The international political economy of contemporary US-China relations.

This book investigates the changing nature of US power at the level of world order using US
relations with the People's Republic of China in the 1990s as a case study. It is argued that US
hegemony has given way to a period of dominance in which the neo-liberal policy objectives
of the US state are increasingly realised via the structural power of global institutions and the
ideological preferences which underpin them; the cultivation of regional trading blocs; and the
material power of the US state as conceived in more traditional terms. This neo-Gramscian
assessment of US power is accompanied by the idea that political agency is required to satisfy
policy goals under conditions of globalisation. State policy is thereby understood as the
product of a political process involving US civil society and non-state actors rather than a
given entity.
The chapters of the book flesh out the methods by which the US has sought to promote a
liberal trading order in the light of China's emergence as a global power and the various areas
of consensus and disagreement between the two nations. This takes the form of analysing
five major thematic areas of the relationship which include assessments of the historical
evolution of US-China relations; the political economy of US-China trade; the role of social
forces (civil society) in US-China relations; environmental aspects of the relationship; and the
impact of regionalism on US-China relations. Overall, the intention is to problematise the view
that the relationship can still be broached in conventional state-centric terms which play down
new structural conditions underpinned by the onset of economic globalisation and more
multilateral forms of power.
In many senses, the thesis entails a novel approach to the political economy of relations
between two of the world's foremost powers by placing analysis within the context of neo Gramscian
critical theory. It concludes by noting that though US structural power remains
considerable in the post-hegemonic era of the 1990s and beyond, the rise of China may induce
moves, for better and perhaps worse, to a more multilateral world order.