Why China matters for the Global South and world system

Editor's note: John Pang is a former Senior Counsel to the Prime Minister's Office of Malaysia. The video reflects the interviewee's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Since we have the happy occasion of the 75th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, let's look at this in the longer-term horizon as well, in the full context of these 75 years – it's three quarters of a century. The most important achievement of China's growth story over the last decades is the manner in which it has been accomplished. That is, without structural dependency on imperialism and war.

That dependence on war and imperialism has been structural to the development of the West. Every one of its major economies has directly or indirectly depended on a political economy, on a global political economy, sustained by colonialism, by extractive relationships, secured at the barrel of a gun.

This uniquely non-colonial, non-imperialist path is truly something new. It is an achievement of world, historic importance. It is going to change the nature of the world system. It is going to enable the development, the economic unshackling of the Global South.

To understand the full significance of the Global South's growing trade and investment ties with China, I think we have to appreciate the issue in terms of the old global political economy that the rise of China is both upending and putting to an end.

That global political economy was based on dollar-denominated external debt, on crippling debt actually for the developing world, on chronic financial crises. In this global political economy, the prospect of becoming a "developed economy," whatever that means, was dangled in front of developing countries of the Global South as a carrot on the stick in front of the beast of burden you were by design never going to reach. It is a growth model only for perpetual subordination of the Global South to the interests of the West or the Global North.

So, what is the importance of the rise of China here? It's that the trade ties of the Global South with China connect the countries of the Global South with the Chinese economy and growth model. This is a model that is driven by investment, not debt, oriented toward the real economy, not financialization.

In other words, it is different from the current hegemonic global model. The trade is what connects the Global South's trade and investment to make it possible for it to plug into the industrial "capitalism" of China rather than the financial capitalism of the West.

But more than that, its real significance is to plug the Global South for the first time in hundreds of years actually into an economic dynamism in which they are not by design. And structurally, the hewers of wood and drawers of water in which they are not by design, lined up to be exploited by monopoly capital.

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