The Sino‐centric Capital Export Regime: State‐backed and Flexible Capital in the Philippines

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate as to whether Chinese capital can be described as developmental. While some argue that Chinese capital is simply a tool of the Chinese state to exploit the global South, others claim that Chinese capital opens new development opportunities. Rather than advancing a framework based upon either an exploitative or an egalitarian mode of development, this article argues that China's current crisis of overaccumulation has led to a so‐called Sino‐centric capital export regime, which sends out two types of capital to the global South. First, state‐backed capital imposes a development model by modifying ‘local orders’, attempting to make host states legible by creating maps of peoples and terrains that surround China. These maps aim to improve China's ability to manage inter‐state disputes. Second, flexible capital is interested in extricating itself from the conditions imposed on it in China. By moving into the global South, flexible capital breaks through the barriers placed by the Chinese state. As a by‐product of this quest for extrication, flexible capital can generate new venues of accumulation and novel ways of organizing production. This article demonstrates these two types of capital using examples from Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines — the Kaliwa Dam project and online gambling — drawing on original field research and a newly generated dataset.

Chinese financial statecraft in Southeast Asia: an analysis of China’s infrastructure provision in Malaysia

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Chinese Investment in Turkey: The Belt and Road Initiative, Rising Expectations and Ground Realities

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Chinese Workers and Their “Linguistic Labour”: Philippine Online Gambling and Zambian Onsite Casinos

“…Unfortunately, it is not possible to acquire data in the OFCs since they do not give shareholder information or any data on their firms. See Camba (2020)…”

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