We live in societies with economies nested within them, nested in turn in the non-human world. A green republican conception of political economy recognises this reality, and challenges the priority given to growth. As Philip Pettit argues in his contribution to this series, republicans see the economy as a politically created arena of human activity, with an associated institutional infrastructure (such as the legal codes, tort, property rights, legal framework for economic enterprises, legal rules governing trade and exchange, etc.). It is neither ‘self-regulating’ or beyond legitimate political and democratic regulation and, where necessary, interference. Republicans do not see a difficulty with interfering with market relations for important non-economic, political reasons, such as to preserve civic freedoms, promote solidarity or shared common goods. They are concerned with ensuring the market is confined to its appropriate sphere, and that the ‘economics imperialism’ and the colonising effects of the market are limited, but without completely abolishing the market. A green republican conception of political economy, however, is one that also begins its analysis from the observation that we live in societies with economies nested within them. Not the other way around. And both human economies and societies are themselves located within and completely dependent upon the non-human world.

In January of this year, The Huffington Post reported on a fire that killed six children and one young adult “at an illegally run orphanage in central China”: “The deaths Friday in Henan province’s Lankao county have spotlighted China’s lack of government-run child services. They are often left to private citizens with few resources and no legal authority. The Lankao government earlier acknowledged that it had turned a blind eye to the illegal orphanage, which cared for abandoned children and young adults. …The deputy county governor said earlier that some departments had failed in supervision and should shoulder responsibility.” Unregulated orphanages are exceedingly common in China. Official government estimates put the number of “orphans” (the term is used loosely to include children who have been abandoned, and in fact have one or both parents still living – the Chinese term for orphan, gu’er (孤儿) – literally “solitary/lonely child” accommodates this) in China at over half a million as of 2011.[1] The state orphanage system designed to care for these children is characterized by a rural/urban dichotomy. Orphanages are located in urban centers; orphans and abandoned children in rural areas (who account for around 85% of the total orphan population) do not have access to these state-run institutions.[2] A variety of welfare programs exist in rural areas to support the indigent, including children without parental care, and many orphans and “foundlings” are taken in by relatives or neighbors[3]; but despite this, there is a conspicuous gap in the state’s orphan welfare program when it comes to rural China. This gap is filled, as the above article alludes to, by “private citizens with few resources and no legal authority”.

AS JAPANESE troops advanced on the Chinese capital of Nanjing in 1937, Zhou Fohai, a senior official in the Chinese government, wrote in his diary of the panic and fear consuming the city. He anticipated the destruction and its implications for his nation: “China will have no more history,” he wrote. The devastation that the Japanese invasion would wreak was indeed shocking. But as Rana Mitter shows in his illuminating and meticulously researched new book about the Sino-Japanese war, not only did Chinese history not end with the fall of Nanjing, but in many ways the war helped to create modern China. It was the anvil on which the new nation was forged. Other historians point to the arrival of British gunboats in the 1830s, when industrialising Europe collided with ancient China, as the dawn of China’s modern age. But Mr Mitter, a professor at Oxford University, believes that the country’s war with Japan was more important because it reduced China to its weakest state. “Suddenly the circumstances of war made the concept of the nation, and personal identification with it, more urgent and meaningful for many Chinese.”

Private households in the UK own an estimated £10.3 trillion in property and other assets, most of which is relatively lightly taxed. Following the 2008 financial crash, the need to find additional public resources to reduce or obviate the need for painful spending cuts and fund growing long-term demand for public services makes wealth an attractive potential tax base. However, while it is generally accepted that the current system of property and wealth taxation in the UK is highly flawed, there is no broad political consensus on whether and how different forms of wealth should be taxed. There is also a lack of evidence about the potential impact of different approaches.

It is well-known that one of the key fault lines of inequality in China is the rural-urban divide. Rural China has been the engine of much development through industrialisation; through farming to provide food for China’s cities; and through land grabs which open new areas for investment and government revenue. Yet the benefits of such development are distributed unfairly. Many rural residents either do not benefit directly from development or do so at great cost to their health. These inequalities are compounded by the continued disparity in welfare provision between rural and urban areas. Welfare provision in China’s countryside has doubtlessly improved after the introduction of rural healthcare cooperatives in recent years, but it remains limited. Illness is as an extreme embodiment of routinized and recurrent forms of social suffering and exclusion from various forms of care and welfare. As I document in my book, Fighting for Breath, a population’s attempt to secure care is both a physical and a social struggle to maintain integrity and to ensure family and neighbourly support. Over the past decade, I have spent almost two years living in rural China and researching attitudes to development,illness, pollution and morality. This has brought me to witness first-hand some of the often unthinkable suffering rural villagers face (environmental and otherwise), as well as poignant moments of human dignity, kindness and resilience. Many of these scenes will stay with me forever. A woman in her fifties salvaging roof tiles before she demolished by hand her own newly built home to make space for a road. A seventy-year-old woman refusing treatment for glaucoma — because ‘one eye is enough’ — whilst opting to save the money for her grandson’s education. My host tending to her dying father (suffering from oesophagus cancer) as he spat blood into newspaper scraps. Sixty-year-old Uncle Wang committing suicide by drinking pesticide in the final stages of stomach cancer. His wife, a few years later, scavenging plastic bottles in the township to boost the family’s income and support her granddaughter’s education. Villagers growing crops in fields they know to be severely polluted. An anti-incinerator activist lying in bed surrounded by flies next to his sick wife after suffering a stroke.

“What kind of economy is consistent with living inside a living being?” This was a question posed under a leafy canopy, deep in the woods of southern England, not far from Schumacher College where I’d come as a teacher. I stood listening with a group of students as resident ecologist Stephan Harding asked what for me would become a pivotal question – the only question there is, really, as we negotiate the turn from the industrial age into a new age of civilization. I’d come to Schumacher to share my learnings from four years as cofounder ofCorporation 20/20 at Tellus Institute in Boston, where I’d helped lead hundreds of experts in business, law, government, labor, and civil society to explore a critical question: How could corporations be redesigned to incorporate social and ecological aims as deeply as financial aims? Over 20 years as co-founder and publisher of Business Ethics magazine, I’d seen how corporations and financial markets had come to be the dominant institutions of society, how their profit-maximizing operating system had become the operating system of the planet. That design lay at the root of many major ills facing our society. But Stephan’s talk helped me understand why redesigning corporations did not quite hit the mark as the solution: You don’t start with the corporation and ask how to redesign it. You start with life, with human life and the life of the planet, and ask, how do we generate the conditions for life’s flourishing?

The legal relationship between the Chinese state and the citizen are contradictory. The laws on administrative litigation are on one side of the spectrum. They allow the Chinese to sue their government, one of the regime’s most promising reforms (though it has often failed to live up to its potential). On the other hand, re-education through labour (RETL) (laojiao (劳教)), a draconian detention programme, has long been a focal point for critics of China’s human rights record, whereby China’s police can sentence an individual to three years (with a possible 4th year extension) in a labour camp without a trial Particular cases bear out these contradictions. Tang Hui and Zhao Meifu, two women detained separately under China’s re-education through labour system, have become so well known in China that they helped prompt calls for reforming the RETL system. Yet, both women were recently denied compensation by China’s administrative courts. While criticism of China’s human rights record and courts tends to be very general, these cases show that the small details of China’s legal system showcase the biggest injustices.

There is no such thing as “the market economy”. Markets come in many varieties and their character is a matter of political choice. Saying that a market is politically shaped is simply to state the obvious, namely that any economic market is first political and then economic. A politics-free market does not exist in the real world outside of standard economics text-books or, paradoxically perhaps, in the prevarication of politicians who deny its political component precisely for political reasons. So, if markets are irreducibly political, we need to ask what values should guide their political construction. The Democratic Wealth series has given much attention to ‘republicanism’ as a philosophical tradition which might serve as a source of guidance (see, for example, these contributions from Alex Gourevitch, José Luis Martí and Philip Pettit). But which republicanism?