The economic position of the Chinese People’s Republic

Measuring the economic position of the state has lived to see a rich literature on the subject, especially after the end of the Cold War, mainly due to the re-evaluation of the relationship between politics and economics. There is a close and direct relationship between the economy (economic action) and the power and security of the state (political action). It is widely believed that during the Cold War, economic criteria were subordinated to political objectives and values, whereas after the end of the Cold War, economic action and activity is largely free of political considerations. This is manifested in the development of globalisation, the spread of global capitalism referring to the principles of economic liberalism, i.e. the triumph of economics based on the rules of the market (i.e. solely on the criteria and values of economic action). At the beginning of the 1990s, the American researcher E. Luttwak considered that the era of geo-economics was coming, the essence of which is that states act on the basis of mainly economic rather than political criteria. This dominance of economics by no means changes the essence of states, but the nature of the rivalry and competition between them, where the goal is wealth, profit sharing and markets [Luttwak, 1990/1991, pp. 17¦23]. In his view E. Luttwak is not isolated, as another well-known scholar P. Kennedy, in his fundamental work on the world’s superpowers, placed the main emphasis on the interaction of the economics and strategies of the superpowers, pointing out that any international order inspired by a given superpower was based on material considerations. The Pax Britannica on the pound sterling and London as the financial centre of the world before the First World War, and the Pax Americana after the Second World War was based on the technological superiority of the US economy acting as a quasi world currency (dollarisation of the world economy) [Kennedy, 1994]. The economic position of any state is determined and conditioned by its potential (power), which is commonly accepted and defined as the ability of a state to use its tangible and intangible resources to influence and/or coerce the behaviour of other actors in international relations. The factors of economic power are manifold, the main ones being: population, territory, natural resources, industrial and agricultural output, size of national income, labour productivity, foreign trade.