Xie Fusheng: Three Paradigms in Contemporary Imperialism Research

In June 2018, General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized at the Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs: "At present, China is in its best period of development since modern times, and the world is undergoing great changes unseen in a century ^[1]; the two are interwoven and oscillating synchronously." To explicate these "great changes unseen in a century" and answer the "question of the times" posed by the General Secretary—"What is wrong with the world, and what should we do?"—the key lies in analyzing the shifts in the global political and economic landscape and its inherent contradictions. Imperialism theory primarily analyzes the political and economic relations between capital and the state, as well as between states themselves; it is an essential theoretical component of Marxism for analyzing the development, evolution, and internal contradictions of the global political and economic landscape, and thus constitutes an analytical paradigm for answering the General Secretary’s "question of the times." Since its founding by Lenin in the early 20th century, imperialism theory has undergone a century of development. From the classical imperialism theory around the period of the First World War, to the theories of monopoly capital, dependency theory, and world-systems theory after the Second World War, and further to various theories of "new imperialism" in the 21st century, all reflect the epochal characteristics of Marxist scholars’ analyses of the global political and economic landscape and its inherent contradictions.

Following the end of the Cold War, the global political and economic landscape underwent deep adjustments: economic globalization accelerated, neoliberalism spread widely, and the United States entered an unprecedented period of expansion, becoming the "only truly global power." Against this backdrop, right-wing politicians and scholars in Europe and America called for the United States to assume leadership responsibility on a global scale and to lead the construction of a prosperous and stable "New Empire." Most left-wing scholars do not identify with the "New Empire" advocated by those on the right; rooted in Marxism, they have analyzed the world economic order under the aegis of the United States from various perspectives under the name of "imperialism." Since 2000, foreign Marxist journals such as Monthly Review and Historical Materialism have frequently opened special columns on imperialism research, engaging in debates and discussions surrounding contemporary imperialism, which has deepened the analysis of the development, evolution, and internal contradictions of the contemporary global political and economic order. Domestic Marxist scholars have primarily focused their analysis on the contemporary application of classical imperialism theory. Scholars represented by Cheng Enfu, Wang Jincun, Li Cong, Jin Huiming, and Luo Wendong have dissected contemporary imperialism mainly from the perspectives of international monopoly capital, US hegemony, neocolonialism, and supra-national monopoly capitalism. These studies have undoubtedly deepened our understanding of the contemporary capitalist world political and economic order and its inherent contradictions.

Currently, the fruits of research on foreign imperialism theory are quite rich. Some reviews analyze imperialism theories from different historical stages vertically according to a chronological timeline; other reviews integrate the representative views of different scholars horizontally according to thematic lines. Judging from the existing analyses and debates on imperialism by foreign Marxist scholars, two basic questions are primarily involved: first, compared with classical imperialism, has contemporary imperialism undergone a qualitative change; and second, does contemporary imperialism possess internal stability? If contemporary imperialism has already undergone a qualitative change—that is, if monopoly capitalism has ended—then we must, as Lenin did 100 years ago, reposition the developmental stage of capitalism. At the same time, only by clarifying whether the contemporary imperialist order is stable and what its inherent contradictions are can we grasp the direction of the evolution of the global political and economic order and answer the "question of the times" raised by General Secretary Xi Jinping. Based on these two basic questions, we categorize the current imperialism theories of foreign Marxist scholars into three major analytical paradigms: Super-imperialism, Hegemonic Imperialism, and Late Imperialism. On the basis of surveying the discourses of representative scholars within these three paradigms, we will conduct a critical review, comparing, absorbing, and drawing lessons from these studies to analyze contemporary imperialism and answer the "question of the times" raised by General Secretary Xi Jinping.

I. Qualitative Change and Stability: Super-imperialism

Although "super-imperialism" (超级帝国主义) shares a similar name with Karl Kautsky's "ultra-imperialism" (超帝国主义), it is by no means a simple throwback to the latter in the era of globalization. Some scholars believe that the process of globalization has dissolved the imperialist hierarchy, and that imperialism manifests as an intangible, abstracted, and integrated form. For example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that "Empire" is a global order that is borderless, stateless, and decentralized. Others, such as William I. Robinson and Leslie Sklair, believe that capital in the era of globalization has completely swallowed the nation-state, and that freely flowing transnational capital has constructed a brand-new international order, forming a "transnational capitalist class" and a "transnational state," manifesting as a kind of "super-economic empire." We summarize those imperialism theories that advocate that imperialism has undergone a qualitative change and possesses internal stability as the "Super-imperialism" analytical paradigm.

1. Empire

Hardt and Negri argue that in the era of globalization, imperialism has undergone a qualitative change into a centerless, borderless, and stabilized "Empire." "Along with the global market and the formation of global circuits of production... a new form of sovereignty is emerging." Compared to imperialism, Empire does not establish a center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries and limits. It is a centerless and borderless apparatus of rule. Empire is composed of a series of national and supranational organisms, a new global form of rule united under a single logic of rule. Within its open, expanding frontiers, this apparatus of rule continually strengthens its integration of the entire global realm. The distinct nation-state colors of the imperialist world map have been merged and blended into the global rainbow of Empire.

The global expansion of capital requires breaking nation-state boundaries and capitalist monopolies; this process promoted the formation of the imperial order. Capital is inherently expansive and must break through its own barriers to accumulation to create a unified world market. The development of capitalism allowed the nation-state to replace the monarchical state and the "order of citizens" to replace the "order of subjects," giving rise to nation-state sovereignty. Because different nation-states occupy different territories, imperialist sovereignty was restricted within specific territorial spaces. The process of economic globalization has crushed the limited sovereignty within the specific spaces of nation-states, replacing it with a borderless imperial sovereignty. "The fundamental characteristic of imperial sovereignty is that its space is always open." Furthermore, after capitalism entered the stage of imperialism characterized by monopoly, the monopoly brought about by capital competition formed an obstacle to capital expansion. "Competition, which is essential for the operation and expansion of capital, necessarily declines in proportion to the development of monopoly during the imperialist stage. With the emergence of commercial franchises and protective tariffs, and the appearance of imperialist states and colonial regions, imperialism continues to demonstrate and strengthen its limited boundaries, obstructing or channeling economic, social, and cultural exchange." Monopoly limits capital expansion, and imperialism creates barriers to capital flow, hindering the realization of the world market. Capital will strive to eliminate monopoly and use Empire to replace imperialism, re-establishing a smooth and vast space for capital expansion. The power of Empire operates through a three-tiered pyramidal structure, with different operations within each tier: the top of the first tier is the United States, which holds global hegemony; the middle consists of nation-states primarily led by the G7; and the bottom consists of various international organizations. The second tier mainly comprises transnational corporations and other nation-states; the third tier mainly includes the "multitude" and non-governmental organizations, etc. The process by which imperialist sovereignty evolves into imperial sovereignty is achieved through the global extension of the US Constitution. "In effect, what we are entering is a process of the formation of Empire through the expansion of a domestic constitution."

Immaterial labor is the economic base of Empire. Capital pursues stable and continuous accumulation, which stimulates a transformation in the mode of production—namely, the shift from material labor to immaterial labor. Immaterial production, or post-modern production, is a mode of production dominated by service industry production and informatized production. There are three main forms of immaterial labor: large-scale industrial labor that has been informatized and has absorbed communication technology; labor involving analytical creativity and symbolic tasks; and affective labor related to social interaction. Immaterial production is a decentralized, deterritorialized, and networked mode of production that gave birth to transnational corporations that transcend the traditional boundaries of the nation-state, and also gave birth to Empire. Immaterial labor is not governed by external coercive forces like previous forms of labor, but is internal to the labor activity itself. The creation of surplus value is also mainly through networks of language, communication, and affect, adopting a cooperative and interactive mode. The traditional industrial worker disappears with the rise of immaterial labor, replaced by a new subject of resistance against Empire—the "multitude."

2. Super-Economic Empire

Robinson believes that in the era of globalization, imperialism has evolved into a "super-economic empire" built upon transnational production and composed of a transnational capitalist class and a transnational state. Robinson first applies Marx’s theory of the circuits of capital to analyze capitalist transnational production. The expansion of transnational corporations in the era of globalization has made capitalist production fragmented and decentralized on a world scale. In the pre-globalization era, the first part of the circuit of capital, M—C...P...C', occurred within individual countries. After commodities were sold on the international market, profits returned to the domestic sphere to begin a new round of the circuit. In the era of globalization, "P" is highly decentralized on a global scale, and thus the M—C...P part is also highly decentralized. In the era of globalization, not only is production global, but the markets for goods and services are also global.

The globalization of production providing the basis for the transnationalization of classes and the rise of a transnational capitalist class. Robinson analyzes the formation of the transnational capitalist class from the perspective of the dialectical movement between the economic base and the superstructure. "As the entire circuit becomes transnationalized, so too do classes, political processes, states, and cultural-ideological processes... In the new era, the locus of class and group relations is not the nation-state, but the global system." The transnational capitalist class (TCC) consists of the owners of transnational capital who possess the world’s primary means of production. They mainly include the class-conscious transnational elite who constitute the internal circuit of transnational capital, as well as transnational managers, transnational bureaucrats, transnational technicians, and mainstream thinkers and intellectuals who serve the TCC. The TCC has become a new global ruling class, possesses class consciousness, is increasingly organized, and continually seeks to maximize class interests.

Furthermore, "the economic dominance of transnational capital" will "shift toward its possible political form of dominance," namely the transnational state (TNS). The TNS aims to maintain the collective authority of the global ruling class, can incorporate nation-states into larger organizational structures, and institutionalizes the new class relationship between global capital and global labor. The TNS is "a particular constellation of class forces and class relations closely related to capitalist globalization and the rise of a transnational capitalist class, embodied in various political institutions. These institutions are various supranational apparatuses institutionalized through reformed nation-states and the dominance of hegemonic branches of capital worldwide." The TNS is a networked organization serving world capitalism, including economic organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, as well as political organizations such as the United Nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the European Union. Robinson believes that the global rule of the TCC and the TNS, who share common class interests, has generally eliminated the basis for inter-imperialist struggle, and that global imperialism can basically remain stable.

II. Qualitative Change and Instability: Hegemonic Imperialism

Hegemonic imperialism primarily refers to an international political and economic order in which the United States utilizes economic, political, and even military means to control other countries—that is to say, imperialism has evolved into "American imperialism," yet it possesses internal instability. Examples include the "New Imperialism" expounded by David Harvey based on "hegemony by dispossession"; the "Empire of Capital" discussed by Ellen Meiksins Wood, where the US uses economic power to manipulate the international economic order; the "competitive imperialism" proposed by Alex Callinicos based on geo-economic and political competition; and the "American Empire" clarified by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, which is shaped by the United States based on international power.

1. New Imperialism

Harvey argues that "new imperialism" overcomes crises of overaccumulation primarily through "spatio-temporal fixes" and "accumulation by dispossession," manifesting as a form of "dispossessory hegemony." Imperialism originates from the dialectical relationship between the territorial logic and the capital logic of power. The territorial logic refers to "the politics of state and empire"—imperialism as a specific political project where the power of its practitioners is based on control over a certain territory and the ability to mobilize its human and natural resources to achieve political, economic, and military goals. The capital logic refers to the "molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time"—imperialism as a politico-economic process diffusing through space and time, where the command and use of capital hold primacy.

The "spatio-temporal fix" is a mode unique to capitalism for resolving difficulties in capital accumulation. Simply put, overaccumulation within a specific territorial system produces surpluses of labor and capital. These surpluses can be absorbed through temporal and spatial fixes: the former refers to temporal shifts via long-term capital projects such as education and scientific research to postpone the time when capital value re-enters the sphere of circulation; the latter refers to spatial shifts by developing new markets elsewhere, utilizing new productive capacities, resources, social environments, and idle labor. In the process of the spatial fix for excess capital, new centers of capital accumulation and surplus capital constantly emerge. Faced with the powerful momentum of capital overaccumulation, various vibrant centers of accumulation compete fiercely on the world stage. To occupy a dominant position in capital accumulation, a hegemon must use economic, political, diplomatic, and even military means to seize favorable sites for spatial fixes, and must endlessly expand, extend, and strengthen its power.

"Accumulation by dispossession" is a means of appropriating surplus value without going through production; it is an important method adopted during the spatial fix of capital and a core feature of new imperialism. What accumulation by dispossession does is release a set of assets (including labor power) at extremely low prices (and at times, entirely for free). Overaccumulated capital can then seize these assets and rapidly utilize them for profitable activities. Privatization, commodification, and financialization are the primary means of accumulation by dispossession. Arrighi argues that a model of the capitalist world-system encompassing the concept of fluid hegemony can replace more complex imperialist analyses. The decline of the nation-state in the era of globalization implies that imperialism and monopoly capitalism have become obsolete; what remains is a world-system filled with hegemonic rivalry. Harvey incorporates Arrighi’s discourse, emphasizing that Arrighi’s concept of hegemony should replace the concept of imperialism, abandoning the rigid geographical division between core and periphery. The fragmentation of value flows and the competition and shift of hegemony in the era of globalization are the core characteristics of contemporary imperialism.

2. Empire of Capital

Wood argues that the "empire of capital" is a new stage of capitalist development in which the United States controls the world by manipulating capitalist economic mechanisms. She reveals the specificity of the empire of capital—namely, economic power detaching from and replacing extra-economic power—through the historical evolution of capitalism from empires of property to empires of commerce, and finally to the empire of capital. Empires of property, represented by the Roman and Spanish Empires, carried out colonial rule and economic plunder primarily through extra-economic power such as military conquest and political administration. "Imperial command of the economy was always limited by the reach of extra-economic power." Empires of commerce, represented by the Arab, Venetian, and Dutch Empires, profited primarily by controlling international trade. Although economic power played an important role in empires of commerce, extra-economic power remained dominant. "To call them empires of commerce is not to say that their imperialist rule was based on economic forms of oppression... extra-economic power remained the fundamental factor." The British Empire was a transitional period from traditional imperialism to the empire of capital. British colonization of Ireland relied entirely on economic power, while it simultaneously relied on extra-economic power to forcibly impose economic power upon the rest of the world. This can be seen as a period of capitalist expansion toward the globe and the transition from extra-economic to economic power.

Only after World War II, when U.S. hegemony replaced extra-economic power with economic power, was the empire of capital finally established. World War II destroyed the traditional imperialist order of rule, and the vacuum in the world order provided the United States with a historic opportunity. Through international organizations such as the Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, the U.S. began to replace extra-economic power with economic forces such as capital competition and free markets on a global scale, beginning its rule over the world through economic power. These new imperialist relations, growing out of the ruins of old imperialism, are no longer relations between a metropole and colonies, but a complex interaction among sovereign states. Relying on its superpower economic strength and manipulation of global economic organizations, the empire of capital promotes economic laws to the entire world and imposes these laws on formally independent states. Although extra-economic power can achieve the rapid rise of an empire, its stability is poor and its costs are high. In contrast, economic power controls the world through the market, with lower risks, lower costs, and higher profits. It is only under the capitalist system that economic power can truly function independently. "Capitalism has a unique capacity to separate economic and extra-economic power... meaning that the economic power of capital can reach far beyond any existing or imaginable political and military power." Wood argues that the more economic power replaces extra-economic power, the more the hegemon needs to strengthen its military power for global control, which inevitably leads to never-ending military actions, namely "infinite war."

3. Competitive Imperialism

Callinicos argues that imperialism must be understood through the intersection of economic competition and geopolitical competition. Regarding the meaning and relationship of these two types of competition, he points out: "A century or two ago, two logics of competition rooted in different modes of production were clearly distinct: one was economic competition in the early stages of the capitalist world-system, and the other was geopolitical competition characterized by the feudalism that drove the formation of the European state system—that is, in the process of military expansion and state-building. Imperialism is the product of the fusion of these two logics." Similar to Callinicos, Chris Harman also argues that new imperialism should be understood through the competition between nation-states and transnational corporations. Based on the different relationships between economic and geopolitical competition across different periods, Callinicos divides imperialism into three stages: classical imperialism (1870–1945), superpower imperialism (1945–1991), and post-Cold War imperialism (1991 to the present).

Classical imperialism was a stage where economic and geopolitical competition reinforced each other, manifested primarily through the liberalization of the world economy, political multipolarity, territorial expansion, and the reciprocal reinforcement of the arms race and state capitalism. This stage had two foundations: first, the emergence of a group of great powers following the unification of Germany and the American Civil War; second, the formation of global capitalism. New technologies created by industrial capitalism, particularly the railway, drastically reduced transportation costs. The compression of space, combined with global economic networks, promoted the flow of commodities, money, and capital. Meanwhile, the spread of industrial capitalism intensified great-power competition, particularly when Britain found its industry and naval supremacy challenged by Germany. Driven by technological innovation, Britain initiated a naval arms race and joined the Allied military bloc in 1914. In a world ruled by a few European countries, economic and geopolitical competition reinforced one another. The simultaneous growth of colonial expansion and capital export was the concrete manifestation of this mutual reinforcement. "European colonies expanded from 2.7 million square miles and 148 million inhabitants in 1860 to 29 million square miles and 568 million inhabitants in 1914; meanwhile, foreign capital exports ballooned from £2 billion in 1863 to £44 billion in 1914." The British Empire relied heavily on colonial expansion, deriving massive returns from direct investment in colonies. Other nations followed Britain’s example, embarking on the path of territorial expansion one after another.

Superpower imperialism was a stage where economic and geopolitical competition diverged, manifested primarily in the open economic policies dominated by the United States and the US-Soviet rivalry. After World War II, the U.S. pursued open economic policies aimed at projecting its formidable economic, political, and military power globally without falling into the "quagmire" of colonialism, making capitalist accumulation beyond territorial limits possible. The greatest obstacle to these U.S. goals was the Soviet Union; therefore, the U.S. began to participate in the postwar reconstruction of Europe and Japan to contain the Soviet Union. Under U.S. leadership, European capitalist countries and Japan actively promoted trade and investment liberalization, achieving economic prosperity. During this period, economic competition among advanced capitalist countries remained fierce, with Germany and Japan accelerating their economic catch-up with the U.S. However, this economic competition did not trigger geopolitical competition and conflict as classical imperialism had; instead, it manifested as a "partial decoupling of geopolitical and economic competition." There were three reasons behind this: first, the Cold War with the Soviet Union constrained the alliance of advanced countries; second, to maintain its hegemonic status, the U.S. would strike back head-on against challengers; third, despite economic competition, economic integration under U.S. leadership brought benefits to all capitalist countries, consolidating U.S. alliances in West and East Asia and facilitating a long-term shift in the competitive landscape.

Post-Cold War imperialism is a stage of exceptionally fierce geopolitical competition, manifested primarily in U.S. hegemonic rule over the world, shifts in global power, and the crisis of the rate of profit. Following the end of the Cold War, the United States became the world's sole superpower. The global power structure was "one superpower and four powers"—the sole superpower being the U.S., with China, the EU, Japan, and Russia as [regional] powers. To maintain its hegemony, the U.S. engaged in intense geopolitical competition with other nations. Geopolitical competition, in turn, further triggered changes in the global power structure. Callinicos argues that the rise of China is reshaping global power relations. "The complex of Wall Street, the U.S. Treasury, and the IMF has expressed increasing dissatisfaction with Chinese investment and loans in the Global South, because it grants poorer countries the right to use capital without attaching any neoliberal conditions." He emphasizes that post-Cold War imperialism faces crises such as slow economic growth, widening inequality, and a declining rate of profit. The rate of profit in the capitalist world peaked during the "Golden Age" after World War II and began to show signs of crisis starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since then, the rate of profit trended downward until a partial recovery in the 1990s, only to fall into a more severe crisis after entering the 21st century.

4. American Empire

Panitch and Gindin argue that new imperialism is rooted in the "American Empire," a new world order intentionally shaped and maintained by the United States through state power. They believe that classical theories of imperialism are tinged with economic reductionism and state instrumentalism, and thus it is necessary to "break with traditional conceptions regarding the nature of modern imperialism—namely, the view that modern imperialism is determined by economic competition." "Capitalism" and "imperialism" are not the same; the former is an economic relationship while the latter is a state relationship, belonging to different analytical levels. Although the economy is usually an important dimension of imperialism, imperialism cannot be regarded merely as economic imperialism. Theories of imperialism cannot be extended solely from capitalist economic theory; rather, they must be constructed and refined through the development of a theory of the capitalist state. The imperialist elements behind the state come not only from the economic level but also from multiple levels including the political, clerical, cultural, and military.

The history of capitalist development after World War II shows that the birth of new imperialism was not merely the result of capital accumulation, but the result of the U.S. state using its powerful political, economic, and military forces to continuously nurture and manage it. Panitch and Gindin refer to the post-World War II imperialist system as an "informal American empire" to distinguish it from the "formal empires" prior to World War II that relied on colonial rule. After the war, the U.S. forged dollar hegemony through the Bretton Woods system, actively promoted the Fordist capitalist mode of production globally, used the Marshall Plan to reconstruct the socio-economic systems of Western Europe and Japan while integrating them into the global capitalist system, and controlled Europe through the establishment of NATO, leading the construction of a new imperialist order.

In the 1970s, the imperialist system established after World War II faced multiple contradictions and crises. Against this backdrop, the United States utilized its state power to forcibly implement neoliberal policies—centered on privatization, marketization, financialization, and globalization—on a global scale. This was done to restructure the world capitalist system, overcome the crisis of capital accumulation, and extend the sphere of influence of the American empire across the globe.

The United States has forged a world that conforms to its own vision; the most salient feature of contemporary capitalism is the rule of the American empire. The U.S. attempts to incorporate all countries into the American imperial system, requiring them to identify with or submit to its rule. However, vast differences in the political, economic, and cultural spheres of various nation-states make it difficult for them to be fully integrated. For those countries that do not accept neoliberalism or refuse to submit to American leadership, the U.S. deploys state power to exert political pressure, impose economic sanctions, or even launch military strikes. The hegemonism pursued by the American empire is increasingly causing resentment among other nations. Meanwhile, conflicts and contradictions between different forces within the American empire are continuously testing the internal endurance of the system.

III. Quantitative Change and Instability: Late Imperialism

"Late imperialism" is a new characterization of the current stage of capitalist development proposed by John Bellamy Foster, building on the research of Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and John Smith. It represents a new development in the imperialist theory of the Monthly Review School ^[6] in the United States, reflecting the global landscape and contradictions of capitalism. Foster argues that late imperialism is a new stage in the development of monopoly capitalism, primarily manifested in the ubiquity of monopoly-finance capital, the globalization of production, new forms of surplus value extraction from the periphery by the center, and epochal economic, military, and environmental challenges.

1. Monopoly-Finance Capital and Globalized Production

After studying the degree of monopoly in sectors such as manufacturing, finance, and retail since the 21st century, Foster pointed out that monopoly capitalism has evolved into a more generalized and globalized system of monopoly-finance capital, which forms the foundation of contemporary imperialism. In this system, the total revenue of the Fortune Global 500 companies accounts for 40% of the total revenue of all firms worldwide. Most other enterprises are entangled in the production and sales networks of these giants, existing merely as subcontractors. By virtue of its absolute monopoly position, contemporary imperialism can capture rents on a global scale. These rents take two forms: first, imperialist rents generated by the exploitation of workers in the Global South; and second, the extraction of natural resources from the South. Foster constructed a theory of "ecological imperialism" to explain the latter.

In the era of globalization, monopoly capital in the North exploits the labor force of the South through "global labor arbitrage" based on worldwide wage differentials. Through neoliberal policies, Northern countries have uprooted hundreds of millions of workers and peasants in the South from the land and national industries upon which they depended, forming a massive "global industrial reserve army." The globalized market is an incomplete market; while capital and commodities can flow freely, workers cannot move freely due to geographical, social, and political restrictions. The interaction between suppressed labor mobility and the growing supply of labor has birthed a massive gradient in international wages. From 1991 to 2011, the GDP per capita of workers in developed countries rose from $54,800 to $73,600, while in developing countries, it rose from $7,460 to $14,220. In 2014, the unit labor cost in manufacturing for emerging economies like China, India, Indonesia, and Mexico was only 46%, 37%, 62%, and 43% of that in the U.S., respectively.

Global wage differentials lead to varying rates of exploitation, creating a gap between the value created by workers and the value they are paid; this is the internal driver for the rapid development of globalized production. Represented by multinational corporations, monopoly-finance capital utilizes means such as industrial outsourcing, offshoring, and cost control to replace high-wage domestic workers with low-wage overseas workers, fully exploiting global wage differences to continuously extract value from the South. The globalization of production has prompted a large-scale shift of manufacturing and industrial workers to Southern countries. The South’s share of global manufactured exports soared from around 5% in the pre-globalization period to over 40% in 2011. Similarly, the share of manufactured imports from low-wage countries to major developed nations rose from about 10% to over 50% in 2011. Correspondingly, the global working class has undergone a profound transformation. In 2010, approximately 541 million industrial workers lived in Southern countries, accounting for 79% of the world’s total industrial workforce, compared to only 34% in 1950 and 53% in 1980. Globalized production driven by wage arbitrage is not the production of absolute surplus value, as lengthening labor time is not the primary allure of outsourcing; nor is it the production of relative surplus value, as outsourcing serves as an alternative to investment in new technology. This outsourcing-based mode of production constitutes a "third method" of surplus value production based on "suppressing wages below the value of labor power."

2. Financial Explosion and Economic Stagnation

The global transfer of value brought about by globalized production has driven the financialization of capitalism. Financialization, in turn, has deepened imperialist monopoly and exploitation worldwide. In the 1970s, developed capitalist countries generally faced a crisis of stagflation, and enterprises could only maintain rapid capital accumulation through financial investment and the global relocation of production. Globalized production allows for a steady stream of imperialist rents through unequal exchange. In statistics such as GDP, trade, and financial flows, these rents are simply recorded as "value-added" in the Global North, having been removed from production costs. The value transfer brought by globalized production triggered the problem of surplus capital absorption. Foreign investment is not the export of domestic surplus, but the most effective means of transferring surplus generated abroad back to the investing country. In this context, foreign investment clearly exacerbates rather than alleviates the problem of surplus absorption. To achieve capital appreciation more rapidly, an increasing portion of surplus capital has shifted from productive investment to various financial investments, and non-financial enterprises have become increasingly financialized. Corporations pour large surpluses into the financial system, seeking rapid returns through securitization. The financial sector created various financial instruments to stake claims on future income streams and absorb surplus capital, resulting in the continuous expansion of financial sector assets from the late 1970s to the 1990s.

Financialization transferred control over the reproduction of the economic system to oligopolistic banks in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, making developed countries the global centers of finance and accumulation. This enhanced imperialist control over globalized production and value plunder. Alongside communication and digital technologies, financialization promoted the process of commodification on a global scale, laying the foundation for the global accumulation of capital. Imperialist rents are continuously transformed into massive profits for monopolists; wealth is increasingly concentrated in a few corporations and wealthy individuals, squeezing labor compensation and the profits of non-monopoly capital. Financialization, as a means of absorbing surplus capital, further exacerbated monopoly and wealth inequality. Since the financial sector does not create value, its explosive growth became detached from growth in actual investment and the economy, manifesting as a sharp increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio. This worsened economic stagnation and gave rise to even more surplus capital. Simultaneously, monopoly-finance capital has an inherent hunger for debt growth, particularly sovereign debt, as a way to absorb monopoly surplus profits; however, debt expansion undermines the stability of the financial system. The growth of financial assets relative to their productive base continuously generates asset bubbles that burst periodically, thereby threatening the stability of global capitalism as a whole. The deepest cause of the 2008 financial crisis lay not in finance, but in production.

The core of late imperialism is the extreme hierarchical relationship that dominates the 21st-century capitalist world—a relationship increasingly dominated by mega-multinational corporations and a handful of Northern states. The contradictions of late imperialism are becoming more acute. Crises of uneven development, governance, finance, war, and the environment occur one after another. All these crises stem from the continuous accumulation of monopoly capital and are masked by liberal ideology, steadily widening the expansive and irreversible rift between the center and the periphery.

IV. Commentary and Implications

Research by foreign scholars on contemporary imperialism dissects the primary features of the contemporary capitalist world political and economic order—such as multinational corporations, globalized production, information technology, financialization, and American hegemony—from different perspectives. This research reflects the latest phase-specific changes in imperialism, containing both theoretical highlights and blind spots.

Scholars adhering to the "super-imperialism" ^[7] analytical paradigm primarily analyze the contemporary capitalist economic order from the perspective of the global expansion of capital accumulation and global governance. Hardt and others analyze the dematerialization of production and the "world-ization" of capitalism driven by capital from a postmodern perspective. However, Hardt and Negri rely too heavily on metaphors and theory, completely disregarding the concrete realities of the contemporary capitalist world economy and ignoring the combined and uneven development of capitalism. Their assertion that the North-South divide is disappearing is clearly false; the largest share of capital flows occurs between wealthy countries, and there is no "equalization" caused by the flow of labor from the South to the North. The multinational corporations that control the globalization of capital still rely on powerful "state" forces; a "world-state" that transcends national borders has yet to emerge. Internal contradictions among developed countries such as the U.S., Europe, and Japan do not arise from interest diversions between monopoly capitals, but are related to the diversity represented by national interests. They reduce the historical subject to the "individual" and then combine many individuals into the "multitude" ^[8], which misplaces the epochal question of redefining the historical subject.

In reality, economic globalization is to some extent merely a process of the "Americanization" of the world economy—coordinated to make the rest of the world adapt to the rhythm and needs of the American economy. Current competition and confrontation within the "empire" are constrained by the U.S., which always seeks to restrict the development of its allies. Robinson’s proposal of new concepts such as "transnational capital," the "transnational capitalist class," and the "transnational state" (based on globalized production) reflects only one facet of the era of capital globalization. As Ellen Meiksins Wood pointed out, the nation-state is capable of "maintaining property relations, social order, and ensuring the normativity and predictability of contractual transactions, backed by coercive force," which is vital for capital accumulation. Transnational capital and the transnational capitalist class have not "de-nationalized." Different national bourgeoisies and nation-states cannot, as Robinson argues, integrate equally into a transnational capitalist class and a transnational state; rather, they exhibit a center-periphery structure.

Scholars adhering to the hegemon-imperialism analytical paradigm focus on analyzing the relationship between capital accumulation and state action. They argue that the essence of contemporary imperialism is an economic order in which American hegemony controls the global political economy. David Harvey creatively employed spatio-geographical methods to analyze "accumulation by dispossession" as the mode of accumulation in contemporary capitalism, revealing the laws of contradictory motion between the logic of capital and the logic of the state through the lens of the "spatial-temporal fix." However, Harvey overstates the importance of accumulation by dispossession and overlooks changes in the process by which capital captures surplus value under globalized production; this led him to the erroneous conclusion that "global wealth is flowing from Western nations to Eastern nations." Based on a historical-analytical method, Ellen Meiksins Wood traced the evolutionary lineage and characteristic differences of various imperial forms, revealing the nature of American economic control over the world and the role of the nation-state. Yet, she failed to grasp that the most essential feature of imperialism is monopoly, ignoring the transformation of the concrete forms of monopoly within the process of globalized production. Alex Callinicos combined Marxism with realist International Relations (IR) theory to anatomize the behavior of imperialist states from the perspective of competition, constructing a more realistic analytical perspective on New Imperialism. However, he overlooked the decisive role of economic drivers behind geopolitical competition; in his work, imperialist monopoly and exploitation are obscured by the concept of competition. Panitch and Gindin analyzed the important role of the state in imperialist expansion—specifically the U.S. shaping and management of the global capitalist system—but their analysis is almost purely political, thereby diluting the economic dimension of imperialism as a whole and failing to analyze the dynamic evolutionary process of capital accumulation.

During the era of colonialism, Lenin "divided nations into oppressor nations and oppressed nations" and pointed out that this was "the essence of imperialism." He further emphasized that imperialism is "the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations." Lenin noted that monopoly is the key to understanding imperialism and the foundation for realizing its oppressive nature. Any study of imperialism detached from the category of "monopoly" is incomplete. The evolution of capital accumulation and its fundamental contradictions causes imperialism to exhibit different characteristics in different periods. Scholars adhering to the late-imperialism analytical paradigm have analyzed the global control of monopoly-finance capital and the transnational exploitation of Southern workers by Northern capital during the processes of production globalization and financialization. However, their analysis of global labor arbitrage needs to be further deepened by integrating it with global production networks, and their analysis of imperialist contradictions requires further refinement.

The theory of imperialism primarily studies the contradictory movement between state and capital, as well as between states, within specific international environments during the process of capital accumulation. Driven by endless capital accumulation, individual capital tends, on the one hand, to appropriate profits through speculative finance, which lowers the overall level of industrial capital accumulation. On the other hand, in the process of accumulation, industrial capital tends to suppress labor costs as much as possible, which lowers the overall level of consumption. Both tendencies can lead to recurring economic crises. From a dynamic spatial perspective, unavoidable contradictions also exist within the circuits of capital between the fixed and the mobile, concentration and dispersion, and local commitments and global interests. Consequently, a distinctive feature of capitalist history is the continuous search for and revision of organizational arrangements capable of mitigating or suppressing these contradictions. The result is the necessary creation of a nested, hierarchical organizational structure based on state power, linking local and specific factors to the global production and appropriation of surplus value to resist the inherent self-destructive tendency of individual capital. The essence of the resulting organization of the world political economy remains an imperialist order of oppression and being oppressed. In alignment with the evolution of the capitalist mode of production and its internal contradictions, imperialism in different periods presents itself in different forms.

Synthesizing the various analytical paradigms above, contemporary imperialism is actually a stage in which the United States—to facilitate domestic monopoly capital accumulation and with the aid of international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and even the United Nations—coordinates with developed countries like those in Europe and Japan to appropriate the surplus value of other countries through means such as global production networks and financialization. Supplemented by political and military means to control the political and economic orders of other countries, this represents the latest stage of capitalist development.

With the development of economic globalization, information technology, and transportation technology, multinational corporations (MNCs) from Northern developed countries—such as the U.S., Europe, and Japan—have decomposed the global commodity production process through integration and modularization. They conduct networked collaborative production on a global scale, continuously absorbing the surplus value created by Southern countries. There are two modes of monopoly for MNCs within global production networks: one is based on a monopoly advantage in the production of use-value, and the other is based on a monopoly advantage in the realization of value. The former refers to MNCs occupying a dominant position in the production network by virtue of their monopoly on technical patents and control over key production stages, while outsourcing non-essential production and circulation processes to capture a massive amount of added value. This production-driven network is particularly evident in capital- and technology-intensive industries such as automobiles and semiconductors. The latter refers to MNCs playing a key role in the realization of the value of final products by virtue of their monopoly over brand marketing and distribution channels. This buyer-driven network is concentrated in trade-led, labor-intensive consumer goods industries, such as apparel, daily necessities, and consumer electronics. The monopoly position of MNCs in global production networks constitutes the most stable foundation for imperialist control over global material reproduction. Based on Marx's labor theory of value, scholars like John Smith (Kopp) ^[9] and Suwandi have calculated that it is the Southern labor force, situated in the middle of the production chain, that accounts for the bulk of added value. Smith estimates that in 2011, Northern countries extracted approximately $2.8 trillion in surplus value from Southern countries.

Developed countries such as the U.S., Europe, and Japan also plunder the value of other countries through financialization. John Bellamy Foster emphasizes that every form of financial transaction between developed and developing countries contains what Marx called "predatory profits," backed by unbalanced power relations. The U.S. can achieve global financial plunder through various means and is the creator, maintainer, and primary beneficiary of today's global liberalized financial order. First, as the international reserve currency, the U.S. dollar yields international seigniorage income. The U.S. can directly issue dollars to purchase goods and services from other countries, plundering their resources without being constrained by foreign exchange reserves or balance-of-payments deficits. Second, the U.S. possesses a highly developed financial industry. Wall Street, acting as the global financial center, continuously develops various financial products and derivatives to control the pricing of bulk commodities. It uses its institutional advantages and sophisticated operations to arbitrage in financial markets, achieving the dispossession of wealth from companies and individuals in Southern countries. Finally, U.S. financial capital intervenes on a large scale in the privatization processes of Southern countries, acquiring vast natural resources and infrastructure to obtain massive monopoly rents. U.S. financial capital also engages in large-scale global speculative activities, continuously extracting wealth by creating and transmitting financial crises. Research institutions have estimated that since 1980, developing countries have lost $16.3 trillion due to balance-of-payments leakages, misreporting of import/export trade, and recorded financial transfers.

With the exception of a few countries, most Southern nations consistently linger on the periphery of the American-led imperialist order. First, economic plunder continuously erodes the ability of Southern countries to escape their peripheral predicament. Global production networks and financialization have strengthened developed countries' appropriation and control of Southern markets, turning them into sources of raw materials, sales markets for products, and outlets for capital export. The capital exports and the speculative nature of international financial capital from developed countries have triggered debt and financial crises in the South. The drain of wealth from Southern countries has deprived them of the resources necessary for their own economic development and robbed them of their capacity for economic independence. Second, the U.S. continuously suppresses Southern countries through political and even military means, forcing them to serve the economic development of the U.S. and other Northern developed capitalist countries. The U.S. reinforces the "Washington Consensus" through international organizations like the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN to solidify the existing international political and economic order. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government has successively proposed the "Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement," the "Global War on Terror," the "Asia-Pacific Rebalance," and the "Indo-Pacific Strategy" to consolidate American global leadership and the dependent status of Southern countries. For those Southern countries that challenge the existing world order, when economic and political means prove ineffective, the U.S. further employs military force to coercively lock them into the periphery.

The American-led imperialist order faces multiple contradictions at both the domestic and international levels. Domestically, the U.S. faces a contradiction between maintaining domestic monopoly capital accumulation and upholding the legitimacy of the capitalist system. First is the unemployment crisis triggered by the globalization of production. The share of manufacturing in U.S. GDP has declined from approximately 28% in the 1950s to 12% in 2010. In the pursuit of profit, monopoly capital has continuously shifted manufacturing to Southern countries, triggering a domestic unemployment crisis. Second is the crisis of economic stagnation triggered by financialization. The contribution of the "vaster financial sector"—comprising finance, insurance, and real estate—to U.S. GDP rose from 15.70% in 1980 to 20.56% in 2016. With speculative finance at the core, productive long-term investment is inevitably squeezed out, pushing economic development onto a debt-driven basis. The combined effect of financial expansion and industrial relocation exacerbates the tendency for monopolies to fall into stagnation and crisis. Finally, there is the crisis of wealth disparity. The wealth captured through globalized production and financialization has not benefited the majority of the American public but has instead been monopolized by a few monopoly capitalists. In 2018, the U.S. Gini coefficient reached a 50-year high of 0.485. The worsening wealth disparity in the U.S. has fueled the resurgence of neo-fascism; neoliberalism is increasingly merging with fascism, giving rise to racism and revanchist nationalism.

Internationally, to externalize its domestic crises and protect its national interests, the U.S. frequently comes into conflict with other nations. While the U.S. views the EU and Japan as allies, it also consistently treats them as strategic competitors. The U.S. seeks to restrict the development of other developed countries in certain fields to maintain its own absolute advantage. For example, as early as the 1980s, the U.S. struck a blow to Japan via the "Plaza Accord." To control oil and strengthen the petrodollar alliance while undermining the Euro and the EU, the U.S. launched a series of unilateral military interventions in the Middle East, including the Iraq War, the Libyan War, and support for the Syrian Civil War. To protect the interests of U.S. financial monopoly capital and respond to domestic financial crises, the U.S. has repeatedly externalized its crises to the rest of the world through quantitative easing, severely disrupting the international economic order. The Trump administration further adopted an "America First" strategy, raising the banner of nationalism/chauvinism, launching protectionist movements, unilaterally withdrawing from over a dozen international organizations or agreements, and initiating trade wars against many countries, including China, the EU, Canada, and Japan. The multiple contradictions facing the New Imperialist order under U.S. dominance mean that global development is currently facing the four major challenges of the governance deficit, trust deficit, peace deficit, and development deficit. Consequently, calls from the international community to reform the existing world order are growing louder.

The international political and economic order continues to develop and evolve under the impetus of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. The world is undergoing "profound changes unseen in a century" ^[10]. China is one of the largest variables in these profound changes and one of the most important factors influencing them. Facing the multiple contradictions and challenges of the American-led world order, our country must comprehensively coordinate the two domestic and international spheres, unswervingly promote supply-side structural reform and the Belt and Road Initiative, and construct a new development pattern of "dual circulation" in which domestic and international cycles reinforce each other. China must actively promote the reshaping of the global governance system, improve the international political and economic order, and promote the common development of all countries while seeking its own development. We must strive to realize the "Chinese Dream" of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and the "World Dream" of building a community with a shared future for humanity.