China’s rise, weaponised interdependence and the increasingly contested geographies of global finance

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, scholars have investigated China’s rise within the global financial system – from identifying China’s different state-market configurations, to understanding its controlled financial opening and entanglements with the neoliberal, US-dominated global financial order. The recent geoeconomic turn, however, has fundamentally changed the macro-context of this development. Largely in response to China’s rise, the US started weaponising finance, upending key trends and reshuffling actor constellations: within China, in private finance, in non-Western countries and in the West itself. To understand China’s emerging global role, we need to explore this new geopolitical context and how it reshapes global financial geographies.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• global finance
• geopolitics
• neoliberalism
• state capitalism
• financial geography
• great power rivalry
• financial globalisation

JEL:

• F6, F65
• F5, F51
• F3, F38
• G18
• P00

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Ruben Kremers for his feedback on a previous version of this paper.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [grant number no 855/7-1/446618653]; Economic and Social Research Council: [grant number 1791638].