Small Banks, Big Politics: The Cause and Consequences of Bank Proliferation in China

The Henan bank protest, the Evergrande crisis, and the ongoing local government debt issue in China all point to one thing: there’s something wrong with the country’s banking system. Beijing needs to better regulate the numerous small banks that are now intimately intertwined with much of China's economic challenges. 

They’re working on it, but there’s no easy solution.

Adam Y. Liu will tell us the origins of the dilemma, the increasing role of small banks in China and local development, and what tradeoffs China will likely have to make to prevent a run-away banking crisis.

Speaker

Adam Y. Liu is assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His main research interests include Chinese politics and political economy. He is currently working on a book project that explores how central-local politics drove the formation, expansion, and operation of what he calls a "state-owned market" in China's banking sector. The project is based on his dissertation, which won the 2020 BRICS Economic Research Award. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral associate with the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy at Yale University.