Is China Turning Latin? China’s Balancing Act between Power and Dependence in the Lead up to Global Crisis

China’s apparent escape from the external constraints of peripheral late industrialisation in the build up to the global economic crisis of 2007–2009 has been recent and remains tenuous. Before its spectacular trade surpluses of the 2000s, China’s external accounts reflected many of these constraints. Even in the midst of the surplus surge, external vulnerabilities of a peripheral nature have persisted. Besides the issue of export dependence, which is the conventional focus of most crisis-related studies on China, vulnerabilities have been more profoundly related to the dominance of foreign ownership in China’s export sector and to the relatively subordinate position of this export sector within the massive rerouting of international production networks via China that followed the East Asian crisis, in large part led by Northern transnational corporations. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.