‘A new type of great power relationship’? Gramsci, Kautsky and the role of the Ford Foundation’s transformational elite knowledge networks in China

Challenging conflictual Realist and optimistic liberal-internationalist arguments about full-scale integration of China into the US-led order, this article uses Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and Kautsky’s concept of ultra-imperialism to explore US hegemony’s influence in transforming China and to characterize the relationship. Original archival research shows that China’s elites were gradually integrated into the US-led order from 1978, with a special role played by elite knowledge networks built by the Ford Foundation, particularly in Chinese economic policy reform, diffusion of free market thinking, and the development and teaching of Economics as a technocratic, policy-oriented academic discipline. Ford funded Sino-American elite knowledge networks closely connected with Chinese globalizing elites, with and through which liberal tendencies penetrated China, adapted to local conditions. We argue that these networks played significant yet neglected roles in managing change in China, and Sino-US relations during a time of global power transitions. This is inexplicable in either Realist or Liberal-internationalist terms, but provides the substance of what might be a ‘new type of great power relationship’, perhaps explicable in Kautskyian ‘ultraimperialist’ terms. Though conflict and turbulence remain in the relationship due to changing economic conditions and global strategies, this need not result in inter-hegemonic military conflict.