The Chinese Economy From the Underside: Funny Money and Institutional Transformation in the Xi Jinping Era

Abstract

This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist examines the irregular transactions and informal institutions that constitute the essential underside of the Chinese economy. Contributors with a range of disciplinary backgrounds explore shadow banking, social welfare and rural development by private enterprise, NGO financing, the credit/debt cycle of informal international trade, and offshore investment by Chinese state-owned enterprises. The question posed by all contributors is as follows: How, in China through the 2010s, do irregular or nonlegal financial transactions influence political authority? Institutions, the rules and norms by which we live, are found to be key. This “Introduction” sketches the conceptual links between money, rules, and ruling in the context of the heightened authoritarianism and institutional formalization of the 2010s—the Xi Jinping era.