This chapter traces the origins of Fedecafé’s hegemonic labor regime in Viejo Caldas. It begins by showing how Colombian coffee producers adapted to a peripheral niche of the world coffee market during the era of British hegemony, with semi-marketized small farmers better able to cope with the volatility of prices in the coffee market than large-scale planters that used various proletarianized labor systems. It then shows how Fedecafé emerged as a parastatal development organization charged with consolidating a profitable export sector based upon smallholding farmers. In doing so, it shows how Fedecafé instituted a regulatory social compact (Pacto Cafetero) that protected farmers from the volatility of the market and thus facilitated their conversion into fully proletarianized (market-dependent) farmers. It ends with a discussion of whether the Pacto Cafetero was effective in generating a hegemonic labor regime in Viejo Caldas into the postwar decades.

This chapter discusses how culture affects economic development. Based on historical, political, and economic reasons, China today has a strongly pro-economic growth culture. Historically, the Confucian culture of frugality, hard-working, and respecting the family is conducive to economic productivity. Politically, the authoritarian political system has shaped a population that is relatively more obedient and deferent to authority – traits that contribute to efficiency for low-skilled work such as manufactu¬ring. Economically, decades of poverty under Mao’s rule made people extremely motivated to work hard to make money. All these factors fueled China’s high economic growth. The chapter also draws attention to the fact that Mao had left an indelible imprint on today’s business leaders in China, a unique and important phenomenon that the international business community should be aware of. It also shows that a “Mao plus Deng” effect – Mao’s lawlessness and Deng’s call to get rich – is the root cause of property rights violations and especially the persistent problems of product safety and counterfeit goods in China.

This chapter introduces the question of why capitalist development in Colombia has resulted in contradictory outcomes, including endemic political violence and labor repression that exist alongside regular elections, stable economic growth, and deeply entrenched political conservativism across large segments of the country’s working class. To understand these contradictions, it reconceptualizes them as labor regime dynamics that vary significantly across three global commodity-producing regions (coffee, bananas, coca) and across developmental periods of time (pre-developmentalist, developmentalist, neoliberal). It then lays out the conceptual framework and methodological approach of the book, which draws from and extends insights from labor regimes, global commodity chains, world hegemonies, and comparative and world historical sociology. Finally, it provides an overview of the structure of the book and its main findings.

This concluding chapter revisits the main questions driving the book, including how to explain Colombia’s contradictory development trajectory and the stark variation that has arisen across its coffee, banana, and coca labor regimes. It begins by reiterating the need for a labor regimes framework that is attuned to the crisis tendencies of labor regimes that exist at the margins of the global market. It then addresses the question of why we saw such stark variation across rural Colombia during the postwar developmental decades, showing how the establishment of hegemony in Viejo Caldas and despotism in Urabá and the Caguán resulted from a complex interaction of factors operating at the local, national, world-systemic, and interregional scales of analysis. Next, it addresses the temporal question of why these distinct regimes converged toward crises of labor control in the 1980s and 1990s, showing how this process also resulted from a contingent and complex range of factors operating across various scales of analysis. Finally, it summarizes the current conjuncture of crises in Colombia, emphasizing how prior efforts to resolve these crises through economic upgrading has been closed off due to the demise of US world hegemony, leaving de-proletarianization as a more viable solution.

This chapter first explains how the Chinese Communist Party is organized and controls the political system. Unlike the political parties in mature democracies, the Chinese Communist Party is a Leninist party that resembles a secret society, characterized by monopolistic communist ideology, strict hierarchy, exclusive membership, and two unique party organs: the Propaganda Department, and the United Front Work Department. In such a political system, the party eclipses the entire society, including the government, creating a unique party-state that imposes absolute rule over China. The chapter further shows that, leveraging its total control, the party-state creates a low human rights environment in China that enables the party-state to achieve its objectives with few costs and little resistance. In the past four decades, China’s economy grew rapidly, creating a large middle class. However, due to its total dependence on the party, the newly emerged middle class is in no position to push for democracy and the rule of law.

The long and intensifying global expansion of the CCP has made the democratic countries increasingly uncomfortable and concerned. Virtually all the democracies realize that this current relationship with China cannot be sustained. Furthermore, they feel that their open societies are especially vulnerable to the CCP’s expansion, which is exacerbated by a lack of reciprocity: while the CCP/China can freely promote its views and enjoy full legal protection in their countries, they are restricted in China. Their citizens can be imprisoned and their firms can be shut down in China without due process. A China going global under dictatorship is more dangerous to the democracies than a closed one. If a dictatorship is closed, it will degenerate into infighting. For political, economic, and social reasons, China depends on its interactions with the democracies more than vice versa. The success of China, Inc. relies on the democracies to allow it to selectively use international rules in its favor and disregard them if needed. This is beginning to change.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the Colombian state’s efforts to transform the Caguán frontier region of Caquetá into a site of land colonization, settlement, and agrarian development in the 1960s. It demonstrates that these state-directed agrarian development initiatives lacked the political and economic support of Colombian elites, which resulted in the transformation of the region into a site of large-scale cattle ranching under the despotic rule of Colombia’s cattle rancher association, Fedegán. It then shows how the movement of the FARC guerrillas into the region, followed by their involvement in taxing and regulating the region’s emerging coca economy, helped generated a counter-hegemonic coca-producing labor regime that was effective in protecting local migrants from the displacement and marginalization they had experienced under the auspices of Fedegán. It ends with a discussion of the similarities and differences between the FARC’s counter-hegemonic regulatory interventions in the coca regime with Fedecafé’s hegemonic interventions in the coffee regime.

This chapter analyzes how Urabá’s despotic labor regime shifted to a deep crisis of labor control in the 1980s and then returned to despotism in the 1990s. It argues that that shift to crisis was not due to any significant changes to the international banana market, as was the case for Colombia’s coffee regime of Viejo Caldas. Instead, it was caused by the democratization of Colombia’s political system, which opened up new spaces for labor mobilization and worker’s political participation. In Urabá, however, this democratization process undermined Augura authoritative power over the region’s banana plantations and local political offices and therefore threatened to undermine their capacity to adapt to their peripheral niche in the international banana market. By the 1990s, Augura was able to regain control of the banana labor regime facilitating the paramilitarization of the region. I conclude with a discussion of how the rise of paramilitarism in Urabá was not the result of Colombia’s adoption of neoliberal reforms, but was instead a regional solution to peripheralization in the context of political democratization.

After four decades of learning by trial and error, the CCP has achieved total control over every aspect of society, including all resources, firms, and the population. This, along with its objective of “treating the entire nation as a chessboard” has propelled the CCP to run the country as a giant corporation. Living, working, and doing business in China is not a right, but a privilege granted by the party. To a great degree, state-owned firms are business units, state-related firms are subsidiaries, private firms are joint ventures, and foreign firms are franchisees of the party-state, with the party leader being the CEO of China, Inc. China, Inc. enjoys the agility of a business firm and the vast resources and capabilities of a state. The interplay between China and other countries is essentially a rivalry between a huge corporation and other countries. And the competition between a Chinese firm and a foreign firm can become a match between the Chinese state and the latter. This new perspective will help the international community reexamine global competition. It will also aid researchers to further explore this new phenomenon.

In 1976, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong died, providing an opportunity for China to change his revolutionary course that led the country to ruin. In the late 1970s, the CCP changed course and began to open China to investment and trade. The democratic countries welcomed the change and engaged with China, hoping that economic development would lead to democratization. Forty years later, the Chinese economy has become the largest in the world, but democracy and the rule of law are still missing. This chapter provides an overview of the book. The author argues that, wielding its absolute and total control, the CCP has made the entire country into a giant corporation. China, Inc. has the agility of a corporation and the resources of a country, making it extremely competitive globally. However, China, Inc. also has its built-in contradiction: its need to close China from the democracies’ influence, and its reliance on the world’s openness to thrive. Based on the China, Inc. perspective, the author makes policy and strategic suggestions for the democracies and multinational corporations dealing with China.

This chapter begins by analyzing how the adoption of neoliberal agrarian policies in the 1990s intensified land struggles in the region by generating new waves of displaced migrants who became incorporated into the coca economy of the FARC while also transforming the cattle industry from a domestic meat and hide supplier into an exporter of dairy products for the world market.It shows how FARC control of the region remained strong until the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the region became a geographic focal point of the state’s new neoliberal development strategies. I then demonstrate how and why previous efforts to dislodge the guerrilla threat through US-backed Cold War containment strategies failed, but that the balance of power shifted to the Colombian military in the late 1990s and early 2000s, following a massive influx of US military aid that was appropriated under the aegis of the US War on Drugs and War on Terror.I conclude this chapter with a discussion of the future economic prospects of the region’s cocalero farmers and workers in the absence of FARC protection or a developmental alternative to capitalist accumulation through dispossession.

Unlike the industrial policies of other countries, which are mostly guidelines, China’s industrial policy is more like a corporate strategy that approves/disapproves projects and mobilizes the country’s resources to help its firms achieve dominance. Due to its size, the effects of China’s industrial policy have a powerful global impact. The general pattern of its industrial policy is that the state identifies certain industries and determines them to be high priorities. Once an industry is designated as strategically important, the state will mobilize all necessary resources from across the country to develop this industry. The state will pick some domestic firms as national champions, and erects barriers to foreign firms entering the industry. With a large, protected domestic market, the designated firms will be able to quickly realize the necessary scale and to lower unit production costs. Once the designated domestic firm becomes efficient, the state will support it as it goes out and dominates the world market. The cases of electronic vehicle batteries, solar panels, and high-speed rail are used to show how China’s industrial policy helps its firms to gain global dominance.