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Monthly Review Volume 73, Number 3 (July-August 2021)

July-August 2021 (Volume 73, Number 3)

This special issue of Monthly Review is devoted to the New Cold War on China. What has been the view of the Chinese Revolution presented in Monthly Review in the past seven decades? How has it changed over time? As Paul A. Baran observed: “Marx and in particular Lenin being master-tacticians shifted horses and arguments as conditions changed (rightly so, to be sure!)” The question then becomes not the changing views themselves, but how these shifts in perspective reflect changing historical circumstances. | more…

New this week!
US-China competition can avoid confrontation

The New Cold War on China

The imperialist world system, crowned by U.S. hegemony, is now threatened by China’s seemingly inexorable rise and pursuit of its own distinctive sovereign project. In this respect, the Trump administration’s prosecution of a New Cold War on China was no anomaly, but rather the inevitable U.S. response to China’s rise and the end of Washington’s unipolar moment. The Biden administration has made it clear that it not only intends to continue the New Cold War, but to accelerate it. | more…

CPC with Xi at core is driving global transformation

Is China Transforming the World?

This article will be released in full online July 5, 2021.

In most mainstream Western media, China is now presented as a threat, a conquering “empire.” Still the global hegemon, the United States is worried about the Chinese rise in strength, and their successive administrations are building the anxiety-provoking image of a China eager to supplant it and steal its leadership of the capitalist world system. | more…

China expanding agricultural cooperation with Belt and Road countries

Legacies of Definancialization and Defending Real Economy in China

This article will be released in full online July 12, 2021.

Confronting the triple trap of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic downturn, and ecological crisis, the Chinese leadership has reiterated that “China puts the people’s interests first—nothing is more precious than people’s lives.” This kind of people-centered governance philosophy is ostensibly meant to protect the lives and health of the people, while defending people’s property under the basic system of collective ownership. | more…

A McDonald's in China

China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?

This article will be released in full online July 19, 2021.

Whether China has become an imperialist country is a question of crucial importance for the global class struggle. Although China has developed an exploitative relationship with South Asia, Africa, and other raw material exporters, on the whole, China continues to transfer a greater amount of surplus value to the core countries in the capitalist world system than it receives from the periphery. China is thus best described as a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system. | more…

CHINA THREAT by Luo Jie

China and the American Lake

This article will be released in full online July 26, 2021.

U.S. fantasies of expansion, commercial dominion, and military prowess have long hinged on a premise of Pacific exceptionalism. Couched in the millenarian language of manifest destiny, the Pacific region and its multitudinous ecosystems, cultures, peoples, and nations have been vacated in favor of an aqua nullius that frames the region as an empty space designated for U.S. possession by divine providence. | more…

Korean peninsula

In Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy

This article will be released in full online August 2, 2021.

The war against fascism was transformed into the Cold War. U.S. imperialism, subdued somewhat by post-First World War isolationism, came into full flower. Washington implemented this sea change in many ways, including the division of the Korean Peninsula. | more…

5G technology booth

The Political Economy of the U.S.-China Technology War

This article will be released in full online August 9, 2021.

One of the key components of U.S.-China strategic competition is the technology war, the essence and implications of which can be further understood in the broader context of the international division of labor and the two countries’ internal contradictions. From this front, we can decipher the antagonism between different classes/groups within and across the two countries. | more…

Inside the Overseas Chinese Museum of China

Can the Chinese Diaspora Speak?

This article will be released in full online August 16, 2021.

The Chinese diaspora is compelled either to prostrate to an edifying project of assimilation to U.S. liberal democracy, or be branded as illiberal “Red Guards” unfit for serious political discourse. This discursive context has long mobilized overseas Chinese to affirm the universalism of Western liberalism in opposition to a Chinese despotism defined either by dynastic backwardness or communist depravity. Can overseas Chinese speak for themselves in the face of the West’s “hegemonic right to knowledge?” Or will all such speech that challenges U.S. presuppositions of liberal selfhood and Chinese despotism simply be tuned out as illiberal noise? | more…

Monthly Review Volume 73, Number 2 (June 2021)

June 2021 (Volume 73, Number 2)

Where capitalism itself is concerned, the dominant view is that the COVID-19 crisis constitutes a rare, unpredictable, and unlikely to be repeated occurrence. The world capitalist economy, we are informed, was fundamentally sound prior to the advent of this unforeseen exogenous shock, and it will revive quickly once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is under control. This received view, however, is incorrect on all counts. | more…

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