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Understanding China’s economic miracle

June 15, 2021 CEN_com 0

China has recorded the greatest economic growth by a major country in the whole of human history. In parallel, China has produced the most rapid increase in living standards of any major country in human history. A new book China’s Great Road collects together in English a number of analyses by John Ross on China’s economy and its relations with the world published in 2010-2021. The reasons for this economic […]

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Governance in China: A socialist market economy with strong State capacity

June 14, 2021 CEN_com 0

“China will continuously work on striking a balance between developing its economy and promoting energy conservation and emissions reductions by rolling out more detailed plans and policies to guide targeted industries and enterprises and progressing in adopting and developing clean energy.“ The market economy is mainly reflected in what role the market plays in the allocation of resources, and the economy is based on independent decision-making, investment and management decisions […]

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Ecological civilization: A new development paradigm

June 13, 2021 CEN_com 0

By Pan Jiahua, Professor of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences University, with assistance from Yang Xinran. Almost every strategic study on environment and development solicited by the Chinese government refers to ‘ecological civilization’. Successive presidents have connected their names to it. The simplest interpretation of this term has been as the Chinese equivalent of sustainable development in China. But beyond that, what does ‘ecological civilization’ mean? Pan Jiahua explains […]

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Marxism and the Origins of the Ecological Critique

June 8, 2021 CEN_com 0

John Bellamy Foster’s The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2020) shows the role played by biologists and other scientists with a non-mechanistic, materialist outlook, alongside various Marxists, in laying the foundations of ecology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. John Bellamy Foster’s book The Return of Nature picks up where the author left off 20 years ago in Marx’s Ecology, which, as the title indicates, addresses the […]

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All the questions socialists have about China but were too afraid to ask

June 8, 2021 CEN_com 0

Alexander Norton interviews Scottish writer Keith Lamb, who has lived and taught in China for two decades. Keith Lamb is a University of Oxford graduate with a MSc degree in Contemporary Chinese studies and works as a translator of academic texts. His primary research interests are China’s international relations. He talks about his experience of how China’s socialist system measures up to the expectations of a Western socialist expat who […]

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A Resource for Scientific Radicals – The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology

May 27, 2021 CEN_com 0

A review of John Bellamy Foster’s The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology By Dr Camilla Royle The Return of Nature is a genealogy of ecological thinking. The word ‘ecology’ was not in common usage until the twentieth century, leading many to consider ecological thinking a fairly recent development. However, in this impressive volume, Professor John Bellamy Foster convincingly identifies a materialist ecological sensibility within works dating back a century prior to […]

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Ecological Civilization: China’s counter to “Sustainable Development”?

May 27, 2021 CEN_com 0

China’s concept of ecological civilisation is meant to counter the Western view of sustainable development and assert its intellectual and political leadership on environmental issues. Over the last three decades, Chinese intellectuals, government officials, party stalwarts and state leaders have toyed with the concept of ‘ecological civilisation’ (EC) to frame their environmental ideology and management of environmental problems. Domestically, EC has provoked discussion among Chinese intellectuals on its implications for […]

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Ecological Civilisation: A Challenge to Liberal Environmentalism?

May 27, 2021 CEN_com 0

Adjunct Professor Berthold Kuhn looks at the specific features of the concept and analyses from the perspectives of national policy making and international cooperation. The West, and environmental liberals more broadly, would benefit from a better understanding of and engagement with China’s experience of environmental policy making. He advocates paper increasing international engagement with China on environmental discourses and policy making. Some consider the concept, with historically charged references to […]

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Ecological Civilisation – China’s “Eight Principles”

May 27, 2021 CEN_com 0

The concept of ecological civilisation serves as a guide for China’s fast-track endeavour to tackle the challenges facing its environment and ecosystems, respond to the public’s aspirations for a pleasant and eco-friendly living environment and promote sustainable development in a balanced manner. It lends an ideological impetus to China’s active involvement in global ecological and environmental governance to become an important player, contributor and leader in the global endeavour to […]

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Capitalism and Robbery

May 25, 2021 CEN_com 0

The Expropriation of Land, Labor, and Corporeal Life From Monthly Review – https://monthlyreview.org/category/2019/volume-71-issue-07-december/ “The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil constitutes the basis of the capitalist mode of production. ” — “Karl Marx 1 “The power of abstraction,” Karl Marx noted, is absolutely crucial to the theoretical analysis of historical systems, as exemplified by his critique of capitalist political economy.2 But while the force of abstraction is […]