherently unequal and it increasingly fails to meet the development needs of the Global South.
Just like the Third World and Non-Alignment Movement responded to imperialism and hegemonic politics, the Global South has to address the chain of crises brought by the neoliberal globalization and work for a new international order that accommodates the peripheral regions.
As in the past, the imperialist forces are reacting violently to suppress the rise of peripheral regions. They have become more aggressive with containment and retaining their monopoly. This threatens global peace as regional war situations have the potential to turn into global conflicts.
However, unlike during the Bandung era (1955), the presence of countries like China which have already partially changed and challenged the hegemonic order presents the Global South a stronger footing against the Global North than ever before.
The repeated use of sanctions by the US and European Union is a sign of crisis as their monopolies are declining. Their monopoly control over global finance, technological innovations, natural resources, weapons of mass destruction, and communication is increasingly being challenged. This hits at the core of their hegemony.
Challenges to Global North will continue to increase with every passing day and it is a matter of time before we see a more just and equitable world order. The Global South does not seek war but development of a just, peaceful, and eco-friendly international order which cannot be built without breaking down the monopolies of finance, technology, natural resources, weapons of mass destruction and communication. In this context, Hui says that the Global South is a movement for seeking “new universality for the survival and development of human civilization.”