A Survey of China Within and Beyond the Bretton Woods System

China’s full integration into the Bretton Woods System (BWS) since it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001 raised questions about exactly how China relates to the BW institutions and the international economic order that they support. Existing studies debate whether China is supporting the BWS institutions and the order as a ‘responsible’ member, or whether it is looking to reshape the system or even undermine and replace the BWS institutions completely. 

Despite such wide-ranging debates on China’s rise, there is yet to be a consensus in the existing literature on how exactly China has positioned itself in relation to the BWS, the role it is playing and the consequences of its behavior for the respective institutions, or the system or the order more broadly. 

A new working paper by Yaechan Lee, William Kring, Greg Chin and Kevin P. Gallagher provides a survey of the state of the knowledge and available data on China’s role within the BWS. It details the datasets that have been collected and published on this theme of China in the international monetary, global development finance and world trade realms. 

The authors note that the quantitative data on China’s positioning within and outside of the BWS tends to be highly fragmented, inconsistent and imprecise. The lack of comprehensive and coherent official data published by the Chinese government, and the fragmentation in the unofficial data that has been collected by think tanks and academic institutions, has resulted in incomplete understandings of China’s position in the three realms, inside and outside of the BW institutions. The authors provide a survey of the leading and ‘best’ quantitative data sources available in the public domain on the research question of China and the BWS. They also highlight the relevant gaps that exist in the datasets that have been collected. Finally, they offer a roadmap for the new datasets that should be created in order for academics and policymakers to gain a more evidence-based, empirically grounded and theoretically-conceptually informed understanding of China’s position within and outside the BWS, as well as its positioning and impact on global economic governance.