This is an extraordinary book: bold, energetic, engaging, upsetting. China, taken as approaching a “semi-peripheral” status in the world system, is situated right in the centre of an imminent systemic breakdown. By the 2020s, according to Minqi Li, socio-economic, ecological and political contradictions are likely to converge in China, leading to a major crisis of Chinese and thereby global capitalism. As the conditions and basic law of motion for capitalist normal operation – from cheap labour to abundant natural resources – are being undermined, such a crisis may no longer be solvable within the existing framework. Following this general argument based on abundant statistical illustrations, Li's project is not just to ring the bell again but to demonstrate where the seemingly unending accumulation of capital is now hitting its hard limits.
After straightforwardly predicting the impending crisis in the opening chapter, Li discusses in chapter two “the illegitimacy of Chinese capitalism” in light of the transfer of public assets into private hands, especially the bureaucrats and their families. China's economic structure and class power has since been radically altered, and its socialist social contract dismantled. The next three chapters mount a scrutiny following the trajectory of global capitalist crises, at times so dogmatically simplistic that page after page they read like an old-fashioned economics textbook. Two important points are nonetheless made meticulously. One is about Marx's controversial thesis of “tendency for the profit rate to fall.” Li examines records in Britain and the US to show how profit squeezes happened and endured, in the face of rising labour costs and intensified market competition beyond the classical thesis of augmenting organic constitution of capital. As such, contrary to the fallacious neoclassical belief, growth really cannot continue indefinitely. In the same vein, the other point is about capitalism having exhausted the globe's geographical space for further “spatial fix.” China is viewed as the last significant region for capital expansion. Chapters six and seven focus on the predicaments of energy quests and consumption, through detailed data analyses of depletion, pollution and emission en route for a looming climate catastrophe. The original Marxist position on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production is reaffirmed with an additional dimension of ecologically generated contradictions. The last chapter ponders a socialist alternative, arguing eloquently that there is no theoretical reason to believe in the capitalist market being capable of solving the allocation and incentive problems commonly assigned only to socialist planning. In reality, the former suffers no less asymmetric information, moral hazards, wrong price signals and environmental externalities. Li then depicts three future scenarios for China: resumption of a socialist-oriented model of development, which is unlikely; disintegration of the Communist Party rule; and a general political and social collapse. Venturing into the second scenario he speculates on workers and socialists seizing local power and gaining mass support on the ground, preparing for a nation-wide transformation toward a needs-driven economic system of social ownership, equity, and zero to low-rate growth dictated by sustainability.
A few issues remain. First of all, the history of socialist political economy is treated inadequately, not due to lack of space, but due to a mechanistic and instrumentalist understanding. In particular, the Chinese communist revolution cannot be explained by the old ruling elites' failure to establish a viable state necessary for effective capital accumulation (pp. 3, 17). Rather, it was an epic human event of an exploited and oppressed people forced to rise and fight for liberation. The moral essence or justice and historicity of the revolution cannot be substituted by crude economic rationality. Likewise, any success of post-revolutionary development is also fundamentally attributable to the popular foundation of the new regime and its social policies. Still, dismissing the initial reform as a “counterrevolution” is unconvincing: the neoliberal turn after 1989/1992 is not a proof of any inevitability for China to be where it is today. Indeed a conspicuous weakness of the book is its positivist and deterministic air, which awkwardly embraces some romanticized observations on working class consciousness at the same time. Both leave actual politics on hold.
Secondly, by rigidly defining the 21st-century crisis as waning growth that undercuts a minimally required level of profits, the demise of capitalism becomes mathematically predicable. However, the calculation is based on certain implausible assumptions. Citing Robert Gordon, Li takes the three industrial revolutions since 1750 – the invention of the steam engine and the railway, of electricity and internal combustion engines, and of computers, the internet and mobile phones – as having largely completed all that is achievable in terms of scientific and technological progress (chapter three). Here not only is Li imprudent to declare the end of revolutionary discoveries and innovations, his claim also overlooks possible counter tendencies to the falling rates of growth and profit: new products, demands, supply and consuming patterns in renewable energy, bioengineering, medicine, software, education and much else. In the long run, the scope and depth of markets can potentially be boundless insofar as balanced exchange between society and nature is both imperative and attainable. In the interim, in a digital age of “cognitive capitalism” and knowledge economy, relative rent may be generated from material or immaterial production, including patents and copyrights. R&D may well create unprecedented opportunities for capitalization and even optimized monopoly profits. Unpredictable exogenous factors could also emerge.
Finally, concerning the question of agency, if everything is already so logically and objectively settled, what is the point of class struggle in China as “a key battleground” for overthrowing capitalism (p. 169)? Conceptually, it is unclear why class position is directly relevant to environmental degradation and protection alike. Empirically, the wishful depiction of the formation of a proletarianized and militant class of workers is yet to be substantiated (pp. 11–12, 28). Rural migrants, by now the largest contingent of China's industrial workforce, are not stably concentrated in either their work or residential places. They are fairly mobile (on quick-fix, insecure or precarious jobs), footloose (many still seasonally attend to land in their home villages), and, for those in the informal sector, typically invisible. Even as petitioners or strikers they can be ambiguous in their attitude toward the government and other authorities. The profoundly changed triangle relationships among labour (the most vulnerable), capital (foreign and domestic), and the nominally communist state have never been clarified in China's euphemist political and legal discourses since the 1990s. These ambiguities continue to cause ideological and organizational dilemmas for the older and younger generations of workers. Despite his puzzling propositions, Li Minqi has a distinct and critical case to argue, which deserves to be seriously probed and debated.
