The Capitalist Rise of China Has Strengthened US Hegemony: Understanding Dependent Integration in Contemporary Geopolitical Dynamics

Conventional wisdom has oscillated from US hegemonic decline since the 1970s to a “unipolar moment” in the 1990s to now back to decline especially in the face of the rise of China. This paper argues the opposite, that the capitalist rise of China since the 1990s has rendered US structural power stronger than ever before. This is in large part due to the nature of China’s historically unprecedented dependent integration into US-centered global production and financial networks. This paper will map China’s techno-dependency on the US in especially advanced semiconductors (using Bloomberg Professional’s supply chain database, among others), and show how the United States can leverage its techno-supremacy in a manner that was unavailable against Japan in the 1980s let alone the Soviet Union in the 1950s—both of which were much more technologically independent. Concomitantly, China’s role as export platform for the world’s workshop funnels the world’s primary transactions currency (US$) back into the United States—a familiar story—which then allows the US to spend far more than any other state, whether $5 trillion on Covid-19 stimulus (more per capita than was spent in the 1930s New Deal) or endless wars, including those that impact China. In regard to the latter, this paper ends with how US-driven geopolitical events—US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and US support for Israel in its war in the Middle East—has significantly diminished the prospects for Xi Jinping’s Eurasian grand strategy of the Belt and Road Initiative and increased the prospects for the US’ counter-vision of the India-Middle East-European Economic Corridor. That China has offered very little pushback to this spiralling US aggression reveals its extraordinary weakness stemming from its dependent integration into US-centered global capitalism.