The scale and significance of the rise of China is now widely recognised and a burgeoning literature engages with the developmental impacts of Chinese relationships with the rest of the global South across topics such as investment, loans, aid, human rights and migration. All are significant, but most of this work addresses specific states or regions and concentrates on direct, bilateral interactions between these locations and the People's Republic. In contrast, this thesis adopts a world-historical perspective that conceptualises China's rise as transforming some of the central accumulation processes which power global capitalism, producing profound consequences for those states whose developmental prospects depend upon the functioning of these circuits. The principal argument is that during the period 2003-14, such China-driven disruption, particularly to the structures of commodity markets, positively influenced the circumstances of insertion into the global economy for dozens highly-indebted Southern natural resource-exporting states. This shift provided such states with the economic wherewithal to define their own development strategies, free of external neoliberal constraints, for the first time in a generation. I make two main claims: {i} a high export concentration in hard/energy commodities demanded by China is a necessary condition for departure from a neoliberalising trajectory in a given southern state; and {ii} whether such a departure occurs and the direction it takes then depends upon the nature of domestic class configurations in each case. I use Qualitative Comparative Analysis with a set of 25 country cases in support of the first claim. For the second, I present a typology of political-economic trajectories among resource exporting states under commodity boom conditions, building upon periods of fieldwork in Ecuador, Zambia and Jamaica to identify five distinct ideo-typical resource-based development agendas.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:702124 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Jepson, Nicholas |
| Publisher | University of Bristol |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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