Da crise dos subprimes à pandemia de Covid-19: China e Estados Unidos nas novas dinâmicas globais de poder

Abstract

The general objective of this work is to analyze changes in the relative capabilities and relative aggregate power of China and the United States between 2008 and 2022. We chose this time interval, as 2008 marked the turning point of power relations between the two countries. On the one hand, as a response to the 2008 crisis, the PRC has sought to reduce its vulnerability to the North American market, focusing on domestic consumption and indigenous innovations. On the other hand, the US finds itself increasingly vulnerable to Chinese imports and to China's purchases of US Treasury bonds to finance its deficits and military incursions. Moreover, since the rise of Xi Jinping, the PRC has abandoned the low-profile foreign policy, adopting the striving for achievement strategy, with the objective of achieving the Chinese Dream of making the country a great socialist power by 2049, a fact that has intensified the Sino-American disputes. The period 2022 was chosen because it is the most recent post-pandemic year of covid19. In this way, to fulfill the objective of the work, we carried out, in the first chapter, from the epistemology of Larry Laudan, a bibliographical review of the theoretical debate on the concept of power for Realist, Liberal and Marxist authors of International Relations, with the aim of to verify which are the forms of materialization of power (coercion and/or consensus), which are the necessary capabilities for this purpose and which indicators can be used to measure it. Based on these definitions, we collected proxy indicators to measure economic, financial, military and political capabilities and created a composite indicator for aggregate power based on the arithmetic mean of capabilities, in which political capability holds greater weight. In our conception of power, superiority in these capacities (which work together) defines the structural position of States and directly affects their ability to project themselves internationally, influencing the decision-making of other actors in favor of their objectives. In the second chapter, we describe the rise and fall of the North American systemic cycle of accumulation, the rise of East Asia and the incorporation of China into the capitalist world-economy since 1950s, with the aim of verifying how the PRC took advantage of the systemic chaos (established by the financial expansion of the US cycle) and regional division of labor (through the flying geese) to start its material expansion and become the epicenter of the contemporary global economy, a fact that has raised debates about a possible hegemonic transition between USA and China. Finally, in the third chapter, we analyze in detail the transformations in the relative economic, financial, military and political capacities of China and the USA, and, in the end, we verify the change in the balance of relative aggregate power. Our results point to continued US superiority in military, financial and political capabilities and to Sino-US balance in economic capability. In relative aggregate power, the US still has a high superiority.