Explaining China’s Approach to the Global Governance of Sovereign Debt Distress: A State Transformation Analysis

CHINA, DEVELOPMENT AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER SEMINAR SERIES

In this seminar, Shahar Hameiri examines China’s approach to the global governance of sovereign debt distress, an area that is widely understood to be under threat from China, which has risen to become the world’s largest official bilateral creditor. In response to the Global South’s post-2020 debt crisis, China has undermined established approaches led by the International Monetary Fund and the Paris Club, with many seeing this as further evidence of Beijing’s challenge to the US-led liberal international order. Yet, China has proposed no meaningful alternative to the existing regime, and its behaviour has arguably undermined Beijing’s global standing, rather than advancing its strategic interests. Moreover, China has actively participated in Group of 20 frameworks drawing heavily on Paris Club rules, and insists more resolutely on ‘comparable treatment’ with other creditors than Paris Club member-states. Its behaviour therefore seems contradictory and incoherent, rather than reflecting a strategic choice. This article explains this using the State Transformation Approach, which sees the Chinese party-state not as a strategic, unitary actor but as a loosely coordinated, highly contested array of agents pursuing potentially contradictory interests. This seminar will explore why China’s commercial lenders have successfully safeguarded their interests during the debt crisis, at the expense of other creditors and Beijing’s wider geopolitical interests.

Speaker
Shahar Hameiri is Professor of International Politics and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. He is a Research Associate of the Second Cold War Observatory. Hameiri’s work mainly examines security and development issues in East Asia and the Pacific. He is currently working on a project examining the contours of the emerging geopolitical rivalry between China and the US, and how other countries are responding. His recent books include The Locked-Up Country: Learning the Lessons from Australia’s COVID-19 Response (UQP, 2023), co-authored with Tom Chodor, as well as Fractured China: How State Transformation Is Shaping China’s Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Governing Borderless Threats (Cambridge University Press, 2015), both co-authored with Lee Jones. He is also co-editor, with Toby Carroll and Lee Jones, of The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Politics and Uneven Development under Hyperglobalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Chair
Amy King is Associate Professor in the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University, and Deputy Director (Research) in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. She is the author of China-Japan Relations after World War Two: Empire, Industry and War, 1949-1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The holder of an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship and a Westpac Research Fellowship, she leads a team researching China’s role in shaping the international economic order.

This seminar series is part of a research project on How China Shapes the International Economic Order, generously funded by the Westpac Scholars Trust and the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, and led by Associate Professor Amy King from the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs.