This article by Zhun Xu reviews the evolution of the Chinese COVID policies and places its dramatic turns within the context of the country’s shifting class interests. After the initial COVID outbreak in early 2020, China implemented strong measures to successfully contain the spread of the virus within its borders while the rest of the world experienced huge human and social costs. But in November 2022, the Chinese government abruptly abandoned its strong COVID controls. Xu evaluates this policy about-face in the context of the changing Chinese political economy.

PERI researcher Isabella Weber argues that state capitalism is experiencing a revival as a term to capture the current capitalist constellations, increasingly replacing neoliberalism. Unlike neoliberalism, the term state capitalism has a long history reaching back to the age of imperialism in the late 19th century, being used to describe developmentalist and neo-mercantilist projects in reaction to imperialism in the periphery. What is new is that, starting with China, deploying state capitalism as a means for catching up with the West is bearing fruit in ways that could undermine the predominance of Western economies.

The literature on agrarian change in India collapses women’s class relations into those of male household heads. Sirisha Naidu and Smriti Rao examine how the 2019 Indian Time Use survey could lend itself to better understand class relations by accommodating an expanded conception of work as including reproductive labor; accounting for the diversified livelihoods of rural Indians; and more accurately grasping caste and gender distinctions in differentiated labor processes with capital. Within this framework, Naidu and Rao explore methods for deepening feminist political economy analyses of agrarian change.