Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions
In-person, Members-only Briefing
Tuesday, September 26, 2023 | 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM ET
One of the key strategies to China’s global rise has been its deployment of sovereign wealth on behalf of state power. Since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013, China has doubled down on financial statecraft, making shrewd investments with the sovereign funds it has built up by leveraging its foreign exchange reserves. How has the Chinese Communist Party become the number one government global financier? How have these sovereign funds helped China re-shape global markets, advance the Belt and Road Initiative, and Chinese foreign policy? Join us on Tuesday, September 26, 2023 from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM ET for an in-person, members-only briefing with Dr. Zongyuan Zoe Liu, Maurice R. Greenberg Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, who will address these questions as well as her recent book, “Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions.”
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SPEAKER:
Zongyuan Zoe Liu
Zongyuan Zoe Liu is Maurice R. Greenberg Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Her work focuses on international political economy, global financial markets, sovereign wealth funds, supply chains of critical minerals, development finance, emerging markets, and energy and climate policy. Dr. Liu’s regional expertise is in East Asia, specifically China and Japan, and the Middle East, specifically Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Dr. Liu is the author of Can BRICS De-dollarize the Global Financial System? (Cambridge University Press, February 2022) and Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances its Global Ambitions (Harvard University Press, June 2023). She is also a columnist at Foreign Policy.
Prior to joining CFR, Dr. Liu was an assistant professor at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service in Washington, DC, where she taught courses on the global economy, economic statecraft, and Chinese foreign policy. She joined the Bush School after post-doctoral fellowships at the Columbia-Harvard “China and the World Program” and the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Dr. Liu was a research fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies and a research associate at the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business. She was also a visiting research fellow at the Institute for International Monetary Affairs in Tokyo, Bank of Mitsubishi-UFJ, and the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi. She taught courses on Asian energy security and political risk analysis at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Liu received her PhD in international relations from Johns Hopkins University and she is also a CFA charterholder.
About Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances its Global Ambitions
One of the sources of China’s global rise has been its strategy of deploying sovereign wealth on behalf of state power. Since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013, China has doubled down on financial statecraft, making shrewd investments with the sovereign funds it has built up by leveraging its foreign exchange reserves. Sovereign Funds tells the story of how the Communist Party of China became a global financier of surpassing ambition.
In Sovereign Funds, Zongyuan Zoe Liu offers the first in-depth account of the evolution of China’s sovereign funds, and shows how these institutions have become mechanisms not only for transforming low-reward foreign exchange reserves into investment capital but also for power projection.
Additional Material for Reading and Listening:
Financial Times Book Review
Bloomberg Report by Tom Hancock
Interview by Wire China
Podcast by Pekingology
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