Beyond Bilateralism: What the Statistics Don’t Tell Us

Abstract

As we have seen in the Introduction, the growth of the Chinese economy in general, and the growth of Chinese exports in particular, have led to a growing strand of literature assessing the shifting balance of power in the global political economy. But as also argued in the Introduction, considerations of power in the global political economy are often misguided because political analyses of economic relations still rely too strongly on conceptions of bilateral relations between nation states. By considering the nature of post-Fordist production and globalisation, different conceptions of the location of power emerge that are not necessarily territorially bound.