The Rise of China and Post-Neoliberalism Among Southern Resource Exporters

Studies of the rise of China and its interaction with the rest of the global South have quickly grown into an established research programme in recent years. Efforts have generally concentrated on investments in natural resources and agriculture, new aid relationships and questions of political non-interference and human rights. I begin from a broader world-historical perspective which analyses contemporary China-driven structural transformation in the global capitalist economy and its implications for states in the South. The scale and speed of Chinese growth in recent decades has led to a level of import demand for natural resources of sufficient global weight to have prompted the 2002-2008 commodity boom. Even today, with a stagnating global North, fuel and mineral prices remain well above pre-2000s levels. As China, and increasingly other large Southern economies, continue to develop and urbanise, high natural resource prices seem likely to be sustained for another decade or more. This provides the revenue which is freeing hard commodity exporting states from the neoliberalising discipline imposed by the IFIs and global capital markets, easing a key constraint on their policy trajectories and thus allowing for alternatives in political-economic direction of travel which would have appeared highly improbable prior to the commodity boom. I use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) with a set of 30 Southern states as cases to demonstrate that a high export concentration in hard commodities demanded by China is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a break with neoliberalisation. I find that domestic class structure and (traditional) donor dependence are also causally significant and that particular configurations of these conditions can be related to distinct types of post-neoliberal political-economic formation. In world-historical terms, these may tentatively point towards emerging regimes of accumulation centred around a new phase of materially-based growth in the global capitalist economy.