LAUSR

Prognostications of the Asian century, pivoting away from the United States as epicentre of the world economy, call for in-depth understanding of this current shift, including specifying the logic and character of Chinese capitalism. Critical theories usually employ a stage theory embodied in the development of capitalism as linear temporality or teleology of historical progress. Postsocialist China, as a late comer joining global capitalism, embodies multiple forms of capital and operates as a variegated form of capitalism when compared to both the Global North and Global South (Peck and Zhang, 2013; Zhang and Peck, 2014). The simultaneous operation of multiple capitals in China (including Hong Kong) creates its own ‘third world’ in its hinterland, in its internal regions of the country and across the border to its neighbouring regions. However, this does not preclude efforts to capture the dominant features of contemporary Chinese capitalism in order to tease out its complexity, condensation and overarching forces that both constitute and are constituted by working-class masses. To understand the formation of the Chinese working class, with its richness and fluidity, without sacrificing the clarity of its temporality and spatiality, we define the contemporary moment of Chinese capitalism as infrastructural capitalism. Infrastructural capitalism crystallizes an accelerated development trajectory characterized by strategic moves from competitive capitalism in the early reform period (Lin, 2021) to the advent of monopoly capital and an emerging imperialist