Global Economic Crisis and the ‘Spatial Fix’ of China’s World Factory: The Great ‘Long March’ Inland

Abstract

China has already become the world’s second largest economy and continues to post a double-digit rate of growth despite the global downturn, even though its economy has slowed significantly since 2011 (NSB 2013; Wassener 2012). More remarkable than the numeric size of China’s economy per s is the extraordinary scale at which labour is being combined with capital to transform raw materials into commodities (Henderson and Nadvi 2011). By 2010, China’s GDP was only about 40 per cent of that of the United States, but it has since overtaken the latter as the largest manufacturer on earth (Yao and Zhang 2011). China’s emerging ‘world factory’ has been deeply integrated into global capitalism, and the China model critically depends on exports to balance its economy (Lardy 2011; Peck and Zhang 2013), although it would be inappropriate to have China classified as an export-led economy given the primacy of its domestic markets (cf. Chapter 9 of this volume). Especially after joining the WTO in December 2001, the country has witnessed a skyrocketing of growth in trade and foreign direct investment (Naughton 2007), and accordingly an increase in China’s dependence on trade and global capital (Liu et al. 2009). In 2008, mainland China already accounted for nearly 9 per cent of the world’s total commodity exports, and a year later, China overtook Germany to become the largest exporter in the world (NSB 2010).