The Latecomer's Rise

Abstract

This book reveals the nature and impact of a rapidly growing form of international lending: Chinese development finance. Over the past few decades, China has become the world's largest provider of bilateral development finance. Through its two national policy banks, the China Development Bank (CDB) and the Export–Import Bank of China (China Exim), it has funded infrastructure and industrial projects in numerous emerging markets and developing countries. Yet this very surge and magnitude of capital has raised questions about the characteristics of Chinese bilateral lending and its repercussions on the international order. This book pinpoints the distinctiveness of Chinese bilateral development finance, explains its origins, and analyzes its effects. The book compares Chinese policy banks with their foreign counterparts to show that the CDB and China Exim, while state-supported, are in fact also market-oriented—they are as much government organs as they are profit-driven financial agencies that serve both state and firms' interests. This approach, which emerged out of China's particular economic history, suggests that Chinese overseas lending is not merely a tool of economic statecraft that challenges Western-led economic regimes. Instead, China's responses to extant rules, norms, and practices across given issue areas have varied between contestation and convergence. The book demystifies the little-known workings of Chinese development finance to revise our conceptions of China's role in the international financial system.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.