Capitalists need the state. Without the state’s help, the wealthy often cannot accumulate the resources necessary to begin capitalist production (what Marx called “primitive accumulation”) — even within market economies.

In sixteenth-century England, the process of primitive accumulation began with the state-sanctioned enclosure of common lands; it continued for several centuries, as European monarchs empowered merchants in exchange for wartime financial assistance. By the eighteenth century, a small class of English merchants had hoarded much of the country’s capital and land. We all know what happened next.

According to the sociologist Ho-fung Hung, eighteenth-century China also had a thriving market economy, but its political elites suppressed the merchant class’s accumulation of capital: no primitive accumulation, no industrial revolution. In his Marxist scholarship, Hung explores the implications of this history on China’s ascendancy as global economic superpower. His books include The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World, City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule, and Clash of Empires: From “Chimerica” to the “New Cold War.” The future, for Hung, is not Chinese world dominance, but a return to the kind of capitalist-imperialist rivalry described by Vladimir Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.