The liberal-democratic world order is confronting the rise of authoritarian state-led corporate interventions. This book explains how and why.

In the past three decades, China has risen from near collapse to a powerhouse -- upending nearly every convention on the world stage, whether policy or business. China is now the globe’s second largest economy, second largest exporter, a manufacturing machine that has lifted 500 million of its citizens from poverty while producing more than one million US dollar millionaires. Then why do China’s leaders describe the nation’s economic model as “unstable and unsustainable”? Because it is. James McGregor has spent 25 years in China as a businessman, journalist and author. In this, his latest highly readable book, he offers extensive new research that pulls back the curtain on China’s economic power. He describes the much-vaunted “China Model” as one of authoritarian capitalism, a unique system that, in its own way, is terminating itself. It is proving incompatible with global trade and business governance. It is threatening multinationals, which fear losing their business secrets and technology to China’s mammoth state-owned enterprises. It is fielding those SOEs – China’s “national champions” -- into a global order angered by heavily subsidized state capitalism. And it is relying on an outdated investment and export model that’s running out of steam. What has worked in the past, won’t work in the future. The China Model must be radically overhauled if the country hopes to continue its march toward prosperity. The nation must consume more of what it makes. It must learn to innovate. It must unleash private enterprise. And the Communist Party bosses? They must cede their pervasive and smothering hold on economic power to foster the growth, and thus social stability, that they can’t survive without. Government must step back, the state-owned economy must be brought to heel, and opportunity must be freed. During the Tang Dynasty, an official in the imperial court observed: “No ancient wisdom, no followers.” He was lamenting that regime was headed alone into dangerous and uncharted waters without any precedent for guidance. Again today – as McGregor makes clear – this is China’s greatest challenge.

Authoritarian capitalism is rapidly evolving, intensifying and spreading across the globe. This updated second edition book demonstrates that the recent resurgence of fascism and repressive democracies are connected to and symptomatic of the fundamental authoritarianism of capitalism.

Questions the capacity of the present political system to sustain record economic gowth in Singapore, due to internal contradictions and imposed institutional arrangements.

This book is the product of three years of empirical research, four years in politics, and a lifetime in a country experiencing three different regimes. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, it provides a fresh answer to a simple yet profound question: why has liberal democracy retreated? Scheiring argues that Hungary’s new hybrid authoritarian regime emerged as a political response to the tensions of globalisation. He demonstrates how Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz exploited the rising nationalism among the working-class casualties of deindustrialisation and the national bourgeoisie to consolidate illiberal hegemony. As the world faces a new wave of autocratisation, Hungary’s lessons become relevant across the globe, and this book represents a significant contribution to understanding challenges to democracy. This work will be useful to students and researchers across political sociology, political science, economics and social anthropology, as well democracy advocates.

We're all familiar by now with the ways that Donald Trump uses digital media to communicate, from the ridiculous to the terrifying. This book digs deeper into the use of those tools in politics to show how they have facilitated the rise of authoritarianism, nationalism, and right-wing ideologies around the world. Christian Fuchs here applies an updated Marxist frame, along with insights drawn from the Frankfurt School, to show the pernicious role of social media in the hands of nationalist politicians, and the ways in which it has been used to spread right-wing ideology far and wide, and make it seem like an ordinary part of contemporary political discourse. Fuchs diagnoses this problem in stark terms, but he doesn't stop there: he also lays out ways to fight it, and analyzes the prospects for pushing past capitalism and renewing the left.

For the first time in history, the globe is dominated by one economic system. Capitalism prevails because it delivers prosperity and meets desires for autonomy. But it also is unstable and morally defective. Surveying the varieties and futures of capitalism, Branko Milanovic offers creative solutions to improve a system that isn’t going anywhere.

During the past decade, the potential offered by Brazil's size, resources, and location has begun to be realized. There are, however, a number of international and domestic obstacles to the country's continued development, as indicated by its extreme inflation rate and its foreign indebtedness. There are also serious questions about the social and political results of the Brazilian approach to development: Brazil has become something of a test case for whether the Western, or capitalist, orientation can achieve development in more than strictly economic terms. Emphasizing key aspects of Brazil's economy, politics, and society, the authors present an overall analysis of the present system and provide a base from which to assess Brazil's future development.

As the People's Republic of China has grown in economic power, so too have concerns about what its sustained growth and expanding global influence might mean for the established global order. Explorations of this changing dynamic in daily reporting as well as most recent scholarship ignore the part played by forces emanating from the global capitalist system in the PRC's failures as well as its successes. China scholar Arif Dirlik reflects in Complicities on a wide range of concerns, from the Tiananmen Square tragedy to the spread of Confucius Institutes across more than four hundred campuses worldwide, including nearly one hundred in the United States. Eschewing popular stereotypes and simple explanations, Dirlik's discussion stresses foreign complicity in encouraging the PRC's imperial ambitions and disdain for human rights. Eager for economic gain, the United States, Europe, and other Western countries have been complicit in supporting the PRC's authoritarian capitalism. Such support has been a key factor in nourishing the PRC's hegemonic aspirations. Infatuation with the PRC's incorporation in global capitalism has been important to Communist Party leaders' ability to suppress all memory and mention of Tiananmen, and their continuing abuse of human rights. More recently, the PRC's focus has migrated to "soft power" as a means of expanding global influence, with organizations like the Confucius Institutes exploiting foreign educational institutions to promote the political aims of the state.

Despite the severity of the global economic crisis and the widespread aversion towards austerity policies, neoliberalism remains the dominant mode of economic governance in the world. What makes neoliberalism such a resilient mode of economic and political governance? How does neoliberalism effectively reproduce itself in the face of popular opposition? States of Discipline offers an answer to these questions by highlighting the ways in which today’s neoliberalism reinforces and relies upon coercive practices that marginalize, discipline and control social groups. Such practices range from the development of market-oriented policies through legal and administrative reforms at the local and national-level, to the coercive apparatuses of the state that repress the social forces that oppose various aspects of neoliberalization. The book argues that these practices are built on the pre-existing infrastructure of neoliberal governance, which strive towards limiting the spaces of popular resistance through a set of administrative, legal and coercive mechanisms. Exploring a range of case studies from across the world, the book uses ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ as a conceptual prism to shed light on the institutionalization and employment of state practices that invalidate public input and silence popular resistance.