Tadhg Ó Laoghaire (Durham University), "The Middle-Income Kingdom: China and the Demands of International Distributive Justice"
Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2024
For a few decades on either side of the millennium, the world’s most powerful countries — notably the U.S. and the major European nations — were also among the wealthiest. In that context, prosperity and economic power were so intertwined that there wasn’t much need to distinguish between the duties that came from being rich and those that came from being powerful, while determining what much less wealthy countries owed to the global community didn’t seem a pressing concern. This was the backdrop against which much of the early philosophical work on international distributive justice was written. Understandably, then, such work tended to simplify the international picture by dividing states neatly into two main groups: developed countries with demanding duties, and developing countries with demanding claims to aid and assistance. In truth, this framing always masked a more complex and nuanced international picture – something the best work in the literature acknowledged – but it served a purpose in making complex questions of justice and fairness more tractable.
With China’s rise to superpower status, however, such a neat categorisation of states is no longer fit for purpose. While it remains many times poorer on a per capita basis than, say, the US, China is now the world’s second largest economy and its influence on global affairs is truly vast. It is also many times wealthier than the world’s most impoverished states, many of which are increasingly dependent upon China for development loans, aid, and trading opportunities. Given this, it is natural to think that China has at least some positive international duties, however these may differ in content from those of the world’s wealthiest states. The same can be said, albeit to a lesser extent, about powerful emerging economies such as India, Indonesia, and Brazil; despite rivalling the traditional international powers in sheer economic weight, little-to-no work has been done on such states’ distributive duties. By continuing to adopt the simplified binary framing of states in the international order, philosophers are in danger of losing traction on the international order as it has come to be, obscuring from vision the increased centrality of these emerging powers.
In my new paper, ‘The Middle-Income Kingdom: China and the Demands of International Distributive Justice,’ I propose a novel framework for categorising states in the international order which distinguishes between developed, developing, and least-developed states. I provide principled grounds for distinguishing between states in each category, where the key factor is a state’s capacity to realize a minimally decent standard of (domestic) justice (MDSJ, for short). Capacities, on my account, are those goods – such as wealth, infrastructure, and domestic institutions – that states’ governments can use or take advantage of to pursue domestic justice effectively. I argue that what makes one state better off than another — and therefore justifies assigning it greater international responsibilities — is its higher capacity to achieve MDSJ; this, I argue, is more important than whether a state is wealthier than another, or better realizes domestic justice in actuality. I then make the case for identifying ‘least-developed states’ as all those states that are unable to realize MDSJ even under maximally auspicious circumstances, ‘developing states’ as those that can realize it but only (more or less) precariously, and ‘developed states’ as those that can consistently achieve it so long as their governments actually prioritise realizing justice over other, less pressing goals. I conclude by outlining the case for treating China as a developing country despite its vast economic power, and I highlight some areas where China retains claims on other countries and other areas where it has outstanding duties to least-developed countries, in particular. The paper, then, tells a long and fairly complicated story about states, international justice, and the concept of development, but at its core is a very simple point – that China’s rise is of philosophical as well as political significance, and it should prompt us to rethink how we understand the demands of international justice more broadly.