China-US rivalry: a new Cold War or capitalism’s intra-core competition?

Abstract This article aims to provide a framework for conceptualizing the China-US rivalry. It argues that while the China-US rivalry is distorted to be an analogy to the Cold War, it must be understood as an intra-core competition between two different capitalisms. Theoretically the paper is inspired by the world system theory’s perspective on “cycles of hegemony” and the Kautsky-Lenin debate on inter-capitalism relationships. The causal nexus of the two theories explains that the China-US rivalry is in a new phase of the cycles of capital accumulation, and China’s changing competitive dynamics led by its state capitalism model have generated disadvantageous effect on the US hegemony. The paper’s conclusion is that China-US competition will shape the trajectory of world order for decades to come.