Compared to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, China presents an entirely new challenge to the democracies because it is closely intertwined with the latter economically and socially. The CCP’s increasingly dictatorial turn cannot be explained by Xi Jinping’s personality, but the CCP’s logical development. The only way for the democracies to effectively protect themselves from, and counter, the CCP’s expansion is to form an alliance and take collective actions to demand that the CCP make meaningful changes toward respecting human rights, the rule of law, and fair and open markets. To be effective, the democracies should adopt a “tit for tat, delink-ready” strategy in pushing the CCP to make desired changes. Collectively, the major democracies have more bargaining power than the CCP, and thus should stand firm on their demands from the CCP. For MNCs, the book offers several tips to help them in formulating China-related strategies based on the perspectives of China, Inc. and China’s reliance on the relation-based system. For management scholars, the book opens new research areas in the theory of the firm, institutional theory, and other theoretical issues.

China, Inc.’s reliance on the low human rights environment domestically and free trade internationally creates a contradiction that is difficult to resolve. The ideas of democracy, human rights, and rule of law that come into China along with trade encourage Chinese people to demand political changes, which the CCP rejects. The CCP’s strategy to suppress domestic demand for democracy is to expand its influence globally. If the international community acquiesces to the way the CCP rules China, it will not only help mute the demand for political changes in China but also facilitate the party-state to achieve dominance in the world. This chapter reviews the strategies and tactics used by the CCP to influence the world, including using bribery and foreign aid, influencing the influencers, waging the great propaganda war, building a broad united front alliance, using the “Russian doll” method, practicing coercive diplomacy, and invoking the “insulting China” tactic to silence criticism.

This chapter begins by illustrating how Fedecafé avoided the social contradictions of their fully proletarianized labor regime by engaging in collective action efforts with other coffee-exporting countries that de-peripheralized their niche in the international coffee market.While Fedecafé’s early efforts to upgrade up the coffee commodity chain fell flat, the shift in the world hegemonic context and rise of US world hegemony during the postwar decades opened opportunities for collective action efforts among coffee producer-exporter countries that became institutionalized through the International Coffee Agreements (ICA). This geopolitically regulated international coffee market system provided Fedecafé with core-like profits that were essential to the viability of their Pacto Cafetero and therefore to the establishment of a hegemonic regime in Viejo Caldas. This chapter then discusses how the world historical context shifted in the 1980s, with the United States abandoning its support for the ICA system in favor of a deregulated coffee market. It closes with a discussion of how this unraveling of US world hegemony re-peripheralized Colombia’s niche in the international coffee market. This downgrading of Colombia’s niche in the market, combined with the regime’s dependence on fully proletarianized producers, undermined Fedecafé’s hegemony and pushed the region into a series of contemporary crises of labor control.

This chapter discusses China’s legal system and governance environment. In terms of its legal system, China is weak when it comes to developing a rule-based governance structure in which the laws are independently and impartially enforced. The author will review what hinders China’s legal development from cultural, economic, and political perspectives. The author’s central argument is that in the absence of a rule-based system, China has been relying on a relation-based system in which transactions and disputes are governed by private relationships. Understanding relation-based governance is key for foreign investors to protect their interests. The author addresses under what conditions the relation-based system can be efficient, and whether it will be replaced by the rule-based system in China.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the main insights of labor regimes scholarship, including its focus on questions of labor control and its use of the neo-Gramscian distinction between consensual and coercive mechanisms of labor control. It then explains the analytic limits of this consent–coercion dichotomy when analyzing labor regime dynamics in peripheral regions of world capitalism. It then develops an ideal-typical framework intended to understand the crisis tendencies of labor regimes that exist in peripheral locations of the world market, distinguishing “hegemonic” and “despotic” labor regimes from regimes marked by “crises of labor control” or “counter-hegemony.” It then draws from insights from world-systems scholarships on the social precarity of fully proletarianized labor systems and on the core–periphery dynamics of global commodity chains to explain how the convergence of processes of peripheralization and proletarianization, or peripheral proletarianization, has a particularly destabilizing impact on local labor regimes. It ends with a discussion of how both processes of proletarianization and peripheralization are impacted by larger structural and institutional dynamics associated with the rise and decline of US world hegemony.

This chapter begins by comparing the developmental ecologies of bananas and coffee, showing how banana production for export has tended to arise on capital-intensive and fully proletarianized plantations dominated by vertically integrated transnational fruit companies. The spread of proletarianized and peripheralized banana regimes in the early part of the twentieth century generated local labor unrest throughout the banana-producing regions of Latin America, but this unrest was largely quelled by partnerships between authoritarian governments and the banana companies. This partnership unraveled as British world hegemony collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the world banana market was reconstructed under US world hegemony through a process of vertical disintegration that transformed banana transnationals into buyers/distributors and created spaces for the formation of local banana exporters through domestic development initiatives. In Colombia, this process transformed Urabá’s banana zone into a key site of development, but it only permitted entrance into a peripheral niche of the market. Collective action strategies akin to the ICA for coffee failed to generate opportunities for upgrading, pressuring Colombia’s banana planter-exporters to become heavily reliant upon the authoritarian practices of the National Front regime to quell worker unrest and maintain labor control on Urabá’s banana plantations.