GLOBALIZATIONS

https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2024.2302197

Chinese embedded globalization: social-economic formations in

dispute in world reordering
a b
Javier Vadell and Elias Jabbour
a
Department of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil;
b
Department of Economy, New Development Bank, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, People’s Republic of
China

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This contribution focuses on a reconceptualization of the term globalization, Received 25 May 2023
drawing on world system theories and the dialectical concept of Accepted 19 December 2023
countermovement. The focus is the Social-Economic Formation (SEF)
KEYWORDS
concept elaborated by the Marxist tradition to understand and analyse the Globalization; social-
contemporary ascendance of China and its power projection. Based on economic formation; China;
dialectic methodology, we argue that globalization is a contradictory process international political
of interconnectivity between SEFs in different historical eras with substantive economy; development
changes in the space–time relationship. Thus, the embryonic Embedded
Chinese Globalization is emerging as a historical negation of Neoliberal
globalization (NG)

Introduction
The objective of this article is to reconceptualize the term globalization, with a special focus on the
Social-Economic Formation (SEF) concept elaborated by the Marxist tradition to understand the
contemporary ascendance of China and its incipient global governance architecture.
Our purpose is to improve the debate about the current transformation in global political econ-
omy and geopolitics redefining the concept of globalization based on its material, institutional, and
ideological foundations.
Thus, we understand globalization as a contradictory process of interconnectivity between SEFs
in each historical period with substantive changes in the space–time relationship. Therefore, we
argue that the embryonic Embedded Chinese Globalization is emerging as a historical negation/
surpass1 of Neoliberal globalization (NG) – which in turn was the negation of the ‘incomplete’ glo-
balization of the Bretton Woods system (BWS). In this regard, the ECG manifests itself as a histori-
cal negation of the negation and becomes the synthesis of a historical process.
Taking the Marxian dialectical method, the present paper follows up on that track by revisiting
the concept of globalization and is divided into five sections which are complemented by this intro-
duction and the concluding remarks. The second and third sections focus on the fundamental
theoretical and methodological aspects. The fourth part is an interpretation of ‘globalizations’
from the critical theory adopted. The fifth and sixth sections are dedicated to analysing neoliberal
globalization and the ‘countermovement’ represented by the ECG. Finally, in the seventh part, we
highlight the main material, institutional, and ideological pillars of embryonic ECG.

CONTACT Javier Vadell [email protected]

© 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. VADELL AND E. JABBOUR

Theoretical and methodological inspirations: Social-economic formations and

dialectic global political economy
This study proposes a non-orthodox interpretation of international relations that intends to go
beyond the classical ‘state-centrism’ by bringing a critical perspective to the centre of the debate.
For this task, we do not intend to neglect the role of the modern nation-state, but to re-signify
it. If we consider that globalization (or ‘globalizations’ throughout history) is the interaction
between social formations, it is necessary to give centrality to Karl Marx’s category of social-econ-
omic formation (SEF).2 From a critical perspective, this concept represents the highest complexity
of totality in its most finished social form. Thus, in this section, SEF will be the focus of conceptual
and methodological attention aiming to interpret the geopolitical and geo-economic tectonic plates
movements that the (re)emergence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is generating,
especially aiming on its projection of power.
For our purpose, the recovery of SEF concept is fundamental because it allows us to understand
the complexity of global transformations from a holistic view in its political, economic, cultural,
and civilizational aspects. Hence, it is crucial for delimiting our heuristic landscape to start from
two premises: (1) the contribution of Emilio Sereni and Cesare Luporini (Luporini & Sereni,
1973; Sereni, 2013) in the context of the 1970s debate and the; (2) the contribution of Samir
Amin (Amin, 1976) and Milton Santos (Santos, 1996). These authors are distinguished intellectuals
for bringing up the idea of historical totality very intimate to Marxists such as Lenin, Mao Zedong,
Althusser, and Ignacio Rangel (Jabbour et al., 2021).
Critical theory of international relations, global political economy, and geopolitics analysis could
be enriched by Marx’s category of SEF (Marx, 1859) which Lenin later refined as:
The analysis of material social relations (…) at once made it possible to observe recurrence and regu-
larity and to generalize the systems of the various countries in the single fundamental concept: social
formation. It was this generalization alone that made it possible to proceed from the description of
social phenomena (and their evaluation from the standpoint of an ideal) to their strictly scientific analy-
sis, which isolates, let us say by way of example, that which distinguishes one capitalist country from
another and investigates that which is common to all of them (Lenin, 1978)

Emilio Sereni’s contribution is fundamental to define the category of SEF as a

notion that places itself unequivocally at the level of history, which is (…) that of the totality and unity
of all spheres (structural, superstructural and others) of social life in the continuity and at the same time
in the discontinuity of its historical development. (Sereni, 2013, p. 316)

Hence, taking up the concept of SEF is just the tip of the iceberg that allows us to observe the totality
and its parts, perceiving the unity of opposites and their contradictions in historical development.
Tony Burns brings the concept of SEF into the debate highlighting Karl Marx’s work, the Grun-
drisse, where ‘the idea that a given social formation (Gesellschaftsformen), or a given society
(Gesellschaft) – ex. England in the sixteenth century – would probably have an economic system
composed of more than one mode of production’ (MP). In Marx, a SEF constitutes itself as a his-
torical totality concept and combines different modes of production in constant ‘dispute’. Burns
defines SEF as a ‘modal combination’ (Burns, 2022, p. 2), an expression of this totality in which
‘units of opposites’ coexist. Burns’ rescue of the concept of SEF takes place in the context of a debate
around the controversy of the transition from the feudal MP to the capitalist MP. Nevertheless, our
approach intends to dwell on the concept aiming at understanding contemporary China, its trans-
formations, and its projection of power. Thus, it is worthy to highlight Gabriele, Schettino, and
 GLOBALIZATIONS 3

Jabbour’s research (Gabriele & Jabbour, 2022; Gabriele & Schettino, 2012). Their main contribution
is to rescue the concept of SEF to analyse the transformations and complexities in contemporary
China where is emerging a different embryonic SEF, defined by Gabriele and Jabbour as a ‘New
projectment Economy’ (Gabriele & Jabbour, 2022).
A historical multimodal combination complex is the term we use that resembles Gabriele and
Jabbour’s categorization of ‘multilateral coexistence of different modes of production in a global
context in which a particular mode of production tends to remain dominant for a long period’
(Gabriele & Jabbour, 2022, p. 32).
Thus, the concepts of SEF and MP refer to many theoretical and methodological misunderstand-
ings, and therefore our initial purpose is to clarify this point. From Marx-inspired thought, rivers of
ink have been used to analyse the MP concept. Nevertheless, for our purpose, the difference
between the SEF and MP should be made clear. MP is an abstract concept and does not imply a
succession, periodicity, or stages in the history of civilizations from the earliest social formations
to the capitalist SEF. That is, it is an abstract concept that extends from the first differentiated for-
mations to capitalism (Amin, 1976, p. 13).
The Marxist concept of MP ‘refers to a specific form of interaction between the productive forces
and relations of production that characterizes and shapes the material basis and reproduction of
human civilization over long periods of time’ (Gabriele & Jabbour, 2022, p. 47).
It should be recognized that the category MP is mentioned in Marx’s work, and specifically in
Capital, in relation to private property, commodities, public property, division of labour in the pro-
duction of manufactures, the production of surplus value, etc. However, the relevant point here is
the abstract nature of the concept. Thus, MP is considered at a very high level of abstraction, as a
system, where this is understood ‘as a set of internally consistent rules and laws of self-preservation
and movement’ (Gabriele & Jabbour, 2022, p. 50).
SEF is a less abstract category than MP. Consequently, SEF gives concrete expression to national
states understood as historical societies – or complexes of political and civil societies in the Grams-
cian sense – that combine modes of production and organize ‘the relations between local society
and other societies’ (Amin, 1976, p. 64), which nowadays can be reflected in interstate, inter-
national, transnational, and inter-civilizational relations. Thus, ‘Social formations are concrete,
organized structures characterized by a dominant mode of production and by the articulation
around it of a complex set of subordinate modes of production’ (Amin, 1976, p. 64). In other
terms, we can define a SEF as a historical complex of multimodal combination.
Thus, the concept of SEF, which for a long time was erased from the academic debate in the
social sciences, represents a consistent totality to understand the complexity of social relations
in general (international, intersocietal, and inter-civilizational). As we state, Gabriele and Jabbour
rescued the concept of SEF to apprehend the particularities of Chinese socialism and its links
between capitalist MP and new and embryonic social forms emerging from China (Gabriele &
Jabbour, 2022, p. 179).
So, SEF refers to a multimodal economic complex of interdependence between large evolving
blocks endowed with relative freedoms that can allow, under specific historical circumstances,
socioeconomic structures to develop in space and time.
MP and SEF concepts are inherently interrelated and help us to understand the phenomenon of
contemporary globalization overcoming culturalist and essentialist approaches which infer that the
global transformations are the result of interaction between civilizations (Huntington, 1996).
Differently from that vision, we start from the premise that societies, nation-states, or political
units throughout history are SEFs that combine MPs and organize the relations between a specific
4 J. VADELL AND E. JABBOUR

society and other societies into a complex totality that involves: the economy, political and diplo-
matic relations, and social and cultural interactions among peoples.

Globalization and globality: process and condition

The term globalization is one of the most controversial, ambiguous, and omnipresent in contem-
porary political discourse. International Relations and Global Political Economy addressed the
debate on globalization more systematically only in the late 1990s at a crucial moment in the pro-
cess of expansion of capitalism. From this hermeneutic effort, our article emphasizes the com-
ponents ‘space’ and ‘time’, as essential variables to define globalization.
Our main hypothesis is that the globalization encouraged by China (supported in the official
narrative) represents a direct challenge to neoliberal globalization (NG) led by the United States
of America (USA) in the current dispute for global power. China presents its version of globaliza-
tion with a proposal based on cooperation, mutual benefits, and investments in infrastructure to
promote commercial, digital, and cultural interconnectivity.3
In this process, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) presents itself as the most ambitious, but not
the only, component of Globalization with Chinese characteristics. As an ambitious inter-civiliza-
tional proposal, the BRI aims to restore the spirit of the silk routes that marked an era in the so-
called first Eurasian globalization (Brakman et al., 2019; Frank, 1998; Noonan, 2017) and that
since 2013, has been constituting itself as the infrastructural platform of a new kind of embryonic
globalization. It is also a manifestation of China’s expansion and power projection that is reconfi-
guring the economic geography and spatial fix (Harvey, 2001) through unprecedented massive
investments in infrastructure.
We call this globalization in its initial stage as embedded Chinese globalization (ECG). The ECG
is organically related to the emergence of a new economic-social formation within Chinese society
(Gabriele & Jabbour, 2022) and its projection of power in the contemporary world. Henceforth,
globalization is understood as a process of interconnectivity and interdependence between different
SEFs at given historical times.
Every globalization process has another face, which is geopolitics, that develops its spatial
dynamics in an expansive process. Thus, neoliberal globalization, backed with the ideology of glo-
bal free markets and the end of history (Fukuyama, 1989), was sustained by the hegemony of the
United States with its contradictions: the expansion of global finance at the expense of industry
(Hudson, 2021), the monopoly power of the dollar in the global capitalist system, and the expansive
policy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the post-Cold War period. On the
other hand, the ECG also expresses a specific economic and political power projection that led
to important academic debates (Dunford & Liu, 2019; W. Liu, 2021; W. Liu et al., 2018; Y. Liu
et al., 2020).

Which globalization: an interpretation from critical theory

Significant works stand out in the more systematic analysis of the evolution of the polysemic con-
cept of globalization in mainstream academia. Ronald Robertson (1992) David Held and Anthony
McGrew (2000) and Luke Martell (2010) stimulated the debate and showed how the metamorpho-
sis of the meaning of globalization inherently implies an intellectual challenge for international
analysts (Held et al., 1999, p. 1). To be more precise, globalization, according to this line of thought,
means a ‘broadening, deepening, and accelerating interconnectedness of the world in all aspects of
 GLOBALIZATIONS 5

contemporary social life, from the cultural, the criminal, from the financial to the spiritual’ (Held
et al., 1999, p. 2). For Robertson is a ‘Compression of the world and the intensification of the con-
sciousness of the world as a whole’ (Robertson, 1992, p. 8).
Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton identify three major trends, which, in recent history, are
closely linked to a first post-Cold War moment where the determinist vision (optimistic or pessi-
mistic) of the consolidation of a liberal world – an international liberal order – ILO (Babic, 2020)
prevailed. In other words, the primacy of global markets in an environment of interaction among
liberal democracies under US hegemony would converge to a unipolar system.
This stage, as a utopian snapshot of hegemonic neoliberalism, was labelled by Fukuyama as the
‘end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1989). At this historical moment the arguments of the so-called ‘hyper-
globalists’ have been strengthened. They understand the process of globalization and the condition
of globality as irreversible, and unprecedented, rendering the power of states as something ‘unna-
tural’ (Ohmae, 1995).
These approaches become more visible with the historical distance that hidden the power of
nation-states (Arrighi et al., 1999) and stressed the narrative of the economic logic of global markets
and the inevitable ‘denationalization of economies through the establishment of transnational pro-
duction, trade, and financial networks’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 2).
A second group of analysts was called sceptics and emerged in the second half of the 1990s. They
do not recognize that the globalization as an unprecedented fact in history. Applying historical
approach and inductive methodology, they reject the idea that the globalization process implied
an erosion or loss of power of nation-states, forced the debate on globalization, and helped
entrench some globalist representatives ‘in the ambiguities’ of ‘transformationalism’ (Hirst &
Thompson, 1996).
In turn, ‘transformationalists’ conceive globalization as a ‘powerful transformative force respon-
sible for the intensive upheaval of the societies, economies, and governance institutions of the glo-
bal order’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 7). Transformationalists aim to achieve a synthesis between the first
interpretation and the second. Scholte pointed out the transformationalists’ discussion and high-
lighted the difference between globalization and globality.
Globality is understood not only as a ‘condition’, as Steger stated (2013), but also as the spatiality
that ‘describes a place, a domain (…) globality identifies the planet – the world as a totality – as a
place of social relations’ (Scholte, 2005b, p. 3). For Scholte, globality is a condition that indicates
that social relations occur in a place that is not only national or regional but overflows territorial
spaces transcending borders. Thus, globalization refers to a growing process of ‘transplanetary’
interconnectivity that affects all spheres of life.

Neoliberal globalization as a negation of post-war ‘three worlds’

Since the economic crisis of 2008, neoliberal globalization (NG) has been at a political and econ-
omic crossroads (W. Liu & Dunford, 2016; Sheppard, 2016). Critical global political economy lit-
erature recognizes that the boom cycles of capitalism can be characterized as processes of
globalization as an increased interdependence of SEFs as a product of an accelerated expansion
and intensification of capitalist accumulation.
Therefore, Karl Polanyi (2001) thesis of the double movement is significant to understanding the
movement of NG and the countermovement in a global, regional, and local scale.
The movement is an expansion and intensification of capitalist relations via the ‘free market’ and
refers to the spatial extension of capitalist relations, incorporating regions into the circuit of capital;
6 J. VADELL AND E. JABBOUR

intensification means a deepening of mercantile relations in the spheres of human life, incorporat-
ing into the commodification process the universe of what Polanyi called fictious commodities:
labour, land, and money (Polanyi, 2001, p. 68). The intensification of neoliberalism – commodifi-
cation – enhanced the geographical expansion of capital in the 1980s: ‘neither must there be any
interference with the adjustment of prices to changed market conditions—whether the prices are
those of goods, labor, land, or money’ (Polanyi, 2001, p. 69). However, for Polanyi, these three fac-
tors are fictitious commodities because ‘the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must
have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them’ (Polanyi, 2001, pp. 72–73).
According to the empirical definition of a commodity they are not commodities. Labor is only another
name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for
entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized;
land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a
token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the
mechanism of banking or state finance. None of them is produced for sale. The commodity description
of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious. (Polanyi, 2001, pp. 72–73).

Likewise, Polanyi’s contribution helps to highlight the methodological critique of liberal and
methodological linearity.
Social history in the nineteenth century was thus the result of a double movement: the extension of the
market organization with respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction with
respect to fictitious ones. While on the one hand markets spread all over the face of the globe and the
amount of goods involved grew to unbelievable dimensions, on the other hand, a network of measures
and policies was integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative
to labor, land, and money. While the organization of world commodity markets, world capital markets,
and world currency markets under the aegis of the gold standard gave unparalleled momentum to the
mechanism of markets, a deep-seated movement sprang into being to resist the pernicious effects of a
market-controlled economy. Society protected itself against the perils inherent in a self-regulating mar-
ket system-this was the one comprehensive feature in the history of the age. (Polanyi, 2001, pp. 79–80)

So, it is worth noting that the countermovement process does not occur in a linear manner and
without contradictions facing the liberal utopia (Polanyi, 2001, p. 3).
According to Samir Amin, the Bretton Woods System (BWS) had a global ambition but coex-
isted in a tripartite uneven world. The period of growth and consolidation of embedded liberalism
in the West was part of one of the ‘three worlds’ of the post-war era, coexisting together with the
Soviet ‘world’ and its sphere of influence and the so-called Third World. The latter can be portrayed
with the ‘Bandung’ project of the decolonized countries of Asia and Africa which, together with
Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), dealt in contradictory ways with the capitalist growth
phase of 1945–1968.
As Amin pointes out: ‘The processes by which the erosion and then the collapse of the three pil-
lars supporting the completed phase of accumulation led to the current (nineties) crisis’ (Amin,
1996, p. 249) showed a contradiction: ‘the space of production (and finance) is becoming globalized
while the spheres of political and social management remain limited by the political frontiers of
states’ (Amin, 1996, p. 250). So, as production moved to Asia and finance globalized, and entered
a phase of supra territorialization, the sphere of politics, society, and labour continued to be admi-
nistered and disciplined within the borders of nation-states.
Hence, the Soviet sphere of influence and Third World were obstacles to the expansion of capit-
alism that had to be broken. History shows that one of these three worlds prevailed in geopolitics and
global political economy until the beginning of the twenty-first century: US hegemony and ILO.
 GLOBALIZATIONS 7

The end of gold/dollar convertibility in 1971 opened a period of preparation for the great political
changes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher governments catalyzing the subsequent process of
financialization that would consolidate the Dollar/Wall Street system (Gowan, 1999). Therefore, NG
was constituted from the hegemony of the USA and assumed its globality by breaking the two major
obstacles that capitalist expansion had: (1) the destruction of the ‘New International Economic
Order’ (NOEI) project, proposed by Third World countries between 1975 and 1982.
The US unilateral rise of interest rates in the 1980s and the subsequent external debt crisis of the
developing countries – after Mexico’s moratorium in 1982 – destroyed the foundations of the Ban-
dung project and strengthened the control of international capital (private banks) in the indebted
peripheral countries, via the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB); (2) the
second moment was the collapse of the Soviet Union (1985–1991) which consolidated the historical
condition of globality to NG.
Hence, in dialectical terms NG was consolidated as a negation/overcome of the post-war arrangement
and ‘three post-war worlds’ strengthening US power and its capitalist SEF in a stage of ‘unipolar moment’,
a situation that facilitated US unilateral actions, with or without existing multilateral institutions.
Thus, neoliberalism constitutes ‘a specific historical manifestation of the capitalist economy’
(Cahill, 2014, p. X), an accelerating process of the expansion and intensification of capitalist
relations based on three pillars: privatization of public assets, financial and trade liberalization,
and re-regulation (deregulation) of national economies. Second, it is a class project (Cahill,
2014; Harvey, 2005; Moghadam, 2021), specifically led by the sectors of a financial corporate class.
The neoliberal ‘movement’ has its beginnings at the end of the 1970s with the financial dereg-
ulation beginning in the US and the disintegration of the Bretton Woods system, which further
strengthened the role of the dollar in the international monetary system and paved the way for a
‘systemic financial expansion’ (Arrighi et al., 1999). The promotion of the goodness of the self-regu-
lated market and the leading role of the financial business segment was crucial link between the
political and economic organization of NG.
Henceforth, the contemporary neo-liberal movement since the 1980s has produced an unequal
shift in the balance of power between social classes (workers/entrepreneurs) within developed
countries and developing countries in the periphery. As Harvey points out, the neoliberal project
is about liberating capital from its constraints (Harvey, 2005, p. 11) and obstacles in the process of
capitalist accumulation.
The restoration of business elite power, disciplining the working classes within national states
with attractive programmes of modernization, individual freedoms, etc., and a programme of
financial liberalization stimulated by the Reagan and Thatcher governments were the catalysts
for increasingly dynamic processes of geographic mobility of capital in its productive (especially
with industries setting up in Asia in general and China in particular) and financial form – centra-
lized in the financial hub of Wall Street and a network of tax havens around the world under the
control of developed countries.
Globalizations process throughout history have geopolitical expression and a power projection
of territoriality. At the height of NG in the 1990s, the geopolitical manifestations of power expan-
sion had the military and financial development of the U.S. and Western SEFs materialized in the
enlargement of NATO, military interventions in several world regions and, especially after 2001, in
Asia and Africa (Lambert, 2022).
The ‘supra-territoriality’ characteristic of NG allows us to understand the process of transcend-
ing territorial geography (Scholte, 2005a) but does not dissolve it. Rather, supra-territoriality comp-
lements and reinforces the dynamics of geographic capitalist expansion.
8 J. VADELL AND E. JABBOUR

Supra-territoriality means transcending geography by: (1) ‘trans-world simultaneity’ (Oke, 2009,
p. 320) where social phenomena extend across the world at the same time and in the same frame of
reference and; (2) ‘“instantaneity”, where certain phenomena move between any points on the pla-
net in no time’ (Scholte, 2005b, p. 5). So, during the evolution of capitalism the compression of
space annuls the time, as predicted by Marx. Finance is the sector of the economy that most closely
reflects this supra-territoriality. It is the most fictitious, instantaneous, and simultaneous sector of
the capitalist expansion process, relatively delinked from territorial space’ (Scholte, 2005b, p. 5).
This subsection attempted to analyse NG as a dialectical and contradictory process of a phase of
the expansion of global capitalism anchored in an expansive phase of the hegemony of the United
States, whose turning point in the twenty-first century was the economic crisis of 2008.

The crisis of neoliberal globalization

The BWS incomplete globalization system and NG reflected phases of US hegemony and its con-
tradictions: the process of expansion of global finance, the growth of large transnational corpor-
ations, the geographical changes in the organization of production, and the monopoly of the
dollar in the global capitalist system.
One aspect of the contemporary interregnum of systemic chaos is what Merino, Bilmes and Bar-
renengoa call a ‘Hybrid and Fragmented World War’ as a tendency to the sharpening of strategic
political contradictions of structural character in the dispute for the reconfiguration of world power
(Merino et al., 2022). In this context, ‘we observe an expansion of confrontations between different
political-social forces, social fractions and classes, and interstate disputes’ (Merino et al., 2022). This
is the contemporary transitional scenario of the NG crisis in whose interstices the ECG is emerging.
As we stated, Globalization is a contradictory process of interconnectivity between SEFs with substan-
tive changes in the space–time relationship. NG was an overcome of the Bretton Woods system, thus, we
argue that the organic interstices of NG enabled the emergence of the embryonic of ‘something new’.
The reproduction of capitalism shows itself unable to overcome the obstacles of ‘supra-territor-
ial’ contradictions of current NG. As highlighted by Giovanni Arrighi et al. (1999) and David Har-
vey (2010), NG cannot be disconnected from the cyclical crises of capitalism, as an inherent
element of its reproduction. The contemporary phase of financialization occurs in a world
where capital moves with greater speed and where geographical distances are compressed generat-
ing accommodations and new interdependence of SEFs.
As Oke (2009) states, following Marx, globalization is a process of ‘annihilation of space by time’
to avoid the systemic crises of capitalism. As Harvey points out, reconstructing the statement of
Marx’s Grundrisse, ‘every barrier (of capital) must be overcome and the overcoming occurs in
the geography of capitalism’ (Harvey, 2010, p. 47). In line with this perspective, Samir Amin refers
to NG as the stage of ‘abstract capitalism’. That is, capitalism, no longer materializes in bourgeois-
landlord families, but rather ‘manifests itself directly and exclusively through the control of money’,
the specificity of existing financialization is ‘spreading the illusion that money “generates its own
offspring” without passing through production, ultimately expressing the abstract character of con-
temporary capitalism’ (Amin, 2013, p. 33).
In the twenty-first century, especially after the 2008 global economic crisis, the contradictions of
neoliberal capitalism and the possibility of overcoming geographical barriers in a potential new
hegemonic cycle reach a new level, conflicting with another geopolitical reality, with a strengthened
PRC. The rise of Chinese SEF, and other emerging nations such as the BRICS (Vadell & Ramos,
2019); the 2008 financial crisis; the saga of Brexit; the COVID-19 pandemic; and the Russian-
 GLOBALIZATIONS 9

Ukrainian conflict remind us that we cannot neglect geopolitics and the role of nation-states as cru-
cial actors of global economic transformations.
Thus, these sets of concatenations of events allow us to imagine some alternative scenarios in an
uncertainty interregnum of ‘systemic chaos’. We point out three prospects: (a) an opportunity to
reinforce US hegemony via NG prescriptions and a new cold war of global geopolitical partition; (b)
a deglobalizing fragmentation process that may be entropic/chaos (Schweller, 2014; Streeck, 2016);
or (c) a crisis that opens the door to new globalization and the reinvention of geopolitics. All possibi-
lities have specific unfolding in the future international order or international orders that are expected
to coexist in a contradictory manner, which for reasons of scope we cannot examine here. Hence, we
argue that in this process we are experiencing an embryonic predominance of the latter.

The pillars of embryonic Embedded Chinese Globalization

The periodization of globalizing stages throughout history and the hegemonic transitions of the
international system are the subjects of intense and rich debates in the social sciences in general
and among historians. We have mentioned the work of Arrighi (Arrighi, 1994; Arrighi et al.,
1999), who has elaborated a theory on hegemonic cycles. We can mention Therborn’s periodiza-
tion, which describes six phases of globalization (Therborn, 2016), even the analysis of Khondker
(2021) who highlights the insufficiency of European-centric approaches that do not provide a truly
global perspective on globalization. In this case, he identifies three major phases of ‘globalizations’.
The first one, in line with Gunder Frank (1998), was the first Eurasian Globalization from 200 BCE
to 1492; the second is the Atlantic Globalization, from 1500 ACE to 1999; and the third, from 2000
to the future, a return to Eurasian (cosmopolitan) Globalization (Khondker, 2021)
Nonetheless, the Amin’s crucial question is still valid: whether recurrence is, in fact, a cyclical
regularity or a predetermined periodicity (Amin, 2006, pp. 142–143). Thus, our approach combines
the subjacent contradictions of the uncertainties of current transitional phase of contemporary glo-
balization with the central concept of SEF, as a totality.
The crisis and scepticism surrounding the global economy since 2008, turned China into a
strong advocate of globalization, especially after the radicalization of the protectionist discourse
of U.S. President Donald Trump. In this regard, PRC President Xi Jinping’s 2017 Davos speech
was paradigmatic (Xi, 2017a). Thus, Xi Jinping appeals to nation-states that they should guide
the process of globalization, because represents a ‘double-edged sword’, and leave it to the
whim of global elites:
We should act proactively and manage economic globalization as appropriate so as to release its posi-
tive impact and rebalance the process of economic globalization. We should follow the general trend,
proceed from our respective national conditions, and embark on the right pathway of integrating into
economic globalization at the right pace (Xi, 2017a)

Chinese official media labelled this effort as globalization 2:0 (Meyers, 2017), other analysts as
reglobalization (Bishop & Payne, 2021; D. Wang & Cao, 2021), and we labelled as Embedded Chi-
nese Globalization. This process represents a particular economic geopolitical power projection of a
Chinese SEF in cooperation with emerging powers and the Global South. In doing so, we defrag-
ment the ECG in material, institutional and ideational components intertwined with each other.
In addition, we point out five main pillars of the ECG that interconnect the material, ideational
and institutional aspects of this totality and stress the expansive power of the Chinese SEF, which is
embryonically changing the neoliberal paradigm in its foundations: the BRI, the new paradigm of
10 J. VADELL AND E. JABBOUR

Cooperation under GDI; the BRICS plus initiative; The Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank
(AIIB) as a China-led multilateralism; and the five principles of Pacific Coexistence and ‘Commu-
nity with shared future for mankind’.

Belt and Road Initiative

We argue that the ‘Belt and Silk Road and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road’ is the infrastructural
platform of the ECG and, as a material expression of the PRC’s expansion of power, shapes it as a
direct challenge to NG. The BRI is characterized as an interconnectivity proposal that was born as a
regional initiative and expanded as a global and inclusive project, reconfiguring the economic
geography through massive investments in infrastructure that have no precedent.
The BRI was born in a context in which China, under Xi Jinping’s leadership, is carrying out var-
ious initiatives that further strengthen the Chinese economy as a: (a) the biggest trade partner of
almost all US Allies, the Global South countries and trade blocs including the European Union
(EU), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Mercosur. The consolidation of this
trend seems to be the most realistic scenario; (b) with the objective of strengthening the value chains
led by China and after the failure of the Trans-Pacific Economic Cooperation Agreement (TPP) led
by the United States, China manages to articulate the RCEP, a kind of ASEAN plus with China, NZ,
Australia, South Korea, and Japan; (c) China is, at the same time, the world’s largest exporter of con-
sumer goods and the largest consumer market; (d) the PRC is today the largest provider of financing
in the world, surpassing the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the
most important player in infrastructure investments for developing countries; (e) being a ‘world fac-
tory’, China has a pivotal position in global supply chain and value chain, an essential factor to under-
stand the failure of decoupling/deglobalization (Crabtree, 2023) and; (f) China is occupying a leading
position in some high-tech domains, such as 5G telecommunication, the pharmaceutical industry,
the automotive industry, the aerospace industry, semiconductors, IT, and robotics.
In September 2013, PRC President Xi Jinping, on his visit to Central Asia, first introduced the
term: ‘Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road’ at Nazarbayev Univer-
sity, Astana, Kazakhstan. Later, in October of the same year, Xi made the announcement in
Indonesia.
Then, a Leading Group for Promoting the BRI was established in China, and two years after the
announcement, in March 2015, the Chinese government published the ‘Vision and Actions for Jointly
Building the Road Economic Belt’ of Silk and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road’ (China, 2015). BRI
aimed to interconnect Asia, Europe, and Africa in the first stage and, in the second moment, as a natural
extension, Latin America and the Caribbean (Y. Wang, 2018) (See Figure 1). In May 2017 and April
2019, the first and second BRI Forums were held (Dunford, 2021, p. 92).
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Third Belt and Road Forum was held in Beijing in October
2023 with the participation of more than 140 nations. In the event, China released 89 multilateral
cooperation documents and detailed 458 concrete cooperative initiatives. Furthermore, the Forum
signals a notable shift in China’s investment strategy and the future participation of Chinese com-
panies. It was also announced the Global Artificial Intelligence Governance (GAIG) Initiative
which follows the Global Development, Security, and Civilization Initiatives (Avdaliani, 2023).
BRI is embedded in a geographic space with important infrastructure projects financed directly
or indirectly by China. In this sense, we argue that BRI is the main pillar of ECG and reinforces and
help to join with other institutional and ideational components. Almost 150 countries signed the
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) of BRI (see Figure 1).
 GLOBALIZATIONS 11

Figure 1. BRI members by year of signature of the MoUs. Source: https://greenfdc.org/countries-of-the-belt-and-

road-initiative-bri/.

The result of 10 years of the BRI brought about almost more than a trillion dollars in Chinese
investments (Joe Leahy et al., 2023). Despite all the contradictions and difficulties involved in a
modernization process, BRI investments helped promote and reduce trade costs (Maliszewska &
van der Mensbrugghe, 2019), foster interconnectivity, and cultural exchange.
Thus, the BRI is the materialization of Chinese way of cooperation and interconnectivity. Some ana-
lysts have called the BRI a kind of Marshall Plan with Chinese characteristics (Li, 2019; Vines, 2017) that
brings with it qualitative changes, which is consolidating parallel institutions of global governance.

New paradigm of cooperation – GDI

The Global Development Initiative (GDI) was announced by President Xi Jinping in September
2021 in the General Debate of the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (Xi,
2021). This initiative is the product of the evolution of a cooperation regime that has been devel-
oping since the officialization of China’s foreign policy of the five principles of peaceful coexistence
in the 1950s, with the Bandung Conference as a milestone (Vadell et al., 2020).
Perhaps the most salient aspect of this evolutionary process of building a new paradigm of
cooperation is reflected in 2 important documents of 2021. The first is ‘China’s International Devel-
opment Cooperation in the New Era’ which reinforces the objectives of the previous white papers
on China’s Foreign Aid in 2011 and 2014 (China-SCPRC, 2011b, 2014). From our point of view, the
innovative point is that China assumes itself as a great power and assumes responsibility as a pro-
vider of international public goods. In this context, the BRI is presented as the most ambitious
12 J. VADELL AND E. JABBOUR

international public good: ‘The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road
are significant public goods China offers to the whole world and a major platform for international
development cooperation’ (China-SCPRC, 2021, pp. 8–9).
The second landmark is an important China’s institutional innovation with a global impact. The
announcement of the Global Development Initiative (GDI) by President Xi at the United Nations
(Xi, 2021) is directly related to the new purposes of the Chinese cooperation agency created in 2018,
the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA). This institution has gained
an important bureaucratic status in China’s power structure, reporting only to the State Council,
and ranking alongside two important ministries: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry
of Commerce (MOFCOM).
In this sense, a holistic paradigm of development cooperation is being consolidated that moves
away from the principles and metrics of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Devel-
opment (OECD) (Bracho, 2018; Domínguez Martín, 2018).
As Mulakala point out,
The BRI and GDI are best seen as parallel tracks. While the BRI is economic growth-oriented, the GDI
is development oriented. The BRI delivers hardware and economic corridors, while the GDI focuses on
software, livelihoods, knowledge transfer, and capacity building. The BRI is market-oriented, where
enterprises play a key role. By contrast, the GDI is public-oriented, delivering grants and development
assistance. While the BRI’s pathways are mostly bilateral and regional, involving MOUs with partner
countries, the GDI promotes diverse partnerships with multilaterals, NGOs, and the private sector. Chi-
na’s National Development and Reform Commission is the main coordinating agency behind the BRI,
whereas the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the CIDCA drive the GDI (Mulakala, 2022, p. 2)

As can be seen, China-led interconnectivity – the ECG as the power projection of a new style of
SEF – challenges the principles of the NG in a symbiotic way that involves institutional innovations,
production, trade, infrastructure investments, and aid in a holistic and dynamic dimension.

BRICS plus
After the economic crisis of 2008, China and other emerging powers have been firm in their
demands for greater participation in global governance institutions such as the International Mon-
etary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) within the G20 and
through the peculiar political formation (PF), the BRICS.
BRICS is a direct outcome of the 2008 financial crisis and become an ongoing process of insti-
tutional evolution. It presents itself as a huge challenge to Western Liberal Order (WLO), or, as
expressed by many politicians and analysts, the rules-based order. BRICS countries have been
meeting annually since 2009 in formal summits. In 2010, South Africa was invited to participate
as a full member under China’s initiative, consolidating the BRICS label. Hence, in the process
of global reordering, the BRICS PF becomes an increasingly important actor in the international
political system.
As an important piece of ECG, the BRICS institutional evolution process was strengthened by sev-
eral important factors. They functioned as catalysts and were: (a) the persistent strengthening China’s
economic power, which surprises analysts due to the novelty of ways of producing and planning in
China, differently from Western economies (Gabriele & Jabbour, 2022; Naughton, 2021); (b) the cri-
sis of neoliberal globalization and multilateralism; (c) the creation of the New Development Bank and
the Contingent Reserve Agreement (NDB-CRA); (d) the Covid-19 pandemic and; (e) the conflict
between Russia and Ukraine, which involves other institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty
 GLOBALIZATIONS 13

Organization (NATO). These factors have revitalized the BRICS and, at the same time, have posed a
major functional dilemma for this PF. As a corollary, this revitalization reinforced China’s initiative
expressed at the Xiamen summit in 2017: the idea of a BRICS plus.
BRICS plus is understood as the process of expanding a PF that brings together a set of inter-
acting SEFs, which were called emerging or re-emerging powers. They agreed to unite their political
forces to achieve substantial changes in global governance (institutional, economic, and ideational),
in a world that is consolidating itself as multicentric. The characteristic of a multicentric world
combines (a) economic aspects, which highlights the displacement of a SEF from the periphery
of the capitalist system to the centre of global capitalism; and (b) political and civilizational aspects,
which comes close to Acharya’s concept of multiplex (2017), a new complex multipolarity. Hence,
BRICS can be defined as a minilateral PF (Vadell, 2022) that unifies the SEFs that constitute it in a
complex way. The complexity is given by the movement of consolidation and growing expansion
that this PF is acquiring, although with institutional contours which are not clearly defined yet
(Arapova & Lissovolik, 2022).
The qualitative change occurred at the XV BRICS Johannesburg summit when the BRICS plus
was presented not only with an ambition to be a multilateral Political Formation, but as an axis of
interconnection between emerging powers and the global south. For reasons of space, we cannot go
into depth, nevertheless, BRICS countries are challenging some foundations of the ILO and the
monetary system dominated by the dollar. Bilateral agreements between these members, the dis-
connection of the Russian Federation from the payment system and trade with the West, and
the role of the New Development Bank project a gradual de-monopolization of the exclusive use
of the dollar in the international trade and payments (De Mott, 2023). In this new institutional
configuration, the Gulf countries, new members of the BRICS plus, will have a new role in strength-
ening the Yuan in the face of gradual de-dollarization (Alshareef, 2023).

AIIB
The reasons for the founding of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are linked to the
2008 financial crisis, the global economic context of the rise of emerging powers, the creation of the
BRICS, and the development of power in China with a series of initiatives such as Belt and Road
Initiative.
AIIB is a Multilateral Development Bank created on the initiative of China in 2014 and opened for
operations in January 2016 (AIIB, 2016). At the beginning of 2021, the AIIB presented itself as a sig-
nificantly consolidated bank, with more than 70 member countries, subscribed capital comparable to
that of established Multilateral Development Banks, and occupying a position political-economic
strategy for China (Zhu, 2019). The AIIB is also the first multilateral financing institution not led
by the United States of America (US) since the end of World War II. For this reason and because
of China’s role in its evolution and performance, we consider it important to understand the func-
tioning of this increasingly relevant financial institution in the designs of a new type of globalization.
More directly, the reasons for the creation of the AIIB are linked to a growing demand for invest-
ments in infrastructure on the Asian continent, justifying the creation of a new development bank in the
region (Bustillo & Andoni, 2018). In a context of Western significant resistance to the proposals for the
creation of new multilateral financing institutions at the beginning of the 2010 decade (Wihtol, 2014).
The United States reacted in a hesitant and confused manner to this multilateralism with Chi-
nese characteristics, especially after former British Prime Minister James Cameron announced the
incorporation of the UK into the institution (Tiezzi, 2015).
14 J. VADELL AND E. JABBOUR

As Freeman (2019) highlights, the American response to the emergence of the AIIB has been
erratic. In the final four years of the Obama Administration, the US changed its strategy several
times, varying at first from accepting the new multilateral bank to rejecting the bank, or discoura-
ging the affiliation of allies, without achieving success – since the group of countries of central
capitalism (G7) are founding members of the AIIB – . This position was maintained during the
Trump Administration, which expressed its disagreements with the bank in its participation in
the AIIB summit in 2019, in Luxembourg.
The US position is that the AIIB should integrate into the existing network of Multilateral Banks
under decisive US hegemony in the ILO. Thus, Freeman (2019) considers that the result of this
erratic position is that the success of the AIIB has translated into a Chinese victory in the current
geopolitical dispute with the USA (Freeman, 2019).

Five principles of pacific coexistence and community with shared future for mankind
The ideational aspects of the emergent ECG are directly linked to the relationship of the Chinese
rule of internal law with the rule of international law. As Staiano points out, the ‘Comprehensive
Rule of Law’:
generated a political-juridical concordance between the current implementation of the rule of internal
law and the creation of a rule of international law, through China’s foreign relations policy. This new
paradigm aims to build a new type of international relations, of a people-centred-approach to global
governance. (Staiano, 2023, p. 52).

The ECG has ideological foundations and is grounded in two sets of constructs of international
law. The first one goes back to the 5 principles of peaceful coexistence: (1) mutual respect for each
other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; (2) mutual non-aggression; (3) mutual non-interfer-
ence in each other’s internal affairs; (4) equality and mutual benefit; and (5) peaceful co-existence
(United-Nations, 1954). The initial appearance was in a treaty signed in April 1954 between China
and India, which was the building block of the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference in Indonesia in
1955 (Asian-African-Conference, 1955). These principles have guided China’s foreign policy up
to the present day.
The second foundation is the formation of an embryonic new international normative which has
its expression in the idea of a Community with Shared Future for Mankind – CSFM (Staiano, 2023,
pp. 52–53). The construction of the idea was gradual until it was legally consolidated. The main idea
appeared in September 2011, in the White Paper on Peaceful Development (China-SCPRC, 2011a),
and later in a speech by the then Prime Minister Wen Jiabao during the XIV China-ASEAN Sum-
mit. This expression was taken up by Hu Jintao in the opening speech of the XVIII National Con-
gress of the Communist Party in 2012 (Hu, 2012).
Nevertheless, it was Xi Jinping, in his famous 2015 speech on the occasion of the 70th anniver-
sary of the United Nations, who expressed the idea of building ‘a community of shared destiny for
mankind’ (Xi, 2015), which includes five aspects: political association, security, economic develop-
ment, cultural exchanges, and the environment. This perspective was reaffirmed in a speech at the
UN in January 2017 (Xi, 2017c) and in October of the same year in the report of the XIX National
Congress of the Communist Party of China: the essential need to ‘build a community with a shared
future’ (Xi, 2017b).
In a 2018 reform, the notion of a CSFM was incorporated into the Constitution of the PRC, as
part of Xi Jinping’s thinking about socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era. Thus, the
 GLOBALIZATIONS 15

CSFM became a key objective of China’s soft power in international relations and its goal of creat-
ing a new international order and new convivium, that includes relationality, human authority, and
symbiosis (Staiano, 2023, p. 66).

Final remarks
Our concluding remarks serve a dual purpose. Firstly, we develop our argument from the critical
theory of global political economy based on the thought of Marx, Polanyi, Amin, etc., to redefine
and re-signify the concept of globalization to understand a particular expansion and projection of
power of contemporary China. For this task, we rescued and used the concept Social-Economic
Formation and, subsequently, we created a concept: Embedded Chinese Globalization, as a process
of interconnectivity and interdependence between SEFs led by China in contemporary times. We
argue that the current process of ‘reglobalization’ by ECG is a historical product of the contradic-
tions of NG and the capitalist system, analysed in the paper.
So, the underlying contradiction is: if on the one hand, the BRI, BRICS, and the new paradigm of
international cooperation challenge the foundations of the NG, on the other, it presents itself as a
way out/response to the crisis of the global capitalist system at an impasse. China-driven global
countermovement, in Polanyi’s terms, confronts the Western SEFs led by the group of powers
that Samir Amin defined as the ‘imperialist triad’ – US, EU, and Japan – (Amin, 1997), but without
explicitly proposing the destruction of their normative bases, but as a way of global overcoming. In
fact, this process of Chinese power expansion exposes the weaknesses and contradictions of global
governance based on the Western narrative of rules-based order or liberal world order (Babic,
2020), a kind of ‘restrict multilateralism’.
In this paper, we argue that we are experiencing the emergence of a new embryonic globalization
that we call ECG in a transitional context of systemic chaos. Nonetheless, this does not mean that it
will succeed in the face of the contradictions of the GN. As Amin reminds us, there are no laws of
transitional periods. What we intend to leave open for future research is the study of new (reinven-
tion) geopolitical configurations as a result of this transformation process.
Secondly, in the last part of the paper, we open the possibility of a research agenda focused on
studying the evolution of the embryonic institutions of the ECG. Many institutional developments
and legal frameworks are in the construction process, from those that are incumbent upon the BRI
and international legal mechanisms for investment disputes (Sun, 2023), as well as some rules for
the use of alternative currencies to the dollar for international trade, an initiative that may flourish
in the BRICS.

Notes
1. Hegel’s term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications. it is the synthesis or the nega-
tion of the negation. It defines, in the same concept: negation, preserving, and overcoming/surpass (the
German verb aufheben means ‘to cancel’, ‘to keep’ and ‘to pick up’).
2. We use both social formation and social-economic formations as synonymous.
3. We will deepen this point in the empirical part.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
16 J. VADELL AND E. JABBOUR

Funding
This work was supported by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior [grant number
304103/2018-7].

Notes on contributors
Javier Vadell is an Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations of the Pontifical Catholic
University of Minas Gerais (PUC Minas). He is also visiting Professor at National University of Rosario
(UNR), Argentina, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), and at Jiaxing University,
China. He is Research Fellow at Huaqiao University, Xiamen. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Estudos Interna-
cionais, Journal of International Relations of PUC Minas. He is a researcher at CNPq, Brazil. He is a CLACSO
‘China and the Map of world power’ working group member. He has published numerous articles and book
chapters about Latin American international politics and China.
Elias Jabbour is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the State University of Rio de
Janeiro (FCE-UERJ), at the Graduate Program in Economic Sciences, and at the Graduate Program in Inter-
national Relations (UERJ). He is a Consultant to the Presidency at New Development Bank (NDB), Shanghai.
He is an author of books and more than a hundred articles on topics related to socialism and the Chinese
development process. He has experience in geography, human and economic geography, political economy,
international political economy, and economic planning. The main topics of research are China, the transition
to socialism, national and comparative development strategies, the Marxist category of economic-social for-
mation, and the independent thinking of Ignacio Rangel.

ORCID
Javier Vadell http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5398-6083
Elias Jabbour http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0946-1519

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