EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Explaining China’s approach to the global governance of sovereign debt distress: a state transformation analysis

Shahar Hameiri and Lee Jones

Review of International Political Economy, 2025, vol. 32, issue 4, 945-969

Abstract: The global governance of sovereign debt distress is widely understood to be under threat from China, which has risen to become the world’s largest official bilateral creditor. In response to the Global South’s post-2020 debt crisis, China has undermined established approaches led by the International Monetary Fund and the Paris Club, with many seeing this as further evidence of Beijing’s challenge to the US-led liberal international order. Yet, China has proposed no meaningful alternative to the existing regime, and its behaviour has arguably undermined Beijing’s global standing, rather than advancing its strategic interests. Moreover, China has actively participated in Group of 20 frameworks drawing heavily on Paris Club rules, and insists more resolutely on ‘comparable treatment’ with other creditors than Paris Club member-states. Its behaviour therefore seems contradictory and incoherent, rather than reflecting a strategic choice. This article explains this using the State Transformation Approach, which sees the Chinese party-state not as a strategic, unitary actor but as a loosely coordinated, highly contested array of agents pursuing potentially contradictory interests. This explains why China’s commercial lenders have successfully safeguarded their interests during the debt crisis, at the expense of other creditors and Beijing’s wider geopolitical interests.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09692290.2025.2451753 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:32:y:2025:i:4:p:945-969

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rrip20

DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2025.2451753

Access Statistics for this article

Review of International Political Economy is currently edited by Gregory Chin, Juliet Johnson, Daniel Mügge, Kevin Gallagher, Ilene Grabel and Cornelia Woll

More articles in Review of International Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-07-02
Handle: RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:32:y:2025:i:4:p:945-969