Please note this event was moved online due to inclement weather.
According to Johns Hopkins University professor Ho-fung Hung, the recent rivalry between the United States and China is more about global capitalism's shifting balance of economic forces than ideological differences. Since the 1990s, Wall Street and U.S. transnational corporations have integrated Chinese firms into their global financial circuits and supply chains. Their lobbying fostered a U.S.-China policy that advanced economic engagement despite the deep, post-1989 ideological rift between the two countries. After about 2010, the China boom faltered. The Chinese state became ever more aggressive in squeezing U.S. and other foreign capital within China’s sphere of influence to facilitate China’s capital export. In this seminar, Hung explained why this unleashed an inter-capitalist competition that underlined the intensifying U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry and compared it to the United Kingdom-Germany rivalry a century earlier.
This event was jointly sponsored by the Department of Government and the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University.
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Ho-fung Hung is the Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy in the Department of Sociology and the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Protest with Chinese Characteristics (2011), The China Boom (2015), City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule (2022), and Clash of Empires: From “Chimerica” to the “New Cold War” (2022). His academic publications have been translated into at least 11 different languages. His analysis of global and Chinese politics and economy has been cited or featured in major media outlets worldwide.
