In 2020 over 22,000 new semiconductor companies were registered in China. A new gold rush had started as entrepreneurs and businesses – from the private and state sectors alike – charged in to make money and reduce China's dependence on imported semiconductors. “Here's a new way to tell whether a Chinese company is a major player: ask the CEO if the firm is designing its own microchips,” wrote Zeyi Yang, a journalist for Protocol. The money poured in – from both state and private capital. For some, such as home appliance companies Gree, Midea, TCL and Haier, chips played an important role in product manufacturing. Huawei had made an early start. In 2004 it had established a separate company, HiSilicon, to focus on chip-making. For others, there was no clear link. They lacked the business need and had little experience but were committed to “making it big” and keen to access government or private funding on offer. And, alongside the 20,000 new companies, stood SMIC, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. Founded in 2000 as a wholly foreign-owned company, by 2020 SMIC's main shareholders were state-owned yet it was also publicly listed. SMIC had not lived up to hopes that it would challenge Taiwan's TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) as a global semiconductor leader. Would this mix of state and private capital, policy priority, entrepreneurialism and intense competition lead to success this time?

Semiconductors are but one sector of the Chinese economy, albeit one at the centre of China's ambitions and the push and pull of US– China relations. Away from the abstractions of economic theory, the realities of China's economic growth recipe are messy and seemingly contradictory, yet historically effective in aggregate: state ownership and private; giant corporations and small businesses; competition, coordination and coercion.

It was ever thus. In 2007 the then premier, Wen Jiabao, described China's economy as unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable. His concerns were overinvestment, reckless lending, excessive liquidity, unbalanced foreign trade, inequality between cities and the countryside, inefficient energy use, wasteful allocation of resources and environmental ruin.

The advantages of power-sharing arrangements as a tool of peacemaking are gradually being substantiated in practice and research, but have not yet gained normative legitimacy, nor have they been properly incorporated into either the human rights framework or international and regional law. When power-sharing arrangements utilize predefined ethno-national groups as a central feature of the constitutional structure, they are widely seen as illiberal (and unjust) and as violating individual rights to equality and nondiscrimination. This conflict between power-sharing and human rights is generally viewed as a dilemma between peace and justice, and the main justification given to support the maintenance of the arrangements is that they are an indispensable political compromise to overcome violent conflict and are preferable to the continuation of bloodshed. However, this justification is not always enough, as the European Court of Human Rights ruling in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitution illustrates. But is this “peace versus justice” framing of the tensions between power-sharing and human rights accurate? Does it properly account for the meaning and requirements of justice in loci of deeply divided places?

The theoretical framework of collective equality changes how tensions between power-sharing arrangements and human rights are viewed: Instead of a dilemma of peace versus justice, it is framed as between two conceptions of justice as we evaluate power-sharing and other collective measures as a way for promoting justice (in addition to peace). This chapter brings the collective equality framework into the legal debate and explores its key implications for human rights law. It also offers an alternative way to mitigate the tensions between existing international law (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 1) and contemporary peacemaking practice, which is more apt to the contemporary task of international law: regulating disputes and conflicting demands made by ethno-national groups. This proposed framework aims to contribute to an already happening shift, from a state-centered interpretation of the right to self-determination to a more nuanced and substantive understanding of that right as an international legal right of peoples to secure their freedom and equality.

Pan-African thinkers in the pre-1945 period developed innovative ideas that challenged the racialized hierarchies of the world economy. Some of these thinkers are discussed in previous chapters, such as George Padmore and C.L.R. James (both discussed in chapter 7) as well as Amy Ashwood Garvey (chapter 10). This chapter discusses three other prominent Pan-African thinkers who sought to cultivate the transnational economic solidarity of Africans and the African diaspora in order to challenge this group’s subordinate position in the world economy. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey was the best-known popularizer of this kind of “economic Pan-Africanism” via his Universal Negro Improvement Association and its Black Star Line. The other two discussed in the chapter are W.E.B. Du Bois (from the United States) and Hubert Harrison (who migrated from the Danish West Indies to the United States). The latter two disagreed with Garvey and each other about a number of issues, ranging from their views of capitalism to the role of the African diaspora in Pan-African politics.

Neomercantilists rejected the liberal advocacy of free trade, urging instead strategic trade protectionism and other forms of government economic activism in order to promote state wealth and power. Their goals were similar to those of pre-Smithian mercantilist thinkers, but they defended their priorities in new ways by engaging critically with the ideas of classical economic liberals. This chapter describes the important role of Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List in helping to pioneer neomercantilist thought as well as other less well-known thinkers from Europe and the United States who developed distinctive and influential versions of this perspective. Many of them were inspired by List but adapted his ideas in some interesting ways, including William Ashley, Mihail Manoilescu, Gustav Schmoller, and Sergei Witte. Another key figure, Henry Carey, was more inspired by Hamilton than List, but developed an important version of neomercantilist thought that was very distinctive from both of theirs. These thinkers highlight how neomercantilism in Europe and United States had more diverse content than the common textbook depiction suggests.

Scholars of international political economy (IPE) often locate the origins of their field in the contested nature of the world economy of the early 1970s, but many of its early proponents drew important inspiration from political economists who had an international focus from the pre-1945 period. This chapter summarizes the book’s analysis of the field’s pre-1945 roots, an analysis that challenges conventional depictions of this history in two ways. First, the book embraces a more global conception of the field’s pre-1945 roots by highlighting many contributions made by thinkers from outside Europe and the United States. Second, it shows that discussions of the international dimensions of political economy before 1945 involved much more than a debate between the three perspectives of economic liberalism, neomercantilism, and Marxism. This introductory chapter also highlights some limitations of the analysis as well as some of the motivations behind the project.

Feminism is often portrayed as a relatively new perspective in debates about the international dimensions of political economy, but it has predecessors in ideas advanced by some prominent thinkers in the pre-1945 era. These thinkers shared– with varying levels of commitment – a broad normative goal which has echoes in contemporary feminist IPE literature: that of challenging patriarchal practices and structures in order to end women’s subordination within the world economy. There were many divisions among these thinkers, including between those who sought to promote feminist goals within an economic liberal framework (including Jane Addams, Bertha Lutz, Chrystal Macmillan, Harriet Martineau) and those more drawn to socialism and Marxism (Williama Burroughs, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Aleksandra Kollontai, Paulina Luisi, Magda Portal, Clara Zetkin). Some other thinkers also linked feminist goals to other perspectives such as neomercantilism (once again, Henry Carey), Pan-Africanism (Amy Ashwood Garvey), and anarchism (He-Yin Zhen).

This chapter examines some Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian thinkers who argued that religious values and civilizational discourse needed to be front and center in discussions of political economy. The Pan-Islamic thinkers called for new kinds of economic solidarity among a transnational Islamic community that could promote its interests and values within the world economy. Their proposals included Iranian-born Jamal al-Din al-Afghani’s calls for the collective economic modernization of the Islamic world, the endorsement of specific joint economic projects such as the Hejaz railway by Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, and India’s Sayyid Abul A’la Mawdudi’s focus on the need for all Muslims to embrace a new kind of Islamic Economics. By contrast, the Pan-Asian thinker Sun Yat-sen focused on the interests and values of a transnational community that he conceptualized in civilizational terms. Sun argued that Asian countries’ interests and values could be promoted by development-oriented economic cooperation amongst themselves, their collective pursuit of neomercantilist goals, and an alternative tributary model of international economic governance centered on the principle of the “rule of Right.”

Two years after the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, President Xi Jinping started 2022 in expansive mood, speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum by video link from Beijing:

Xi's vaulting ambition shone through. His choice of words was considered and deliberate. Many listeners would not though have grasped their full meaning. This would have required a grounding in the phraseology used by the Communist Party of China (CPC). And, as always, reality has a way of bringing aspirations down to earth.

Despite Xi's appeal to remove barriers, Covid-19 had indeed brought barriers and walls. As he spoke, international travel in and out of China remained at minimal levels and subject to lengthy quarantine, even as travel was recovering quickly in the rest of the world. And, only three months after Xi's Davos speech, he was to order walls and barriers to be built within China too, as stringent lockdowns took effect in Shanghai and other cities in attempts to stave off the omicron variant. Since the arrival of Covid-19, China and the West had been separated, moving to different rhythms dictated by the spread of the virus. Physical separation fuelled increasingly separate information streams, perceptions and attitudes.

Although Xi spoke of opening up and integration, his true ambition was more nuanced – contradictory, even. Xi seeks a China separate from the world and yet connected with it. His Davos speech mentioned the integration. It did not mention the separation. China seeks self-reliance, so that it does not depend on others, while also gaining the benefits of links to the world and, ideally, having others become dependent on China.

On 14 May 2020, following a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Dual Circulation was announced to the world as a “new development programme of mutual benefit through domestic– international dual circulation”. In other words, it highlighted the delineation between the domestic and the international economy. A month earlier, at a meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission, Xi had spoken in private of a “new development dynamic that focuses on domestic economic flow and features positive interplay between domestic flow and inter-national engagement”.

In October 2020 Han Wenxiu, assistant head of the CPC Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission office, said that “the proposal for a new development programme that takes the domestic market as the mainstay while letting internal and external markets boost each other is the CPC's practical application of the objective laws of economic development. This is a proactive step, not a passive response; a long-term strategy, not an interim measure.”

Ask different analysts – both in China and overseas – what Dual Circulation Strategy really “is” or really “means”, and there will come a range of answers. It marks a closing of China to the world, as China seeks to decouple. Or it is really nothing new. It articulates a new form of globalization. Or it is a passing slogan of no import. Some may also observe that mentions of Dual Circulation in policy speeches peaked in 2020 and 2021, and argue that Party rhetoric has moved on to other phrases, such as Common Prosperity and High-Quality Development. Yet the key priorities of Dual Circulation remained clear in Xi's work report to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022. There is indeed much ambiguity about Dual Circulation – not just about the specifics, but also about the nature of the term. Is it best seen as a slogan (perhaps already past its sell-by date), a set of guiding principles or a series of policies and plans? “Dual Circulation” is by no means the only ambiguous phrase in the China policy lexicon. Such ambiguity is almost a defining feature of Chinese policy terms. It runs through discussions on Common Prosperity and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) too.