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The Strategic Foundations of International Economic Order: China, Bretton Woods, and the Cold War
In the early 1940s, Nationalist China was an important shaper of the post-World War II economic order founded at Bretton Woods; by the early 1950s, the People’s Republic of China had become a target of Cold War economic sanctions and absent from the order’s major institutions. Tracing Nationalist and Communist ideas about China’s place in the international economic order, Amy King examines how these ideas shaped, and were shaped by, the changing character of that order from World War II to the early Cold War. She explores the order-shaping mechanisms used by Chinese actors, and the important continuities in Nationalist and Communist ideas about the strategic, rather than liberal, foundations of international economic order. Examining the order transition from World War II to Cold War highlights the incremental evolution in shared ideas that may occasion other moments of order transition, and the historical origins of contemporary Chinese economic ordering ideas.
Amy King is Associate Professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. She has published widely on China-Japan relations, the economics-security nexus in Asia, and China’s historical and contemporary role in shaping the international order. The author of China-Japan Relations After World War II: Empire, Industry and War, 1949–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Amy’s works have also appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, Modern Asian Studies, Security Studies, Journal of Cold War Studies, and the Cambridge Economic History of China, among others. Her research has been supported by an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship and a Westpac Research Fellowship, and she holds an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies and DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford.
Date:
17 October 2025, 12:00
Venue:
Dickson Poon Building, Canterbury Road OX2 6LU
Venue Details:
Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre (lower ground floor)
Speaker:
Professor Amy King (Australian National University)
Organising department:
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Organiser:
Professor Todd Hall (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
Part of:
China Centre talks
Booking required?:
Not required
Cost:
Free
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Clare Orchard
