China's Global Impact

Traces China’s rise from export-driven growth to global superpower status, examining how its economic and technological expansion is reshaping the world order and challenging American dominance.

First came the China supply shock, as Chinese exports, which grew six times between 1998 and 2007 brought much cheaper everyday products to Western markets. Then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, which prompted China to launch a four-trillion yuan economic rescue package and brought a realisation to Chinese policymakers that China could no longer rely on the United States, but had to find its own development path. Then came the China consumer boom, which populated department stores in London, New York, Paris and Milan with thousands of well-heeled Chinese shoppers; filled British and American private schools and universities with Chinese teenagers; and made French vineyard owners rich. Today, Chinese electric vehicles have taken over from the Chinese tourists as the tangible evidence in Western countries of China’s continued emergence.
China’s rise since 1980 has changed the world and will continue to do so. But how? China’s Global Impact: Technology, Geopolitics and the New Multipolar Order brings a uniquely well-informed and up-to-date perspective to today’s most consequential geopolitical development.
Giles Chance’s first book China and the Credit Crisis: The Emergence of a New World Order (2010) was the first to describe a shift in the post-war, America-dominated global power structure. His new book examines China’s increasingly important impact on global affairs and economics, starting from the late 1990s when Chinese exports started to produce global disinflation, up to today, as China, now a great power, creates a web of alliances to balance America’s control of the Western hemisphere.
The author participated in the late 1990s in one of China’s first dotcom start-ups, which focused on cross-border online sourcing from China. He makes use of his experience to analyse China’s technology development and evaluate its position today and tomorrow. As an investment banker in the early 2000s bringing private Chinese companies to raise capital in Hong Kong and London by way of Initial Public Offerings, he gained many insights into the development and role of China’s huge private business sector and its innovations. The author’s position between 2009 and 2020 as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College in the United States and also at Peking University in China has given him a deep understanding of both sides’ perspectives on the China–America relationship, which he has devoted a chapter in the book to discussing.