ALTERNATIVE LEADERSHIP China and Global Finance

The People’s Republic of China (China; PRC) has become a global financial power. After decades of seclusion, the PRC joined the Bretton Woods system in the 1980s, kept a low profile and sought to build up expertise and develop a better understanding of global financial governance. Despite the increasingly far reaching economic and social reforms under Deng Xiaoping, its financial system was kept under tight control of the party-state. Its integration into global capital markets remained limited, and the issue of financial reforms remained heavily contested. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, China’s admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 triggered domestic reforms yet left the priority of “control” over “opening up” widely intact. The integration of China into the global financial order proceeded much slower than many observers expected but gained dynamic under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Today, China challenges existing norms and standards, advances its interests and creates new international institutions without a full-flung opening of its domestic system. Domestic challenges and risks have kept the Chinese leadership from pushing its own norms and ideas more insistently on the global stage.