Niv Horesh

Shanghai's bund and beyond : British banks, banknote issuance, and monetary policy in China, 1842-1937

As China emerges as a global powerhouse, this timely book examines its economic past and the shaping of its financial institutions. The first comparative study of foreign banking in prewar China, the book surveys the impact of British overseas bank notes on Chinas economy before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Focusing on the two leading British banks in the region, it assesses the favorable and unfavorable effects of the British presence in China, with particular emphasis on Shanghai, and traces instructive links between the changing political climate and banknote circulation volumes. Drawing on recently declassified archival materials, Niv Horesh revises previous assumptions about Chinas prewar economy, including the extent of foreign banknote circulation and the economic significance of the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925.

China: an East Asian alternative to neoliberalism?

ABSTRACT The political-economic evolution of post-Mao China has been portrayed as a historically inevitable embrace of neoliberalism; as an exemplification of the East Asian developmental state and as an extension of Soviet New Economic Policy-style state capitalism. This paper evaluates these portrayals through a broad historical and geographical framework. It examines the position of China as a new state after 1949. It then places the shifting logics of socioeconomic regulation in China in relation to (1) the global neoliberal hegemony since the 1980s and (2) the concomitant shifts in the economic policies of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how the Communist Party of China creatively adapted and re-purposed regulatory logics from the Washington Consensus and East Asian policies to consolidate its own version of Leninist state-led development.

The ‘Singapore Fever’ in China: policy mobility and mutation

The ‘Singapore Model’ has constituted the only second explicit attempt by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to learn from a foreign country following Mao Zedong’s pledge to contour ‘China’s tomorrow’ on the Soviet Union experience during the early 1950s. This paper critically evaluates policy transfers from Singapore to China in the post-Mao era. It re-examines how this Sino-Singaporean regulatory engagement came about historically following Deng Xiaoping’s visit to Singapore in 1978, and offers a careful re-reading of the degree to which actual policy borrowing by China could transcend different state ideologies, abstract ideas and subjective attitudes. Particular focus is placed on the effects of CPC cadre training in Singapore universities and policy mutation within two government-to-government projects, namely the Suzhou Industrial Park and the Tianjin Eco-City. The paper concludes that the ‘Singapore Model’, as applied in post-Mao China, casts institutional reforms as an open-ended process of policy experimentation and adaptation that is fraught with tension and resistance.

Chinese money in global context : historic junctures between 600 BCE and 2012

Chinese Money in Global Context: Historic Junctures Between 600 BCE and 2012 offers a groundbreaking interpretation of the Chinese monetary system, charting its evolution by examining key moments in history and placing them in international perspective. Expertly navigating primary sources in multiple languages and across three millennia, Niv Horesh explores the trajectory of Chinese currency from the birth of coinage to the current global financial crisis. His narrative highlights the way that Chinese money developed in relation to the currencies of other countries, paying special attention to the origins of paper money; the relationship between the Wests ascendancy and its mineral riches; the linkages between pre-modern finance and political economy; and looking ahead to the possible globalization of the RMB, the currency of the Peoples Republic of China. This analysis casts new light on the legacy of Chinas financial system both retrospectively and at present-when Chinas global influence looms large.

The Chongqing vs. Guangdong developmental ‘models’ in post-Mao China: regional and historical perspectives on the dynamics of socioeconomic change

ABSTRACT The Chinese political economy is a dynamic entity constituted by multiple developmental trajectories. Recent debates on two seemingly divergent ‘models’ in the subnational regions of Chongqing and Guangdong have foregrounded the potential contradictions of this dynamism. While existing research has attempted to evaluate these trajectories as outcomes of elite politics or ideological incommensurability, an overlooked but no less important aspect is the connections between these trajectories, Mao-era regulatory policies and the post-1978 system of reciprocal accountability. Synthesizing empirical materials from policy documents, academic commentaries, statistical data and interviews with planners from China, this paper provides a critical evaluation of these connections.

In Search of the ‘China Model’ Historic Continuity vs. Imagined History in Yan Xuetong’s Thought

The ‘China Model’ literature in English was until recently quite peripheral and rather ahistoric in nature. It was mainly penned by economists and other social scientist who aimed at generalising how China’s reforms worked since 1978. Historians, to the extent they tried at all to find linkages between Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and China’s pre-1978 heritage, were rather minimalistic in their approach. And since many economists reduced China’s achievements to the inflow of foreign investment in pursuit of cheap labour and tax breaks, many historians also tended to view the Special Economic Zones set up by Deng as merely reincarnations of a well-tried formula whereby Westerners were allowed to set up autonomous and bustling treaty ports along the China coast in the later part of the 19th century. In short, it was often suggested that the reforms the PRC had embarked on in 1979 were not so boldly original or ingenious as might be otherwise assumed. Yet, because PRC social scientists in their advisory capacity are more tightly linked with government than in the West, one can freely come across in the Chinese literature very sober and historicised academic accounts of the challenges the country is facing domestically and internationally, so long as the Party’s monopoly on power is not challenged directly. The following passages address an important book in that vein by prominent Tsinghua University professor, Yan Xuetong, that was recently translated into English. It is not a monograph in the strict sense of the word, but makes for a compilation of articles from various stages of the author’s career. Thus, Yan’s book offers stimulating insights on how China’s pre-modern past might inform the nature Chinese ambitions for global leadership in the future.

Development Trajectories: Hong Kong vs. Shanghai

Over the past three decades, Shanghai and Hong Kong, leading cities in Chinas Yangzi River Delta and Pearl River Delta, respectively, have seen rapid economic development and institutional transformation. Shanghai has experienced a major breakthrough in its export‐driven economy and in industrial upgrading since the opening of the Pudong area in the 1990s. Shanghai has also ramped up its efforts to catch up with Hong Kong and has already become one of the worlds foremost manufacturing and export hubs. At the same time, and particularly following the 1997 Asian economic crisis, Hong Kong has redoubled efforts to identify shortcomings in its economic architecture; and has explored plans to transcend its traditional role as a financial hub, to attract entrepreneurial hi‐tech talent, and to overcome inequitable income growth. This paper explores the development trajectories of these two cities and how they depart from the pre‐1978 development models. The paper also examines the extent to which the current trajectories are complementary or in competition.

The People's or the World's: RMB Internationalisation in Longer Historic Perspective

Prognoses of Chinas currency—Renminbi or RMB in short—going global have become a hotly debated topic in the economic and popular literature of late. While some analysts are tipping a gradual transformation of the RMB into the worlds next principal reserve currency in lieu of the US

Why Coins Turned Round the World Over? A Critical Analysis of the Origins and Transmission of Ancient Metallic Money

, others contend that the deficiencies of Chinas financial market will continue to preclude any such transformation for a long time to come. The aim of this paper is to survey the arguments put forward by either camp and to weigh into this debate not only through the prism of applied economic theory or political economy but also through the prism of economic history.

Chinese-Iranian mutual strategic perceptions.

The inspiration behind the pre-modern bronze round coinage standardised across China by the First Emperor of Qin in the 3rd century BC have remained fairly obscure and are still a contentious issue. We demonstrate in this article that the various theories arguing for an exclusively endogenous impetus behind the spread and development of Chinese round coinage vouched for by many scholars in either East Asia or the West all carry inherent contradictions. In contrast, circumstantial and archaeological evidence in support of partly exogenous origins are mounting. Evidence from the Middle East points to the early invention and wide circulation of round coinage in Lydia, Greece and the Achaemenid Empire. The expansion of the Persians into India in the 6th century BC and the later incursions by Alexander and the Greco-Bactrians in the fourth and third centuries BC all facilitated and may have decisively contributed to India’s adoption of round coinage. Similarly, the flow of ideas, artistic motifs and metallurgic knowhow from West Asia to China via Central Asia had occurred much earlier than the 3rd century BC. Active adoption of foreign (Central Eurasian steppe) customs in the fourth century BC is recorded in Chinese pre-imperial records and confirmed by recent archaeological findings across Eurasia. Ongoing archaeological work in China’s western provinces could further highlight this ancient phase of globalization that, quite literally, still shapes our most fundamental grasp of money.