The following drivers and fundamentals of capitalism are vital to this study:
• Profit orientation and a boundless and excessive imperative to accumulate9—combined with legitimate greed and mythical utopian promises—which, unlike traditional, subsistence-oriented societies, help to unleash innovation dynamics and directional dependencies of institutional change
• The role of competition, logics of acceleration, and competitiveness in market and nonmarket social relationships, which threaten to permanently destabilize modern social orders because they prioritize competition over solidarity-oriented behavior
• Structural differences between the strategic capacity for action among the actors, which results from inequality in terms of access to resources or class positions
• The dependency on noneconomic institutions, including the modern state, which plays the predominant role (and also displays a structural interdependency with the economy)
• A fundamental tension between market expansion and social coherence, which in turn affects the social, political, and ideological conflicts in modern societies
• Finally, the drivers of capitalism including both characteristic expansion dynamics and an associated tendency among actors to subvert or bend the rules,10 as well as the potential to integrate and restructure noncapitalist or precapitalist structures
Against the backdrop of my assumption of a universal efficacy of drivers of capitalism as well as of their divergent outcomes, the aforementioned points will function as a “heuristic checklist” (Streeck 2010b, 10) to determine whether and to what extent these can be traced back to phenomena in recent Chinese history.11
In order to fend off any charges of reductionism, I would like to emphasize that this study is not an attempt to describe all modernization processes currently under way in China. At the same time, it does not support the argument that all noncapitalist forms of action or independent interpretations are eliminated in the processes of capitalist-driven modernization. A modern world predominated by capitalism does not indicate in any way that all noncapitalist autonomous social practices are lost. Rather, there is evidence of recombinations of institutions and ideas, making an examination of variances in modernization processes an absolute priority. However, historical cultural traditions and interpretations are reshaped through capitalist modernization processes. Notably, it is not only the musings of Marx or the hypotheses of his apostles, but also Weber who stresses the notion of capitalism as the “most fateful power in our modern life” (Weber 1991, 12, my translation).
The overlapping of noneconomic institutions or spheres with drivers of capitalism (e.g., housework, family, cultural phenomena, natural relations, social antagonisms and oppressive relationships, which are not directly the result of capitalism) can be expressed using the term capitalist-driven society. As overarching factors linking social, political, and economic processes with one another, the drivers of capitalism exercise a long-term effect on other dimensions of society, without being subject to them to the same extent when the tables are turned.12
In order to understand the overarching driving forces of capitalism and their specific national and/or regional manifestations, a multistep examination into the macro-, meso-, and microdynamics of the implementation and reproduction of such forces is required. The historical varieties of capitalism are viewed as multiple outcomes of a global overarching mode of association, which also demonstrates significant variation in the different historical phases of capitalism (such as the state-interventionism phase beginning in the 1930s or the liberalization phase from the 1970s onward). National economies do not simply converge to form a homogeneous economic unit. The global system comprises a network of different yet interlinked forms of capitalism characterized by continual adjustment and differentiation processes.
In order to avoid the dangers of economic functionalism, ahistorical equilibrium models, and political voluntarism, I have integrated the following assumptions and concepts into my analytical framework:
(1) I work under the assumption of the unstable dynamics of capitalist social orders, to which many theories of capitalism rightly attach great significance—Marx’s capital and circulation analysis, Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation, Schumpeter’s analysis of entrepreneurism, as well as Keynes’s or Polanyi’s theories, for example. The relevance of these theories is found in their insistence on the contradictions and conflicts of the capitalist development process and their structural susceptibility to social tensions and uncertainties.
Thus, the growing interdependencies between socioeconomic processes are just one aspect of the capitalist reproduction process. Even if the modern division of labor can be seen as the primary source of social solidarity and the basis of moral order (Durkheim 1988, 471), it will only develop its distinctive capitalist form as part of competition-driven accumulation, that is, the permanent competition between individual production units that creates an innovation dynamic rife with crises and conflicts. This is linked to the fact that capitalist modernity is an arena for social relationships where rationalization develops only in a particularist way (Adorno 1996, 231). This is precisely because the decisions taken by intentionally rational actors are often anchored in fiction or, in other words, based on unrealistic expectations (Beckert 2011). Thus, I argue for the transformation of China’s political economy to be linked with the unstable dynamics of capitalist development and the constant crisis-ridden and uncertain renewal of the system.
(2) To describe commonalities and differences between types of capitalism, I draw on the concept of an international variegated capitalist world system (see Jessop 2009; Streeck 2010a). Commonalities are based on the fact that the modern world market results from interaction between an incalculable number of different factors. The world market is thus a globally dynamic synergy of actions and exercises significant imperatives to act. The reproduction of the global economy as a whole embodies a process without a steering subject that results in innumerable unintended effects. Even when specific development paths form in a national context, they are subject to external adaptive pressure, which might be relativized through national or regional path-dependent tendencies toward inertia but which cannot be prevented altogether. The relatively simultaneous and universal nature of the great capitalist crises of the 1870s, 1930s, 1970s, and 2008–9, although occurring under different socioeconomic, political, and cultural conditions, points to this very correlation (R. Brenner 2006). This trend has grown stronger since the 1970s, as research into the transnationalization of value chains demonstrates (Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005). The almost universal appearance of liberalization tendencies since the 1970s is also evidence of this.
At the same time, the differences between individual forms of capitalism have to be taken into account. Contrary to the hypothesis of the neoclassical model (for a critical account, see Kaldor 1972), global competition does not act as a force for harmony between the units of capital, leveling differences between companies, regions, and, ultimately, nations. This convergence hypothesis is based on untenable premises—such as the assumption of perfect competition and market transparency, homogeneous goods, and constant production technology and demand structures. It ignores the spatiotemporal development of companies, and the varying degrees to which institutions are embedded, as well as the reality of disparities in the development of capital due to differences in productivity levels. The expansion of capitalism thus brings about severe spatiotemporal disparities not only between but also within OECD and newly industrialized or developing countries. Global accumulation processes are implemented unevenly because the various national societies provide different conditions for the establishment and reproduction of capitalist production relationships (Block 2005).
(3) In terms of methodology, a transnational perspective is well suited to a study of this nature. Modern-day societies should not be viewed as separate entities but must be seen as a federal, overlapping nexus (Mann 1990). Capitalist-driven societies can be