BERKELEY SOCIOLOGY FORUM
Wednesday, April 13, 5-7.30p.m., 402 Barrows Hall
THE CHINA BOOM
Ho-fung Hungis Associate Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He will present his book The China Boom: Why China will not Rule the World with responses from Tom Gold, You-tien Hsing and Gillian Hart.
Ho-fung Hung is the author of the award-winning book, Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty (Columbia University Press, 2011). He has written widely about the history of China as well as its place in the world today. In his latest book, China Boom, Hung traces the history of capitalism in China, contesting conventional Weberian theses by showing how its origin lies in a century-long process of primitive accumulation that laid the basis of its dynamic capitalism today. Far from challenging the present world order, capitalism in China is an effective prop of US hegemony; and far from saving capitalism its export driven logic threatens to unravel within China and create havoc in the rest of the world. Magnificent in its historical scope China Boom paints an inglorious future – unless China can manage to reconstruct the internal structure of its economy. Ho-fung Hung is a leading representative of a new generation of world systems analysts who focus on the complex intersection of national contradictions and global dynamics.
Excerpts from China Boom can be found at http://berkeleysociologyforum.weebly.com/
Tom Gold is Professor of Sociology and author of State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (Sharpe, 1986) and many articles on civil society in China.
You-tien Hsing is Professor of Geography at Berkeley and author of Making Capitalism in XChina: The Taiwan Connection (Oxford, 1998) and The Great Urban Transformation: The Politics of Land and Property in China (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Gillian Hart is Professor of Geography at Berkeley and author of Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (University of California Press, 2002) and Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (University of Georgia Press, 2014).