The American economy is in shambles, with a spiraling debt crisis, a vanishing industrial base, and a plummeting dollar. And, as the debacle of the occupation of Iraq continues to demonstrate, the US is finding it increasingly difficult to keep the rest of the world under its hegemonic thumb through military intervention. Giovanni Arrighi's new book, Adam Smith in Beijing, situates this global decline of US power within the context of a epochal shift in the world-system away from North American dominance and towards Asia. Is China the real winner of the "War on Terror"? Is it possible to see, in China's startling emergence as a preeminent economic power on the world stage, something other than neoliberal capitalism running rampant? What new possibilities and challenges are in store for struggles against imperialism and exploitation on a less and less US-centric globe?

GIOVANNI ARRIGHI is professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His work investigates the historical interplay of economic and political hegemony in the capitalist world-system. His recent works include The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times and (with Beverly Silver) Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. His current research focuses on trajectories of development across the global South.

DAVID HARVEY is professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center at CUNY, and the author of many books examining the links between capitalism, globalization, and the urban environment, including A Brief History of Neoliberalism, The New Imperialism, Paris: Capital of Modernity, and Social Justice in the City. He has also written some of the definitive works plotting a critical geography of Baltimore, including the essay "A View from Federal Hill" and the book Spaces of Hope.

XUDONG ZHANG is professor of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Studies at NYU and one of the preeminent scholars of recent Chinese cultural politics. He is the author of Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and New Chinese Cinema and the forthcoming Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: The Last Decade of China's Twentieth Century, and was behind recent translations of the works of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson into Chinese.

JOEL ANDREAS is professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, where he has been investigating the changes in class relations in China from 1949 to the present. He's also the author of the bestselling comic-book essay Addicted To War.

A reception will follow the symposium. The event will be free, but donations will, as always, be very welcome. 2640 is a new project of Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse, with the goal of creating an independent platform for political discussion, education art, and culture. It's located at 2640 St. Paul St. in Baltimore.