The Latecomer’s Rise: Policy Banks and the Globalisation of China’s Development Finance

CHINA, DEVELOPMENT AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER SEMINAR SERIES

In this seminar, Muyang Chen 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.

Drawing on a variety of novel Chinese primary sources, including interviews and official bank documents, Chen’s book The Latecomer's Rise pinpoints the distinctiveness of Chinese bilateral development finance, explains its origins, and analyses its effects. Chen 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.

Overall, this talk will explore the little-known workings of Chinese development finance to revise our conceptions of China's role in the international financial system.

Speaker
Muyang Chen is an assistant professor at Peking University's School of International Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of political economy, international development, and international relations, focusing on the role of the state in development and addressing the question of how China’s overseas development finance affects global order. She also studies the role of public financial agencies in facilitating development assistance, export finance, industrialization, and sovereign debt restructuring.

Her work has appeared in International Affairs, European Journal of International Relations, World Development, Development Policy Review, Studies in Comparative International Development, New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, and The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy. She is the author of The Latecomer’s Rise: Policy Banks and the Globalization of China’s Development Finance (Cornell University Press, 2024).

Muyang holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and dual bachelor’s degrees from Peking University and Waseda University. Prior to joining Peking University, she was a research fellow at the Global Development Policy Center of Boston University and a visiting scholar at Japan's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

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.