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"Hung, Ho-fung"
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The Dollar Cycle of International Development, 1973–2017
Since the 1970s, developing countries across the world have collectively experienced a series of economic upswings and downturns. Existing theories of international development, which mostly focus on country-specific factors that facilitate or hinder growth, cannot explain this across-the-board cycle. We argue that the cycle is driven by changes in the global supply of the US dollar, the default currency of transaction and foreign exchange reserves in the world economy. Based on a time-series—cross-section analysis with fixed effects on 170 developing countries from 1973 to 2017, we find that an increase in the global dollar supply brings lower borrowing costs and greater availability of external financial resources, enabling higher growth rates in the developing world. Conversely, a contraction in the global dollar supply increases borrowing costs and dries up financial resources, slowing down growth in developing countries. The vagaries of the dollar supply, determined largely by the domestic political economy of the USA, have formed the context for international development contributing to the “golden age of development” in the 1970s, the international debt crisis of the 1980s, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–1998, and the beginning and end of rapid growth in the 2000s, among others.
Journal Article
The tapestry of Chinese capital in the Global South
Though China’s capital export is not as big as many journalistic and think tank reports portray, it is definitely a rising force in shaping the context of development in many developing countries. Excluding capital flight to financial centers, most Chinese outward investment to developing regions is in the extractive, infrastructure, and trade sectors. Chinese governmental foreign aid, mostly in the form of grants and loans, has been rising in the developing world too. The form and size of China’s inroad into the Global South vary from country to country, depending on individual countries’ geopolitical and geoeconomic relation with China, as well as the countries’ natural resources endowment. The existing literature on China in the Global South focuses mostly on Africa. This paper accompanies an article collection that expands our knowledge on China’s variegated impact by looking into Argentina, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Central Asia. It also looks into how China is reshaping the structure of global politics at large.
Journal Article
Money Supply, Class Power, and Inflation: Monetarism Reassessed
Recent sociological work shows that pro-market neoliberal policies across advanced capitalist countries are due to distributional struggle between classes in the 1970s and 1980s. The orthodox monetarist view, alternatively, sees neoliberal reform as a nonpolitical attempt to end the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. From this perspective, monetary and fiscal expansions brought high inflation, and central bank discipline and government austerity is the solution; but the recent trend of low inflation despite accelerating money growth and government spending contradicts this view. Analyses of time-series cross-section data for 23 OECD countries from 1960 to 2009 support the thesis that the rise and fall of inflation is more about distribution of power between labor and capital than about monetary and fiscal discipline. Inflation in the 1970s originated from a strong working class and hurt capital more than it did workers, while neoliberal repression of workers' power has kept inflation low from the 1980s onward. Disempowerment of labor created rising inequality and economic imbalances that fueled a financial boom underlying the global financial crisis of 2008. Re-empowering labor is a remedy to such imbalances and the subsequent deflationary pressure.
Journal Article
Hong Kong's Democratic Movement and the Making of China's Offshore Civil Society
Hong Kong's civil society has remained vibrant since the sovereignty handover in 1997, thanks to an active defense by the democratic movement against Beijing's attempts to control civil liberties. Hong Kong is becoming mainland China's offshore civil society, serving as a free platform for information circulation and organizing among mainland activists and intellectuals.
Journal Article
The China boom
Many thought China's rise would fundamentally remake the global order. Yet, much like other developing nations, the Chinese state now finds itself in a status quo characterized by free trade and American domination. Through a cutting-edge historical, sociological, and political analysis, Ho-fung Hung details the competing interests and economic realities that temper the dream of Chinese supremacy—forces that are stymieing growth throughout the global South.
Hung focuses on four common misconceptions: that China could undermine orthodoxy by offering an alternative model of growth; that China is radically altering power relations between the East and the West; that China is capable of diminishing the global power of the United States; and that the Chinese economy would restore the world's wealth after the 2008 financial crisis. His work reveals how much China depends on the existing order and how the interests of the Chinese elites maintain these ties. Through its perpetuation of the dollar standard and its addiction to U.S. Treasury bonds, China remains bound to the terms of its own prosperity, and its economic practices of exploiting debt bubbles are destined to fail. Hung ultimately warns of a postmiracle China that will grow increasingly assertive in attitude while remaining constrained in capability.
eBook
Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900
This paper examines the long-term development of Orientalism as an intellectual field, with the European learning of China between ca.1600 and ca.1900 as an exemplary case. My analysis will be aided by a theoretical framework based on a synthesis of the world-system and network perspectives on long-run intellectual change. Analyzing recurrent debates on China within European intellectual circles, I demonstrate that the Western conception of the East has been oscillating between universalism and particularism, and between naive idealization and racist bias. This oscillation is a function as much of the changing political economy of the capitalist world-system as of the endogenous politics of the intellectual field. Despite their contrasting views, both admirers and despisers of the East viewed non-Western civilizations as uniform wholes that had never changed. I argue that the fundamental fallacy of Orientalism lay, not in its presumptions about the ontological differences between East and West and the former's inferiority, as previous critics of Orientalism have supposed, but in its reductionism. Understanding non-Western civilizations in their full dynamism and heterogeneity is a critical step toward the renewal of the twentieth-century social theories that were built upon and impaired by the Orientalist knowledge accumulated in the previous centuries.
Journal Article
Rise of China and the global overaccumulation crisis
This paper assesses the sources of potential instability of China's political economy by expositing the limits of the post-Mao regime of capital accumulation in historical and comparative perspectives. It argues that the new spatial and socio-political orders under this regime, while propelling China's economic miracle, also contribute to the internalization of the global overaccumulation crisis, which has been haunting the world capitalist system since the late 1960s, into China's national economy. Whereas decentralization of regulatory authority of the state accelerates overinvestment among local economic agents, breakdown of the Maoist social compact and the subsequent class polarization foster underconsumption. The resulting structural imbalance of the economy leads to the risk of falling profit across key sectors and China's over-reliance on the export market, the expansion of which has hinged much on the debt-financed and unsustainable consumption spree in the US. A full-fledged overaccumulation crisis within China in the form of extensive bankruptcy of enterprise, surging unemployment and financial turmoil will certainly trigger extensive global repercussions, given China's weight in the global economy. This crisis, nonetheless, is not inevitable, and can plausibly be averted through a recentralization of the state's economic regulatory functions and income redistribution. No matter whether and how such a crisis unfolds, nonetheless, it is not likely to stop the shift of the center of gravity of global capitalism to Asia in the long run.
Journal Article
Protest with Chinese characteristics
The origin of political modernity has long been tied to the Western history of protest and revolution, the currents of which many believe sparked popular dissent worldwide. Reviewing nearly one thousand instances of protest in China from the eighteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries, Ho-fung Hung charts an evolution of Chinese dissent that stands apart from Western trends.
Hung samples from mid-Qing petitions and humble plaints to the emperor. He revisits rallies, riots, market strikes, and other forms of contention rarely considered in previous studies. Drawing on new world history, which accommodates parallels and divergences between political-economic and cultural developments East and West, Hung shows how the centralization of political power and an expanding market, coupled with a persistent Confucianist orthodoxy, shaped protesters' strategies and appeals in Qing China.
This unique form of mid-Qing protest combined a quest for justice and autonomy with a filial-loyal respect for the imperial center, and Hung's careful research ties this distinct characteristic to popular protest in China today. As Hung makes clear, the nature of these protests prove late imperial China was anything but a stagnant and tranquil empire before the West cracked it open. In fact, the origins of modern popular politics in China predate the 1911 Revolution. Hung's work ultimately establishes a framework others can use to compare popular protest among different cultural fabrics. His book fundamentally recasts the evolution of such acts worldwide.
eBook