Acknowledgments

Growing up in coastal China in the post–Cold War era, I saw and heard the word “marketization” (shichanghua) frequently in my everyday life. In decades of economic transition, “market” has acquired a strong positive connotation in a Chinese context, associated with modernity, efficiency, and a better quality of life. When I studied in Japan in my third college year, the same year China surpassed Japan and became the world’s second largest economy by gross domestic product, my perception of these positive connotations was shaken. I still remember how startled I was reading Chalmers Johnson’s MITI and the Japanese Miracle in a class at Waseda University and learning that a key factor contributing to the postwar economic success of our wealthy, capitalist neighbor was a rational planning “state.”

With this state-versus-market puzzle still unsolved in my mind, I went to the United States for graduate studies. My seven years living in the United States coincided with China’s rise as a major development finance provider. Inside and outside classrooms, friends, classmates, and colleagues from around the world asked me questions about the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and fundamentally, the rationale underlying China’s massive overseas financing. What struck me most was that despite decades of “marketization,” “furthering marketization,” and “deepening marketization,” the highly globalized Chinese economy is still mostly viewed as far from laissez-faire.

This book is an effort to understand state-market relations reflected in China’s development finance. In writing this book, I benefited tremendously from the guidance and support of so many wonderful people and organizations. I owe significant debts to my graduate advisers, T. J. Pempel and Steven Vogel, at the University of California, Berkeley, where I developed my research interest in comparing national development banks in China and Japan. Bonnie Wade, who chaired Berkeley’s Asian Studies MA Program, encouraged me to follow my intellectual curiosity. At the University of Washington, David Bachman, Marie Anchordoguy, and Susan Whiting walked me through the tough journey of formulating, writing, and defending my doctoral research, and they always inspired me with challenging questions and sharp comments. Gary Hamilton, Sarah Quinn, and Jerald Herting offered invaluable feedback at my research presentations. I also would like to thank Saadia Pekkanen and Nathalie Williams for running an individualized PhD program at the Jackson School of International Studies, which provided students such as me the flexibility to integrate area-studies expertise with theoretical analysis and explore highly policy-relevant topics, including the subject of this book. I am extremely grateful to Kevin Gallagher for hosting me at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center as a predoctoral fellow. There, I shared an office with a group of fascinating researchers working on development finance. Talking with them made writing much less lonely.

For the research of this project, I conducted fieldwork in several countries. I am grateful to the summer language program at Goethe University Frankfurt, which allowed me to learn German while conducting research on Germany’s promotional banks. I express my gratitude to Atsushi Sunami and the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies for kindly hosting my field trip in Tokyo. A million thanks to colleagues at the KfW Group, Japan International Cooperation Agency, Japan Bank for International Cooperation, China Development Bank, Export-Import Bank of China, and the many wonderful people I interviewed at various financial institutions, government organs, and corporations. They generously carved time out of their busy schedules, educating me and sharing their life stories with me as development professionals.

In revising and expanding this book, I received immense support from colleagues at Peking University, Beida, which is also my alma mater. Working at China’s top university whose history has been tightly associated with the country’s modernization allowed me to think broadly and deeply about this project in the context of a rapidly changing global landscape. I extend special thanks to the students who took my courses at Beida for grilling me with questions about China’s role in global development. I especially thank Jiupeng Jia and Julian Snelling for their excellent research assistance.

At various stages of this project, I received invaluable comments and insights from many scholars at the annual meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, International Studies Association, Association for Asian Studies, American Political Science Association, and Midwest Political Science Association. I especially want to recognize Deborah Brautigam, Gregory Chin, Takeshi Daimon, Austin Dean, Julian Gruin, Kristen Hopewell, Roselyn Hsueh, Yufan Huang, Stephen Kaplan, Saori Katada, Wendy Leutert, Chen Li, Jessica Liao, Guanie Lim, Adam Liu, Chuyu Liu, Zongyuan Liu, Peter Lorentzen, Xiao Ma, Christopher McNally, Daniel Mertens, Natalya Naqvi, Johannes Petry, Meg Rithmire, Victor Shih, Yasutami Shimomura, Yixian Sun, Tobias ten Brink, Matthias Thiemann, Johannes Urpelainen, Hanjie Wang, Yinagyao Wang, Saul Wilson, Christine Wong, Karl Yan, John Yasuda, Weiwen Yin, Ying Xia, Kankan Xie, Jiajun Xu, and Youyi Zhang.

The research for this project was made possible by generous financial support from the following institutions: China Studies Program, Japan Studies Program (Kristen Kawakami Dean Fellowship), and the International Policy Institute of the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington; Association for Asian Studies; Social Science Research Council/Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Project No. PE17722); Global Development Policy Center, Boston University; China Scholarship Council; Peking University (Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities); National Social Science Fund of China (Project No. 21CGJ004).

Chapter 1 of the book is built on my article “State Actors, Market Games: Credit Guarantees and the Funding of China Development Bank,” published in New Political Economy. In “Beyond Donation,” published in Studies in Comparative International Development, I described Chinese financial agencies involved in overseas finance and their relations with the state. I expanded this material to discuss the globalization of China’s catch-up in chapter 3. In “Infrastructure Finance, Late Development, and China’s Reshaping of International Credit Governance,” published in European Journal of International Relations, I examined how Chinese lending affects OECD-led international governance. A part of chapter 4 is grounded in this work. In “China’s Reshaping of Sovereign Debt Relief,” published in International Affairs, I compared China’s current debt relief approach to that of Western private banks during the Latin American crisis of the 1980s. The research contributed to the analysis on China’s impact on the international sovereign debt regime in chapter 4. I thank the reviewers of these articles for their constructive comments and the journals for granting me permission to reuse content.

I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Eric Helleiner and Jonathan Kirshner, series editors of Cornell Studies in Money, and Jim Lance, Clare Jones, and Jackie Teoh at Cornell University Press for guiding me through the process of publication. The anonymous readers of the manuscript provided enlightening, encouraging, and detailed suggestions for revision, from which I have benefited enormously.

Pursuing an academic career as an Asian woman is challenging, since there are visible and invisible walls limiting the choices that girls and women can make. I am extremely thankful for my parents and my husband for supporting me in choosing this pathway. Last, I am grateful for a golden era of openness and globalization, which allowed me to travel and think across borders in seeking answers for this book and making sense of a rising China by exploring the world.