Marxism and the politics of positioning China in world history

This paper critically traces Marxist and certain other relevant traditions of knowledge about China's evolving position in the capitalist modern world, seeking to place current struggles over the country's future direction in the post-communist epochal parameters. Ultimately, given the Marxian perspective of world history in terms of capitalist genesis, expansion and revolutionary transformations (of pre-capitalism as well as capitalism itself), to position China in its historical and international contexts is to clarify its relationship with the global capitalist system. It is politics, rather than any economic logic or cultural destiny, which (de)legitimizes and explains that relationship and makes possible an alternative Chinese path of potential universality.