The Limits of China's monetary diplomacy

In a newly published book The Great Wall of Money: Power and Politics in China’s International Monetary Relations, Yang Jiang contributes a chapter on ‘The limits of China’s Monetary Diplomacy’. The chapter challenges the widely held optimism that China will soon become a global monetary power and that its currency RMB is replacing the US dollar as the next global currency. It provides an in-depth analysis of domestic financial politics, in particular the battle between reformists and conservatives, in order to underline the difficulty of financial reform in China. The domestic political and economic conditions determine that China’s monetary diplomacy has so far been ‘symbolic for political gains, or shallow and short-term oriented for pragmatic commercial gains’. Such features are demonstrated by the examples of China’s rescue for the Eurozone crisis, RMB aid and currency swap arrangements, its role in the IMF, and RMB internationalization.

The book The Great Wall of Money is published in the Cornell Studies in Money series by Cornell University Press in both hardcover and paperback. It is edited by internationally renowned scholars on monetary matters Eric Helleiner and Jonathan Kirshner, with contributions from well-known scholars of both Chinese and international political economies.

Yang Jiang is Senior Researcher at DIIS. Her work on China’s political economy has appeared in journals Review of International Political Economy, The Pacific Review, Journal of Contemporary China, amongst others. Her recent book China’s Policymaking for Regional Economic Cooperation is published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013.