CAPI China Research Chair Guoguang Wu on Chinese party politics and his new book
CAPI China Research Chair Guoguang Wu was quoted in an NPR.org article on the recent communist party congress in China:
"The election is a formality," Wu says. "The positions are decided in advance of the congress." Then they're given to the delegates to rubber-stamp. The actual selection of the party leadership, Wu adds, is done "in a black box" behind closed doors.
Guoguang also recently celebrated the release of his new book, "Globalization against Democracy: A Political Economy of Capitalism after its Global Triumph" (Cambridge University Press).
Description from the publisher:
Globalization has reconfigured both the external institutional framework and the intrinsic operating mechanisms of capitalism. The global triumph of capitalism implies the embracing of the market by the state in all its variants, and that global capitalism is not confined to the shell of nation-state democracy. Guoguang Wu provides a theoretical framework of global capitalism for specialists in political economy, political science, economics and international relations, for graduate and undergraduate courses on globalization, capitalism, development and democracy, as well as for the public who are interested in globalization. Wu examines the new institutional features of global capitalism and how they reframe movements of capital, labor and consumption. He explores how globalization has created a chain of connection in which capital depends on effective authoritarianism, while democracy depends on capital. Ultimately, he argues that the emerging state-market nexus has fundamentally shaken the existing institutional systems, harming democracy in the process.
Guoguang discusses the book in this interview from ChinaFile:
More photos from Guoguang's book launch at CAPI:
