Security guards try to keep protestors angry about failed investments with Hunan Bofeng Asset Management Ltd. out of a branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in Changsha, Hunan. Credit: Chinatopix via AP
China’s political system is preoccupied with stability, particularly in the runup to a quinquennial Party Congress meeting. But there has been little understanding of how the Communist Party’s efforts to cultivate a perception of political stability have interacted with financial stability in China. Nor has there been a full appreciation of how the bargain between the Party and Chinese citizens, that has broadly sustained this financial stability in the recent past, has now fundamentally changed. Against that background, public messaging that Xi Jinping is set to further consolidate and centralize control at the 20th Party Congress is now more likely to generate risks within China’s financial system, rather than defusing them.
China has to date avoided a major financial crisis, despite its eye-watering debt levels — the result of the largest single-country credit expansion relative to global GDP in over a century. This is not because of commonly cited macroeconomic fac
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