China Growing Geo-economic Influence.pdfVIP

Geoforum 41 2010 677–688 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal home On China’s growing geo-economic in?uence and the evolution of variegated capitalism Kean Fan Lim * Department of Geography, 1984 West Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 Canada a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: China’s growing geo-economic clout globally has attracted signi?cant research attention over the past Received 16 August 2009 few years. Rather than strictly adopt a national-speci?c and path-dependent perspective, this paper offers Received in revised form 31 March 2010 a nuanced perspective on the rationale of Chinese economic expansions overseas. I propose we view Chi- na’s growing geo-economic in?uence as a relational development, inextricably connected to broader changes in global capitalism, especially the failure of the US government to maintain con?dence in the Keywords: dollar. The paper probes critically the underlying logics of two recent developments: 1 the role of the China China Investment Corporation a new sovereign wealth fund and state-owned enterprises SOEs in Variegated capitalism accessing new markets worldwide; and 2 the policies to extend the global reach of the Chinese yuan . China Investment Corporation State-owned enterprises SOEs I argue that these phenomena are concatenated to China’s broader aim to secure domestic economic Financial overaccumulation security, given its vast holdings of dollar reserves and its macroeconomic constraints through the main- Macroeconomic constraints tenance of a ?xed foreign exchange regime. These developments in turn contour and sustain the evolu- tion of the variegated global system of capitalism. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ‘‘[R]e?ning the emergent problematic of variegated capitalism to East Asia, Arrighi 2007 argues that the revolution in China in woul