The Latecomer’s Rise: A Book Talk by Muyang Chen

The event took place on October 11th, 2024 and was hosted online via Zoom webinar.

Professor Muyang Chen (Peking University) discussed her recent book The Latecomer’s Rise: Policy Banks and the Globalization of China’s Development Finance, which reveals the nature and impact of a rapidly growing form of international lending: Chinese development finance. Drawing on a variety of novel Chinese primary sources, including interviews and official bank documents, Chen pinpoints the distinctiveness of Chinese bilateral development finance, explains its origins, and analyzes its effects. She compares Chinese policy banks with their foreign counterparts to show that the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, while state-supported, are in fact also market-oriented. This approach, which emerged out of China’s particular economic history, 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.

This event was co-sponsored by Georgetown University’s Africa-China Initiative and Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues.

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Muyang Chen is an Assistant Professor of International Development at Peking University’s School of International Studies. Her research focuses on understanding the role of the state in development, and addresses the question of how China’s development finance affects global order.

Tianyi Wu (respondent) is a Global China Pre-doctoral Research Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center. She is pursuing a DPhil (PhD) in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

Yufan Huang (respondent) is a PhD student in the Government Department at Cornell University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Chinese domestic politics and its foreign policy, with a particular focus on China’s economic tradecraft and its relations with Southeast Asian countries.