This book examines China’s response to the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, and the resulting new status acquired by China within the international economy. It considers the things China did to weather the crisis, discussing the stimulus package put in place by China and how China’s banks coped, but above all examines the measures which countries outside China look to China to put in place in order to better encourage and secure world-wide economic recovery, measures such as currency revaluation, tax reform and greater stimulation of domestic demand. The book contrasts China’s response to the crisis, and China’s increasingly central role in the world economy, with the responses of the European Union. The book also assesses China’s increasingly important regional role, in particular its dialogue with the new Japanese government, and China’s positioning towards Southeast Asia, and also discusses the growth of Chinese foreign direct investment.

This book examines China’s response to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, both in its immediate aftermath and in the years since. The crisis caused turmoil throughout Asia’s economies, and precipitated wholesale reform of economic and financial policies and institutions across the region. As one of Asia’s largest economies, China responded to the crisis more successfully than many others, avoiding devaluation of its currency, whilst undertaking financial reform, restructuring state-owned enterprises, rural development, and social security systems. This book considers all of these issues, showing how the lessons drawn from the crisis have helped shape China’s policies of liberalisation and market-orientated reform, including its attitude towards globalisation and the outside world in general. Based on research conducted by the China Development Research Foundation, one of China’s leading think-tanks, this book includes contributions from senior policy makers in the Chinese government and some experts participating directly in the government’s policy-making process to assess the effects generated by the country’s related policies, making it an indispensable account of China’s own thinking on its response to the financial crisis.