Is China the new hegemonic power?

Abstract

The article inquires about the possibility that China will displace the United States as a hegemonic power. It analyzes, for this, the evolution of the participation in the world economy of the two countries as well as the central characteristics of its growth, maintaining that it is facing the confrontation between a State Ca-pitalism -focused on the expansion of industrial capital as a means to consolidate its position in the world economy and preserve the internal structure of power- and a Capitalism, in the North American case, strongly transnationalized and marked by the dominance of financial capital. In this context, the author considers the Chinese capitalism’s transformation into a capitalism -similar to the North American one- unlikely, examines China’s limitations to displace the United States as a hegemon, but also the difficulties of the latter to maintain its central position in the world economy, advancing some hypotheses about the probable transformations in the international power structure.