The phenomenon of the rise of the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has been discussed since 2001. ‘Problematising it as related to the decline of American dominance and the rise of global China (and other emerging markets), a Goldman Sachs team selected some useful “non-Western others” and narrated them as being low risk with high growth potential’ (Sum and Jessop, 2013: 443). It was alleged that the economic core of the global political economy was slowly but steadily moving from the traditional industrialised countries in Europe, Japan and North America towards rapidly industrialising and developing emerging markets elsewhere in the world. In this chapter, we assess the significance of these changes in the global political economy through a historical materialist analysis based on the philosophy of internal relations. This will help us to grasp the internal relations between changes in global capitalism with the dynamics of geopolitical rivalry parsing the ways in which the rise of the BRICS within global capitalism is of a piece with processes of state transformation engendering potential new forms of geopolitical tension. ‘Much of the discussion about the rise of the BRICS is actually really a discussion about one BRICS country, that of China’ (Kiely, 2015: 10). Our focus in this chapter is, therefore, on China. In line with the postholing method, introduced in Chapter 1, this allows us to capture some of the empirical richness of capitalist transformation in detail, while understanding at the same time the broader sweep of historical forces.

Many mainstream attempts have been made to analyse the ‘rise’ of China in the global political economy. Neorealists stress the potential rivalry especially between the United States and China. China's recent New Silk Roads or One Belt, One Road strategy – a cluster of large infrastructure projects linking China with Europe, for example – is discussed in terms of a ‘defensive’ or ‘offensive’ grand strategy along these lines (Leverett and Bingbing, 2016: 110–11). John Mearsheimer, in turn, who identifies the United States as a regional hegemon in the Americas, concludes that ‘my theory says that the ideal situation for any great power is to be the only regional hegemon in the world’ (Mearsheimer, 2006: 161).