The rise of the red dragon: the non-binary political economy of decentralised public banks

Abstract

This article scrutinises China’s unexpected economic ascent as an industrial dynamo despite an underdeveloped institutional framework, driven by a fusion of the Currency and Banking School arguments. Our discourse focuses on the reorganisation of endogenous money in post-Communist China, which significantly fortified the domestic economy. We employ a two-tiered framework, firstly linking the Currency vs. Banking School debate to the crucial role of domestic bank credit creation in economic development. Subsequently, we anchor this within the context of the post-Mao reforms, illustrating how ‘inside money’ is deployed in a top-down manner to real industry via a bottom-up and decentralised organisational design. The emergent Chinese political economy is in our view defined by the amalgamation of neo-statist and neo-liberal credit market policies. We detail the transformative effect of evolving domestic commercial banking trends, thereby shaping a distinctive post-Communist society.