In 2017, the Chinese Communist Party began to pay close attention to the development of China’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry, likely motivated by rising tension between the USA and China. This chapter documents the suite of policies that followed and their impact on the evolution of the AI industry in China. First, the AI industry has become another policy tool for the ruling Chinese Communist Party, especially during national emergencies. Second, the AI push likely will further encourage vertical integration of the AI value chain, especially for lead firms. Third, rather than foster market or modular transactions along the AI value chain, Chinese government subsidies and preference for national champions will foster relational and even captive ties between actors along the AI value chain. Ironically, these policies may encourage fragmentation of data architecture in China instead of consolidation.

Chapter 1 introduces the broader framework for the volume and its place in the broader literature on the relationship between economic interdependence and international cooperation and conflict. It draws attention to the deeper political origins of GSCs in the grand strategies of outward-oriented political survival models and identifies some of the pivotal questions regarding the broader role of GSCs in the international relations of East Asia. A focus on GSCs is especially pertinent to our world time as East Asia faces the most complex bundle of geopolitical and geo-economic threats in decades. This provides a natural experiment of sorts for gauging the extent to which GSCs may provide a more resilient foundation for interstate cooperation than older forms of interdependence have at various historical junctures or, alternatively, whether they amount to equally vulnerable targets of nationalistic and autarkic ambitions, inward-looking turns in the US and China, the trade and technology war, and other geopolitical shocks from within the region. Finally, the chapter introduces the rest of the volume, with different chapters addressing various dimensions of the relationship between GSCs and changing features of East Asian and Asia-Pacific international relations.

This chapter explores the rhetorical framing of GSCs in US politics in the context of rising inequality and shifting geopolitics. A growing body of international political economy has focused on the distributional consequences of globalization for demographic groups in the global North and South, and this chapter looks at how political actors’ interpretations of GSCs have framed contemporary debates over trade. The chapter analyzes the debate over trade centered on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement during the 2016 US presidential primary and general election campaigns. When expressing their support for or opposition to the TPP, candidates largely relied on conventional protectionist and liberal framings of trade. With a handful of exceptions, the specificities of GSCs were absent from the political debate surrounding the TPP on the presidential campaign trail, despite the dominance of GSCs in the trade relationships covered by the treaty. Nonetheless, the effect of supply chains on international trade was implicitly reflected in candidates’ identification of the uneven distributional consequences of contemporary trade policies.

The development of global value chains (GVCs) in recent decades has transformed China into a global hub of manufacturing and assembly. Most of China’s exports to the USA are in the context of value chain trade. The deep participation of Chinese firms in GVCs has greatly promoted the rapid growth of Chinese exports to the USA, as well as China's trade surplus with the USA (which triggered the ongoing US-China trade war). Toward an understanding of the complexity of the bilateral trade imbalance, this chapter adopts the GVC perspective in its analysis of the success of China’s exports to the USA and of the persistent huge US trade deficit with China. It shows that conventional trade statistics seriously distort the bilateral trade imbalance by on the one hand exaggerating China’s surplus and on the other hand underestimating actual exports of the USA. In addition, the chapter discusses the impact of the trade war on China-centered GVCs and argues that it is impossible to hedge the risk of the punitive tariffs with the depreciation of the yuan. Shifting part of value chains out of China would be inevitable and the coronavirus pandemic would further strengthen the trend.

Chapter 3 focuses on the 1942 rectification campaign against Wang Shiwei and other Yan’an intellectuals who had emerged from the Shanghai literary world of the 1930s. Mao sought to eradicate the “three evil workstyles” of subjectivism (favouring Wang Ming’s Russian Marxism over Mao Zedong’s local expertise), sectarianism (not doing what the leadership tells you to do), and stereotyped, overly dogmatic, Party writing. Historical, political, and geographic context for the campaign is provided, with particular attention payed to the position of Mao vis-à-vis the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Wang Shiwei was a Communist theorist who took exception to Mao’s version of rectification and offered an alternative Marxist model that shows the influence of Leon Trotsky. Rhetorical goals and strategies in Mao’s speeches are shown to highlight the importance of intellectual self-transformation, the better to create willing and effective mouthpieces for the CCP, which are contrasted with the agenda of revolutionary artists, such as Ding Ling and Xiao Jun, providing context for Wang’s essay collection Wild Lilies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the campaign against Wang and his “Trotskyite” supporters in the Rescue Campaign which ensued, implicating thousands of politically suspect cadres, and leading to Wang’s arrest and accidental execution in 1947.

Chapter 6 focuses on the afterlives of Maoist propaganda outside China following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, which soon led the end of Cultural Revolution policies. The relatively peaceful post-Mao transition in China contrasts with Maoism outside China. The outbreak of the millenarian “Shining Path” revolution in Peru, led by former philosophy professor Abimael Reinoso Guzmán, better known as Chairman Gonzalo, claimed an estimated 69,000 lives and uprooted those of 600,000 more. In the context of global Maoist ideas of continuous revolution and political militancy, Guzmán’s path to becoming a left-wing revolutionary makes sense, especially his time spent in China and his horror at poverty, systemic racism, and government corruption witnessed in urban Peru. The Sino-Soviet split provided a lasting impetus for Guzmán’s embrace of Maoist revolutionary violence, along with the supply of weapons and training for Latin American leftists. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the development of the Shining Path under the tutelage of Guzmán from an intellectual movement of urban professors and rural students to Maoist military insurrection, indiscriminate state brutality and scorched-earth policies, before turning to the movement’s more moderate legacy in Nepal, where it continues to the present day.

The introduction provides a summary of three possible ways to tell the story of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): as the Chinese mirror or foil, as it appears in international media; as the Chinese Dream, as recounted by Xi Jinping and the Party’s propagandists; and as a Chinese mosaic, or scenes from the lives of particular individuals at particular moments. The editors identify this final approach as theirs. They discuss the controversial role played by the CCP in 20th- and 21st-century China and argue that grand narratives which portray the Party in a wholly positive or negative light obscure individual perspectives on life as it was actually lived under Chinese socialism. Finally, they stress the importance of gaining a more accurate understanding of the CCP in light of recent political and economic developments in the PRC and abroad.

Chapter 4 focuses on the career of the actress Shangguan Yunzhu, from bourgeois film star in late 1940s Shanghai to re-educated “art and literary worker” in post-revolutionary New China. Shangguan’s early career and education enjoyed limited success but built on her fortuitous affiliation with the left-wing Kunlun Film Company. Shangguan’s post-revolutionary private and professional life had ups and downs, including allegations against her husband, Cheng Shuyao, during the Three Antis campaign (anti-corruption, anti-waste, anti-bureaucracy) in 1951. Her return to the limelight as a re-educated “old star” came in the context of PRC cinema of the mid-1950s. The controversy surrounding a much-publicized 1956 dinner she had with Mao Zedong shaped Shangguan’s own political fortunes compared to those of her colleagues during the Anti-Rightist movement of 1957. Finally, Shangguan was denounced over a series of humiliating struggle sessions at the start of the Cultural Revolution, which coincided with a diagnosis of terminal breast cancer, together leading the actress to commit suicide in 1968. Shangguan’s legacy, with her close relationship with Mao and Jiang Qing, reveal the persistence of metropolitan modernity in spite of the Party’s mainstream revolutionary socialist discourse.

The Trump administration’s multi-front trade war dramatically escalated with the imposition of extraordinary tariffs on Chinese imports in 2018. Corporate America has responded with a concerted campaign of resistance. We document these efforts – through extensive participation in notice and comment and public coalition-building – and show that corporate opposition to the trade war is primarily a consequence of firms' sourcing and production linkages with China. In contrast, we find far weaker efforts by anti-trade firms to support the trade war, whether to insulate themselves from import competition or to confront Chinese trade practices. We therefore describe and empirically illustrate the politics of global production networks, and highlight that scholars of trade politics should not neglect opposition to the Trump trade agenda arising from globally integrated firms. Global order in the area of trade hangs in the balance in an ongoing fight between corporate globalism and populist nationalism.

Chapter 7 focuses on the economic and political reforms of General Secretary Zhao Ziyang (1919–2005) and his predecessor Hu Yaobang (1915–1989). The reforms are placed within the context of both the controversial “reform and opening” policies of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), and also the larger context of intra-Party ideological debates dating back to founding of the nation. Zhao’s early career as Party secretary in his native county before 1949 is contrasted with his later posting to Guangdong as part of an initiative to break local resistance to land reform in the 1950s. The disastrous Great Leap Forward is presented as a formative experience for Zhao, leading him to side with Mao’s critics, a decision which would in turn lead to his fall from power in 1967. His eventual rehabilitation by Zhou Enlai in 1971 is described as having led Zhao to support political and economic reform beginning with the Li Yizhe controversary of 1974 and culminating in his work in the late 1970s as Party secretary in Sichuan, where he was responsible for implementing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the agricultural sector. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Zhao’s rapid promotion to premier by 1980, and his pragmatic approach to political reform and liberalization, which would lead to his eventual downfall for a second time on the eve of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, and contested legacy in the PRC today.