New article: The Resilience of Self-reliance in China
Amy King and Wenting He have published a new open-access article in The China Quarterly, entitled “The Resilience of Self-Reliance in China: Autonomy, Interdependence and Order-shaping”.
We were motivated to write this paper out of curiosity: since coming to power, Xi Jinping has increasingly made use of the idea of “self-reliance” (自力更生), but does Xi’s understanding of “self-reliance” align with earlier Chinese understandings of the term and, if so, what makes “self-reliance” such a resilient idea in China?
Our research threw up some fascinating and unexpected findings: the idea of “self-reliance” has endured in China for nearly a century, originating not only with Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, but also in the Republican-era discourse of the Kuomintang.
While frequently misinterpreted as autarky or economic isolation, the idea of “self-reliance” has always acknowledged China’s engagement with the global economy. Economic interdependence has enabled China to acquire the advanced industrial goods and technologies needed to achieve autonomy, while avoiding the perceived costs of overdependence on any single foreign power.
And we find that at critical junctures since the 1930s, the idea of “self-reliance” has given Chinese leaders the discursive tools needed to try and shape the international order in ways that might allow China – and other late-industrialising, post-colonial developing countries – to participate in the global economy without undermining their autonomy.
Beyond China scholars, the paper should also interest IPE scholars working with the ideational resilience, a concept that has typically been applied to the resilience of neoliberal ideas. We show that as a malleable and internally-contradictory idea, “self-reliance” is particularly resilient in authoritarian contexts because it allows leaders to make quite radical policy change without criticizing previous generations of leaders.
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