Mon 2009-12-21 19:18 EST
America's Head Servant? The PRC's Dilemma in the Global Crisis
...Despite all the talk of China's capacity to destroy the dollar's reserve-currency status and construct a new global financial order, the prc and its neighbours have few choices in the short term other than to sustain American economic dominance by extending more credit...the historical and social origins of the deepening dependence of China and East Asia on the consumer markets of the global North as the source of their growth, and on us financial vehicles as the store of value for their savings. I then assess the longer-term possibilities for ending this dependence, arguing that, to create a more autonomous economic order in Asia, China would have to transform an export-oriented growth model--which has mostly benefited, and been perpetuated by, vested interests in the coastal export sectors--into one driven by domestic consumption, through a large-scale redistribution of income to the rural-agricultural sector. This will not be possible, however, without breaking the coastal urban elite's grip on power.