The Coming Systemic Cycle of Accumulation and China

The article treats the current world economic crisis within the systemic cycles of accumulation framework developed by G. Arrighi. The ‘systemic chaos’ manifests the decline of ‘the long twentieth century’ of American hegemony, with countries struggling for dominance in a coming capital expansion cycle. G. Arrighi assumed that China could be a new global leader. However, his arguments were rather general, while modern economics requires more rigourous evidence. The article suggests explicit technological and institutional criteria to capture signs of a rising economic hegemony already in transitory epochs, which are changes in energy consumption and external economic policies. The approach is theoretically grounded and verified with the historic data on the British and the US capital accumulation cycles, and then is taken towards the modern Chinese economy. The findings suggest that China has been improving opportunities to gain world leadership. However, questions remain open about the possibility of a polycentric world, as well as about key institutional parameters and early indicators of ‘long’ cycles. These issues require further research.