Ho‐fung Hung
Biographic Data
| ID | 3696538 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ho‐fung Hung |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ho‐fung |
| FAMILY NAME | Hung |
| SIGNATURE | HUNG H F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Johns Hopkins University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4863-1074 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 173 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
China's Long Economic Slowdown
The China boom has ended. The country's annual economic growth rate has decelerated from a height of more than 14 percent in 2007 to less than 6 percent in 2023. Total indebtedness (including both internal and external debt) surpassed an alarming 365 percent of GDP as of the first quarter of 2024, according to the Institute of International Finance—much higher than comparable middle-income countries like Brazil (208 percent), Argentina (152 perce…
China's 'state capitalism' in comparative and historical perspectives
The persistent and increasing domination of the state in China's contemporary capitalist development leads many to apply the vague concept of state capitalism to China's economic model. Comparing China with the earlier Asian developmental states, I discuss the distinctiveness of China's state capitalism, underlined by the state's paternalistic disposition toward capital and the weakness in private property protection. I argue that the subordinati…
City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule
For decades, Hong Kong has maintained precarious freedom at the edge of competing world powers. In City on the Edge, Ho-fung Hung offers a timely and engaging account of Hong Kong's development from precolonial times to the present, with particular focus on the post 1997 handover period. Through careful analysis of vast economic data, a myriad of political events, and intricate networks of actors and ideas, Hung offers readers insight into the fr…
The Dollar Cycle of International Development, 1973–2017
The Virus, the Dollar, and the Global Order: The Covid-19 Crisis in Comparative Perspective
In 2003, the SARS pandemic led to a framework of global public health governance which was characterized by cooperation between the USA and China, and China's increasing influence in the World Health Organization. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, major economies of the world, above all the USA, established the standard of aggressive fiscal and monetary expansion to mitigate any major crisis of the global economy. The effectiven…
Recent Trends in Global Economic Inequality
Since the 1980s, globalization has reduced between-country inequality and increased within-country inequality in most countries. There has been a debate about whether global inequality, which combines both between- and within-country inequalities, increased or decreased. With more adequate and updated data over the past two decades, this debate has been settled. Global inequality unmistakably diminished in the age of globalization. Underlying thi…
The periphery in the making of globalization: The China Lobby and the Reversal of Clinton’s China Trade Policy, 1993–1994
Many studies suggest that globalization is a process initiated by corporations and states in advanced countries that pressures or encourages developing countries to open themselves to the globalized economy. This paper illustrates, with the case of China, that developing countries have significant power to initiate and shape trade liberalization. Using sources from both the United States and China, it delineates how the Chinese state, driven by i…
Trade Battles: Activism and the Politicization of International Trade Policy
Historicizing Embedded Autonomy
The theory of “embedded autonomy” suggests that a developmental state needs to maintain a balance between autonomy and embeddedness to succeed. This paper argues that such a balance is not stable but contingent on an alignment of local, national, and global factors. With the local developmental state of Dongguan, China, as an example, we see how the global economy's search of low-cost labor and the national government's encouragement of decentral…
The Rise of Empires and Nationalism
A Ascensão Da China, a Ásia E O Sul Global
Muitos veem o milagre da economia chinesa como uma ilustração de um modelo de desenvolvimento alternativo à ortodoxia neoliberal promovida por Washington. Também se assume muitas vezes que o envolvimento econômico e político da China nos países do sul global, particularmente nos vizinhos asiáticos, está criando uma nova ordem geopolítica que desafiaria a dominação norte-americana. Neste artigo, argumenta-se que o milagre do desenvolvimento orient…
Hegemonic Crisis, Comparative World-Systems, and the Future of Pax Americana
The China boom: Why China will not rule the world
Many thought China's rise would fundamentally remake the global order. Yet, much like other developing nations, the Chinese state now finds itself in a status quo characterized by free trade and American domination. Through a cutting-edge historical, sociological, and political analysis, Ho-fung Hung details the competing interests and economic realities that temper the dream of Chinese supremacy--forces that are stymieing growth throughout the g…
From Qing Empire to the Chinese nation: An Incomplete Project
Money Supply, Class Power, and Inflation: Monetarism Reassessed
Recent sociological work shows that pro-market neoliberal policies across advanced capitalist countries are due to distributional struggle between classes in the 1970s and 1980s. The orthodox monetarist view, alternatively, sees neoliberal reform as a nonpolitical attempt to end the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. From this perspective, monetary and fiscal expansions brought high inflation, and central bank discipline and government austerity is…
Grandpa State Instead of Bourgeois State: Patrimonial Politics in China’s Age of Commerce, 1644–1839
From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent bourgeois and the concomitant rise of a liberal, populist version of Confucianism, which advocated a more decentralized and less authoritarian political system in the last few decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But after the collapse of the Ming Empire and the est…
Inter-Asian (Post-)Neoliberalism
Trois visions de la conscience autochtone à Hong Kong
Three Views of Local Consciousness in Hong Kong
Korean translation availableChan, Koon-chung. 2012. Zhongguo tianchao zhuyi yu Xianggang (China's Heavenly Doctrine and Hong Kong). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.Chin Wan. 2011. Xianggang Chengbang lun (On Hong Kong as a city state). Hong Kong: Enrich Publishing.Jiang Shigong. 2008. Zhongguo Xianggang: wenhua yu zhengzhi de shiye (China's Hong Kong: cultural and political perspectives). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press
China’s Rise Stalled
China: Saviour or Challenger of the Dollar Hegemony
Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order in 1971, the US dollar has successfully maintained its global hegemony despite the US's declining share in the global economy, thanks largely to the US's political-military supremacy. The recent rise of China poses a serious dilemma to the US. On the one hand, China's export-oriented development has provided the US with low-cost manufactured imports and cheap credit. On the other hand, the US…
Labor Politics Under Three Stages of Chinese Capitalism
This essay outlines the three stages of Chinese capitalist development in the 1980s through the 2000s and discusses how labor politics played out differently in each of the three stages and helped shape the next stage. Whence the erosion of living standards of urban workers amid out-of-control inflation and corruption in the late 1980s led to workers' participation in the 1989 democratic movement, the full-fledged neoliberal reforms implemented b…
Is China Saving Global Capitalism from the Global Crisis
Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty
The origin of political modernity has long been tied to the Western history of protest and revolution, the currents of which many believe sparked popular dissent worldwide. Reviewing nearly one thousand instances of protest in China from the eighteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries, Ho-fung Hung charts an evolution of Chinese dissent that stands apart from Western trends. Hung samples from mid-Qing petitions and humble plaints to the emperor.…
O braço direito dos Estados Unidos? o dilema da República Popular da China na crise global
Contra as previsões de que a China substituirá em breve os EUA como a principal potência econômica mundial, o autor argumenta que o modelo de crescimento chinês, voltado à exportação e lastreado por enormes reservas em dólares, confinou o país asiático a um papel subordinado, ao qual boa parte de sua elite se mantém comprometida
Rise of China and the global overaccumulation crisis
This paper assesses the sources of potential instability of China's political economy by expositing the limits of the post-Mao regime of capital accumulation in historical and comparative perspectives. It argues that the new spatial and socio-political orders under this regime, while propelling China's economic miracle, also contribute to the internalization of the global overaccumulation crisis, which has been haunting the world capitalist syste…
Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900
This paper examines the long-term development of Orientalism as an intellectual field, with the European learning of China between ca.1600 and ca.1900 as an exemplary case. My analysis will be aided by a theoretical framework based on a synthesis of the world-system and network perspectives on long-run intellectual change. Analyzing recurrent debates on China within European intellectual circles, I demonstrate that the Western conception of the E…
Money Supply, Class Power, and Inflation: Monetarism Reassessed
Recent sociological work shows that pro-market neoliberal policies across advanced capitalist countries are due to distributional struggle between classes in the 1970s and 1980s. The orthodox monetarist view, alternatively, sees neoliberal reform as a nonpolitical attempt to end the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. From this perspective, monetary and fiscal expansions brought high inflation, and central bank discipline and government austerity is…
Agricultural Revolution and Elite Reproduction in Qing China: The Transition to Capitalism Debate Revisited
Recent actor-centric theory about the historical rise of capitalism emphasizes the role of the autonomous agrarian elite in fostering a sustained agricultural revolution. This revolution generated ample agrarian surplus, in the form of rural elite's elevated income, to fuel a capitalist-industrial takeoff in late-eighteenth-century England. The nontransition to capitalism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China, despite the vast surplus gener…
Recent Trends in Global Economic Inequality
Since the 1980s, globalization has reduced between-country inequality and increased within-country inequality in most countries. There has been a debate about whether global inequality, which combines both between- and within-country inequalities, increased or decreased. With more adequate and updated data over the past two decades, this debate has been settled. Global inequality unmistakably diminished in the age of globalization. Underlying thi…
Globalization and Global Inequality: Assessing the Impact of the Rise of China and India, 1980-2005
This article uses updated purchasing power parity measurements of countries’ income and a new strategy for approximating global inequality to examine how global income inequality—as a combination of increasing average within-country inequality and decreasing between-country inequality—changed in the period 1980–2005. In view of the overwhelming influence of China and India on trends in global inequality change, the authors base their strategy on …
China: Saviour or Challenger of the Dollar Hegemony
Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order in 1971, the US dollar has successfully maintained its global hegemony despite the US's declining share in the global economy, thanks largely to the US's political-military supremacy. The recent rise of China poses a serious dilemma to the US. On the one hand, China's export-oriented development has provided the US with low-cost manufactured imports and cheap credit. On the other hand, the US…
The periphery in the making of globalization: The China Lobby and the Reversal of Clinton’s China Trade Policy, 1993–1994
Many studies suggest that globalization is a process initiated by corporations and states in advanced countries that pressures or encourages developing countries to open themselves to the globalized economy. This paper illustrates, with the case of China, that developing countries have significant power to initiate and shape trade liberalization. Using sources from both the United States and China, it delineates how the Chinese state, driven by i…
From Qing Empire to the Chinese nation: An Incomplete Project
"One country, two systems" and its antagonists in Tibet and Taiwan
In turning the vast and diverse territory of the Qing Empire into a singular nation-state, Beijing has kept redefining its conception and institution of nationhood in response to challenges from the recalcitrant or not-yet-incorporated peripheral regions including Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Since 1949, Beijing has attempted to solve the Tibet and Taiwan questions with the institutional design of "one country, two systems." This design, widely …
Early Modernities and Contentious Politics in Mid-Qing China, c. 1740–1839
In the last three decades, a spate of research brought to light the dynamics of contentious politics in early modern Europe. These studies suggest that surges of commerce and centralized state power led to a transition of contentious politics from reactive to proactive claims, and from violent to non-violent repertoires. This literature assumes the uniqueness of the western experience, and pays little attention to the non-western world. This arti…
The Dollar Cycle of International Development, 1973–2017
China's 'state capitalism' in comparative and historical perspectives
The persistent and increasing domination of the state in China's contemporary capitalist development leads many to apply the vague concept of state capitalism to China's economic model. Comparing China with the earlier Asian developmental states, I discuss the distinctiveness of China's state capitalism, underlined by the state's paternalistic disposition toward capital and the weakness in private property protection. I argue that the subordinati…
Trade Battles: Activism and the Politicization of International Trade Policy
Inter-Asian (Post-)Neoliberalism
Cultural Strategies and the Political Economy of Protest in Mid-Qing China, 1740-1839
In the historical study of contentious politics, political economy theories see the transformation of the dominant form of contention from reactive violence to proactive demonstration in early modern Europe as a result of large-scale political-economic processes like state formation and market expansion. Culturalist theories emphasize instead the significance of large-scale cultural reconstitutions in forging such transformation. Judging between …
Changes and Continuities in the Political Ecology of Popular Protest: Mid-Qing China and Contemporary Resistance
This article will delve into the historical roots of Chinese environmentalism. A wave of recent research has unearthed numerous instances of Chinese state-society conflicts, as well as the ecological crisis precipitated by drastic population and commercial growth in 18th-century China. Based on a survey of protest events derived from archival sources, this contribution analyzes how the mounting ecological crisis and falling capacity of the Qing s…
Allies as Rivals: The U.S., Europe, and Japan in a Changing World-System
The Paradox of Stability Revisited: Colonial Development and State Building in Rural Hong Kong
Hegemonic Crisis, Comparative World-Systems, and the Future of Pax Americana
Labor Politics Under Three Stages of Chinese Capitalism
This essay outlines the three stages of Chinese capitalist development in the 1980s through the 2000s and discusses how labor politics played out differently in each of the three stages and helped shape the next stage. Whence the erosion of living standards of urban workers amid out-of-control inflation and corruption in the late 1980s led to workers' participation in the 1989 democratic movement, the full-fledged neoliberal reforms implemented b…
O braço direito dos Estados Unidos? o dilema da República Popular da China na crise global
Contra as previsões de que a China substituirá em breve os EUA como a principal potência econômica mundial, o autor argumenta que o modelo de crescimento chinês, voltado à exportação e lastreado por enormes reservas em dólares, confinou o país asiático a um papel subordinado, ao qual boa parte de sua elite se mantém comprometida
The Paradox of Stability Revisited: Colonial Development and State Building in Rural Hong Kong
Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900
This paper examines the long-term development of Orientalism as an intellectual field, with the European learning of China between ca.1600 and ca.1900 as an exemplary case. My analysis will be aided by a theoretical framework based on a synthesis of the world-system and network perspectives on long-run intellectual change. Analyzing recurrent debates on China within European intellectual circles, I demonstrate that the Western conception of the E…
Early Modernities and Contentious Politics in Mid-Qing China, c. 1740–1839
In the last three decades, a spate of research brought to light the dynamics of contentious politics in early modern Europe. These studies suggest that surges of commerce and centralized state power led to a transition of contentious politics from reactive to proactive claims, and from violent to non-violent repertoires. This literature assumes the uniqueness of the western experience, and pays little attention to the non-western world. This arti…
Allies as Rivals: The U.S., Europe, and Japan in a Changing World-System
Product Review: Global Social Change: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
Changes and Continuities in the Political Ecology of Popular Protest: Mid-Qing China and Contemporary Resistance
This article will delve into the historical roots of Chinese environmentalism. A wave of recent research has unearthed numerous instances of Chinese state-society conflicts, as well as the ecological crisis precipitated by drastic population and commercial growth in 18th-century China. Based on a survey of protest events derived from archival sources, this contribution analyzes how the mounting ecological crisis and falling capacity of the Qing s…
China and the Future of the World Economy
Japan Focus presents two complementary perspectives on the challenges facing China and the world economy in the context of global over-accumulation. In 1997, China emerged unscathed from the economic collapse that set back Japan and then Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and other high-flying Asian economies. The present analyses pose the question of whether China, too, is now vulnerable, with consequences that will be felt throughout the world economy…
Rise of China and the global overaccumulation crisis
This paper assesses the sources of potential instability of China's political economy by expositing the limits of the post-Mao regime of capital accumulation in historical and comparative perspectives. It argues that the new spatial and socio-political orders under this regime, while propelling China's economic miracle, also contribute to the internalization of the global overaccumulation crisis, which has been haunting the world capitalist syste…
Agricultural Revolution and Elite Reproduction in Qing China: The Transition to Capitalism Debate Revisited
Recent actor-centric theory about the historical rise of capitalism emphasizes the role of the autonomous agrarian elite in fostering a sustained agricultural revolution. This revolution generated ample agrarian surplus, in the form of rural elite's elevated income, to fuel a capitalist-industrial takeoff in late-eighteenth-century England. The nontransition to capitalism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China, despite the vast surplus gener…
China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism
Cultural Strategies and the Political Economy of Protest in Mid-Qing China, 1740-1839
In the historical study of contentious politics, political economy theories see the transformation of the dominant form of contention from reactive violence to proactive demonstration in early modern Europe as a result of large-scale political-economic processes like state formation and market expansion. Culturalist theories emphasize instead the significance of large-scale cultural reconstitutions in forging such transformation. Judging between …
"One country, two systems" and its antagonists in Tibet and Taiwan
In turning the vast and diverse territory of the Qing Empire into a singular nation-state, Beijing has kept redefining its conception and institution of nationhood in response to challenges from the recalcitrant or not-yet-incorporated peripheral regions including Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Since 1949, Beijing has attempted to solve the Tibet and Taiwan questions with the institutional design of "one country, two systems." This design, widely …
Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty
The origin of political modernity has long been tied to the Western history of protest and revolution, the currents of which many believe sparked popular dissent worldwide. Reviewing nearly one thousand instances of protest in China from the eighteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries, Ho-fung Hung charts an evolution of Chinese dissent that stands apart from Western trends. Hung samples from mid-Qing petitions and humble plaints to the emperor.…
O braço direito dos Estados Unidos? o dilema da República Popular da China na crise global
Contra as previsões de que a China substituirá em breve os EUA como a principal potência econômica mundial, o autor argumenta que o modelo de crescimento chinês, voltado à exportação e lastreado por enormes reservas em dólares, confinou o país asiático a um papel subordinado, ao qual boa parte de sua elite se mantém comprometida
Globalization and Global Inequality: Assessing the Impact of the Rise of China and India, 1980-2005
This article uses updated purchasing power parity measurements of countries’ income and a new strategy for approximating global inequality to examine how global income inequality—as a combination of increasing average within-country inequality and decreasing between-country inequality—changed in the period 1980–2005. In view of the overwhelming influence of China and India on trends in global inequality change, the authors base their strategy on …
Is China Saving Global Capitalism from the Global Crisis
China’s Rise Stalled
China: Saviour or Challenger of the Dollar Hegemony
Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order in 1971, the US dollar has successfully maintained its global hegemony despite the US's declining share in the global economy, thanks largely to the US's political-military supremacy. The recent rise of China poses a serious dilemma to the US. On the one hand, China's export-oriented development has provided the US with low-cost manufactured imports and cheap credit. On the other hand, the US…
Labor Politics Under Three Stages of Chinese Capitalism
This essay outlines the three stages of Chinese capitalist development in the 1980s through the 2000s and discusses how labor politics played out differently in each of the three stages and helped shape the next stage. Whence the erosion of living standards of urban workers amid out-of-control inflation and corruption in the late 1980s led to workers' participation in the 1989 democratic movement, the full-fledged neoliberal reforms implemented b…
Trois visions de la conscience autochtone à Hong Kong
Three Views of Local Consciousness in Hong Kong
Korean translation availableChan, Koon-chung. 2012. Zhongguo tianchao zhuyi yu Xianggang (China's Heavenly Doctrine and Hong Kong). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.Chin Wan. 2011. Xianggang Chengbang lun (On Hong Kong as a city state). Hong Kong: Enrich Publishing.Jiang Shigong. 2008. Zhongguo Xianggang: wenhua yu zhengzhi de shiye (China's Hong Kong: cultural and political perspectives). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press
Grandpa State Instead of Bourgeois State: Patrimonial Politics in China’s Age of Commerce, 1644–1839
From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent bourgeois and the concomitant rise of a liberal, populist version of Confucianism, which advocated a more decentralized and less authoritarian political system in the last few decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But after the collapse of the Ming Empire and the est…
Inter-Asian (Post-)Neoliberalism
The China boom: Why China will not rule the world
Many thought China's rise would fundamentally remake the global order. Yet, much like other developing nations, the Chinese state now finds itself in a status quo characterized by free trade and American domination. Through a cutting-edge historical, sociological, and political analysis, Ho-fung Hung details the competing interests and economic realities that temper the dream of Chinese supremacy--forces that are stymieing growth throughout the g…
From Qing Empire to the Chinese nation: An Incomplete Project
Political science (30 works) · China (22 works) · Economics (22 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (11 works) · History (9 works) · Political economy (9 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (8 works)