Book Project

Developmental Statecraft: Market Integration and the Construction of Structural Power in China’s Global Engagements

This book examines how emerging powers construct structural power in the global political economy. Focusing on China, it argues that contemporary debates on great-power competition place disproportionate emphasis on military capabilities, diplomacy, and transactional forms of economic statecraft while paying insufficient attention to the developmental processes through which long-term influence is built. Drawing on Susan Strange’s concept of structural power, the book shifts attention from how states exercise power to how they construct it.

The book argues that structural power is built through processes of market integration across scales that connect previously fragmented regions, sectors, and economic actors within and beyond national borders. It examines how China’s domestic developmental challenges—including regional disparities, market fragmentation, and uneven development—have become intertwined with its expanding engagement with the Global South. Rather than treating domestic development and external influence as separate processes, the book shows how they are mutually constitutive and how efforts to integrate markets can reshape a state’s position in the global political economy.

To explain how such integration is organized and sustained, the book develops the concept of developmental statecraft, which highlights the role of bureaucracies, firms, and other developmental institutions in connecting domestic developmental objectives with external engagement. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, the book traces the opportunities, contradictions, and limits of translating developmental capacity into structural power. Bridging international political economy, comparative political economy, and development studies, it offers a new framework for understanding how development becomes a source of power in the twenty-first century.