The afterword focuses on the surprising connections of a century of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history to larger global developments outside of China, considering the potential future development of the Party, either towards more democratisation and power sharing, increasing focus on domestic challenges, or a new Marxist-Leninist world order with Beijing at it’s ideological center. The fate of international socialism is contrasted with the purges of both Stalin and Mao, which are shown to have led directly to the Sino-Soviet conflict from the late 1950s on. The lasting significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union for the CCP provides context for the increasingly close relationship between Xi and Putin, who share a mutual concern over Muslim separatism and demographic shifts within their countries. Connections are drawn between the more positive impacts of the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Belt and Road initiative, and darker history of global Maoism in Peru and Cambodia, with the latter spurring modernization following a successful Vietnamese intervention. The CCP’s long-standing difficulty of separating Party from ethnicity, particularly in its Southeast Asian allies, is contrasted with inspiration drawn from Japan and Korea in the post-Mao era and the legacy of falling regulation in global trade over the subsequent three decades. The afterword concludes with an exploration of the gradual end of China’s “peaceful rise” during the Xi era, touching on the daunting problems of a declining workforce, environmental degradation, and continuing wide income gaps which face the country’s leaders today, while also praising its pragmatic macroeconomic policies, impressive technological development, and openness to trade relative to the increasingly divided, insular, and unstable US under Trump.

Chapter 1 focuses on the key role played by Dutch communist and founding member of the Soviet Comintern Henricus Sneevliet (alias Maring) in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai in 1921. Background is provided on the challenging political and economic circumstances of Republican-era China, and two concepts promoted by Sneevliet with lasting significance for the CCP: the need for a disciplined, Leninist party, and the necessity of allying with the broader Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) movement, known as the “United Front.” Chinese resistance to Sneevliet’s second concept, led by student activist Zhang Guotao, who advocated the immediate establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, was a factor in Sneevliet’s low opinion of the CCP as a viable political party. This contrasts with his favorable impression of Sun Yat-sen and the KMT in the south, which led to a debate in the Comintern over the viability of mass party strategy. Eventually, Chen Duxiu, the Party’s current leader, ordered CCP members to join the KMT, but Sneevliet was replaced by Russian Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin.

Chapter 10 focuses on the the rise and fall of Guo Meimei, an Internet sensation in the 2010s. Presenting herself as general manager of the Red Cross Commercial Society, her ostentatious display of wealth on the online platform Weibo attracted scorn from netizens and led to an official crackdown on the (unrelated) hapless quasi-governmental agency the Red Cross Society of China (RCSC) in 2011. Criticism of the RCSC reflected growing challenges to the legitimacy of the CCP in the burgeoning online protest culture of the 2010s, characterized by “human flesh searches” and “spectating,” with serious social issues presented in a humorous style to attract interest. This story reveals complex motivations for participating in online protest events, from genuine outrage to more mundane motivations. The case led to a lasting distrust of the RCSC within China, despite being officially declared innocent of wrongdoing, and Guo Meimei’s later arrest and imprisonment on charges of operating an illegal gambling den. A spate of unrelated online controversies likewise reveal the deep-seated crisis of trust in public institutions and their officials in the PRC today, in turn spurring the widespread adoption of online public-opinion survey reports, “civilized” website awards, and other forms of Party surveillance and self-regulation through semi-automated big-data mining combined with traditional “front building” and increasingly draconian legal measures, all of which are enabled by the more easily monitored and contained closed discussion groups of WeChat.

Chapter 8 focuses on Wang Yuanhua, a Party scholar and celebrated initiator of the intellectual liberation and New Enlightenment movements of the 1980s. In the 1990s Wang was active in Party ideological debates as intellectuals rebounded from the repression after Tiananmen. Wang’s assessment of intellectual life in the Party comes out in his discussion of historical figures:

Du Yachuan (a conservative during the May Fourth era) and the famous late Qing reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. Writing inside China and under Party rule, Wang holds these historical examples up as contrasting models for intellectual integrity under authoritarian regimes. Wang’s own path from Christian schoolboy to Marxist revolutionary to moderate liberal offers a characteristic example of the winding path of Chinese intellectuals over the course of the 20th century. Wang’s formative years were at Tsinghua University in Peking, where his Japanese-educated father taught English. Having joined the Party in the 1930s, Wang fell from grace during the anti-Hu Feng campaign in 1955, and his refusal to implicate the disgraced writer as counterrevolutionary put Wang in the political doghouse for two decades. Yet he returned to Party service after Mao’s death, but became an advocate for thought liberation in the 1980s and for Chinese liberalism in the 1990s.

As a result of increasing vertical specialization in East Asia, interstate relations have a greater potential to influence global supply chains in the region. Despite these growing linkages, the IPE literature has yet to develop a theory for understanding the pathways through which geopolitical disputes generate shifts in supply chains. This chapter proposes a theoretical framework for the effects of nonviolent geopolitical disputes on the topology of supply chains in East Asia. Using case studies of ongoing geopolitical disputes in East Asia, it illustrates how legal actions, security actions, and trade barriers lead to contractionary or diversionary shifts in the topology of supply chains. The case studies also show that only security actions with high degrees of uncertainty are sufficient to trigger shifts in the topology of supply chains. These conclusions are critical for states to understand the implications of even non-economic actions for international trade relations and the makeup of global supply chains. This chapter theoretically advances the literature on supply chains by considering the impact of interstate relations on their makeup and distribution.

This chapter examines the evolution of China’s outward-looking political-economy model that has defined the purpose of and receptivity to GSCs in recent decades. It first provides significant empirical evidence for the past contribution of Western-linked GSCs -- specially through forward participation -- to China’s economic growth, employment and earnings, expanding middle class, urbanization, and its development of technological capabilities. We then turn to limiting bottlenecks and emerging challenges, identifying three stylized responses among China’s leaders: “GSC preservers,” “GSC reformers,” and “GSC replacers.” The costs and risks of more extreme decoupling from Western GSCs may explain why radical inward-looking options may have been overpowered by their alternatives until recently. However, Covid-19 introduced starker dilemmas into an already charged geopolitical relationship. While the battle over the emerging GSC landscape will continue to be fought primarily within China, the Trump shocks have dealt a heavy political blow to “GSC preservers.” As the effects of Covid-19 are overlaid on geopolitical tensions, the odds that mutually beneficial outcomes -- including the survival of GSCs as we knew them -- can still reemerge out of the current conundrum, remain unclear.

The US-China trade war has a major impact on third countries. Using unique micro data from Japan, evidence is provided of the impact of the trade war on Japanese companies and their supply chains. First, it is found that tariffs and geopolitical risks in the USA and China are important factors affecting business plans of Japanese companies. Importantly, the share of Japanese companies reporting that tariffs and geopolitical risks affect the degree of uncertainty about their business plans increased significantly from 2017 to 2020. Second, Japanese affiliates in China with higher exposure to the North America-China trade saw a significant decline in sales and their parent firms had a drop in stock prices after the trade war. In addition, a recent firm survey shows that since the escalation of the Covid-19 pandemic, Japanese companies engaging in importing/exporting or having production bases in China tend to have higher subjective uncertainty over their future sales. These results suggest that the shocks of the trade war and the Covid-19 pandemic propagate across borders through global supply chains. Diversification of sourcing and sales may increase the resilience of supply chains.

Chapter 2 focuses on the critical role played by Chinese Comintern delegate Wang Ming in the birth of the second Communist–Nationalist “United Front” of 1937 following the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War. It begins with a summary of the first months of the war, with the capture of Peking and Shanghai, and soon the Nationalist capital of Nanjing. This is followed by a summary of the situation for socialism in Germany, Spain, and the Soviet Union, providing context for Soviet support of the Chinese in their war against Japan. Wang’s meeting with Mao Zedong in the Communist Party (CCP) wartime base of Yan’an is discussed, with an overview of his arguments for uniting with KMT forces under Chiang Kai-shek, before turning to a discussion of Wang’s meeting with the Nationalist leader in Wuhan. Zhou Enlai’s appointment to vice director of the Political Department is discussed as a way of pulling Communists into Chiang’s government without recognizing them as equals. In contrast, evidence of Wang’s relative success in developing a political platform around which all anti-Japanese groups could unite in Wuhan is presented. Finally, the eventual abandonment of Wuhan under the orders of Chiang is discussed, and the conflict between Mao and Wang is explored in light of later purges.

As all chapters were being readied for submission, Covid-19 erupted furiously in early 2020, compelling the effort to incorporate the pandemic’s initial effects on GSCs, the trade and technology war, and international relations within East Asia, in real time. Chapter 13 is, therefore, a postscript distilling findings from Parts I and II prior to Covid-19 while addressing the latter’s early effects on the chapters’ respective arguments. It then analyzes the strategies GSCs have embarked on in response to both geopolitical and pandemic shocks, building largely on preliminary 2020 survey data. Covid-19 accelerated the cumulative impact of geopolitical shocks and rising inward-oriented hyper-nationalist models, making GSCs more vulnerable than at any time since their initial expansion in the 1990s. Their ongoing restructuring and efforts to reduce overreliance on China suggest a potential decline in China’s status as factory of the world relative to the past, but hardly its demise. Migration out of China and reshoring remain more the anomaly than the norm for now. There is still uncertainty, however, as to whether geopolitics, technological competition, and the legacy of Covid-19 could unleash even more sizable disruptions in the global geography of production.

Why do some state leaders choose to escalate conflicts with close economic partners while others refrain? This chapter explores how a state’s perception of its relative position in a shared supply chain influences its response to conflict, by applying the psychological framework provided by prospect theory. When a state’s key industries are more dependent on the opponent within their shared supply chains, its leaders are more likely to escalate conflicts. This asymmetry in dependency makes policymakers see themselves as being in a strategically disadvantageous position, and the prospect of being replaced in the supply chains predisposes them towards more risk-seeking behavior. By contrast, when a state holds relative dominance within its shared supply chains, its leaders are less likely to risk conflict escalation. They perceive themselves as occupying a superior strategic position and will act in a relatively risk-averse manner to avoid further losses. This theoretical framework is employed to analyze two empirical cases: the ongoing trade conflict between South Korea and Japan and the conflict between South Korea and China over Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD).

There is an ongoing debate about supply chain linkages between African and foreign firms and the impact of GSCs' activities on African states. This chapter contributes to the discussion by studying the impact of the US and Chinese presence in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) region, via supply chains, on economic growth and development comparatively. It argues that the expanding supply chain trade, especially the rapidly growing trade with China, is diversifying intermediate goods and services exports from SACU states and expanding their industrial capabilities. Politically, SACU is at an inflection point; initial gains from GSC trade could spur further economic liberalization or could incentivize ruling coalitions to double down on inward-looking policies. The chapter also highlights some emerging trends in SACU supply chain trade with the two great powers, using intermediate goods and services trade data. It ends with a discussion of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on supply chains in the SACU region.