ORIGINAL ARTICLE
China-IMF Collaboration: Toward the Leadership
in Global Monetary Governance
Jue Wang1
Received: 12 September 2017 / Accepted: 15 September 2017 / Published online: 4 October 2017
Ó The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication
Abstract This paper analyses China’s collaboration with the IMF in various programmes,
including China’s participation in IMF technical assistance programmes,
IMF country surveillance for China, China’s attempt to weaken the US dominance
in the international monetary system through the IMF, and the RMB’s entry to the
SDR basket. The results of these collaboration activities reﬂect the extent to which
the IMF assists China in pursuing leadership in global governance of monetary
policies. The paper raises two key points. First, it highlights the impact of Chinese
actors’ interests and objectives regarding China’s domestic economic development
and outward expansion on their government’s interaction with international organizations.
Second, it argues that the result of China-IMF collaboration is determined
by two conditions (a) the compatibility between Chinese and IMF interests and
objectives regarding key economic and political issues, and (b) China’s relative role
in the IMF’s institutional governance in comparison with the Fund’s other member
states.
Keywords China Á China-IMF collaboration Á Institutional decision-making
power Á Global monetary governance Á International monetary reforms
1 Introduction
The 2008 global ﬁnancial crisis severely destabilized the US-dominated international
ﬁnancial regime and its repercussions have continued to (re-) shape the world
economic structure until present. Although different markets and governments have
& Jue Wang
j.wang.18@hum.leidenuniv.nl
1
Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Arsenaalstraat 1, 2311 CT Leiden, The
Netherlands
123
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-017-0085-8
implemented numerous compensating instruments, including a variety of institutional
and macroeconomic policy changes, the international ﬁnancial system will
not return to its pre-crisis state. On the contrary, these changes have gradually led to
a new global ﬁnancial governance structure with a number of resurrected or novel
components. Among all, this paper delves into two inter-related elements: the IMF’s
attempt to return to the front line of global ﬁnancial governance and China’s pursuit
of leadership in the same realm.
Due to its highly restrained external trade and investment relations, China was
absent from the international ﬁnancial system until the 1980s. As a latecomer, it has,
however, gradually integrated into the existing international ﬁnancial architecture,
with the assistance of international ﬁnancial institutions (IFIs) such as the IMF, and
become an increasingly active member of global governance of monetary policies.
Before the 2008 ﬁnancial crisis, China had participated in various IMF programmes
to get access to advanced methods and techniques of ﬁnancial governance that met
the international standards and useful feedback for its domestic economic
development. After the crisis burst, China and the IMF acknowledged further each
other’s increasing importance in the post-crisis global monetary governance and
strengthened their collaboration.
For example, under the pressure of ‘US dollar trap’, China called the IMF for
taking the initiative in shifting the focus of international monetary system (IMS)
away from the US, while seeking leadership in the reformed system. Meanwhile,
China actively advocated strengthening the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR)
and letting the Renminbi (RMB) join the SDR basket to reinforce the RMB’s role in
the IMS. These examples of China-IMF collaboration show the recent developments
in China’s relationship with international economic organizations, referring to the
evolution from merely China learning from the international organizations (IOs) to
China collaborating with the IOs for greater inﬂuence in global governance.
China-IMF collaboration has generated various results, with some fulﬁlling both
China and the IMF’s needs whereas others leading to disputes between the two.
Studying the causes of such variations helps us understand the progress of China’s
pursuit of leadership in global monetary governance through the IMF. Hence, this
paper will focus on the determinants of the result of China-IMF collaboration based
on a number of case studies, including China’s participation in IMF technical
assistance (TA) programmes, IMF country surveillance for China, China’s attempt
to weaken the US dominance in the IMS through the IMF, and the RMB’s entry to
the SDR basket. The paper raises two key points. First, it highlights the impact of
Chinese actors’ interests and objectives regarding China’s domestic economic
development and outward expansion on their government’s interaction with IOs.
Second, it argues that the result of China-IMF collaboration is determined by two
conditions (a) the compatibility between Chinese and IMF interests and objectives
regarding key economic and political issues, and (b) China’s relative role in the
IMF’s institutional governance in comparison with the Fund’s other member states.
The next sections are arranged as follows. Section 2 brieﬂy discusses a number of
crucial concerns in the studies of China-IO relationship as well as explains the
research focus in this paper. Section 3 assesses China’s relative role in the IMF’s
institutional governance as a determinant of the result of China-IMF collaboration.
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123
Section 4 scrutinizes the cases of China-IMF collaboration according to the IMF’s
two main functions—‘International Organization specialization’ and ‘agenda setting
power’—and examines the determinants of collaboration results, followed by the
conclusion in Sect. 5.
2 China and the IMF: Collaborating Toward Greater Governance Role
Unlike the inﬂuential ﬁnancial powers in the western world, Beijing was absent
from the initial designing and facilitating of post-war international monetary
system. Neither did it catch the early train of economic globalization, and thus
reinforcing its ﬁnancial strength in the early post-Bretton Woods era. As a
latecomer, Beijing, however, has gradually integrated into the existing international
ﬁnancial architecture since the early 1980s, with the assistance of IFIs such as the
IMF, and become an important member of global governance of monetary policies.
The Chinese government collaborated with the IMF in various forms, which
consequently generated diverse results. These results of collaboration, whether
beneﬁting both sides equally or satisfying one side more than the other, reﬂect
China’s dynamic role in global monetary governance.
2.1 China: A Rising Power in Global Financial Governance
In the literature of China’s relationship with IOs, scholars often discuss how China
can be ‘socialized’ (or not) to be a responsible status quo actor in global governance
arenas, whether China plays by the existing international rules, wants to modify
them, or seeks to radically change them and establish new institutions, rules and
norms (Acharya 2011; Han 2007; Lynch 2006; Johnston 2008; Kent 2002). The
socialization approach explains well how China has learned internationally
standardized practices from IOs. Johnston’s (2008) three ‘microprocesses’ of
socialization—mimicking, social inﬂuence and persuasion—detailed how China
was engaged in the international security regime. These ‘microprocesses’ could also
be applied partially to China’s early engagement with the IMF, indicating how
China learned a variety of data processing and policy making methods from the
IMF, and that China gradually liberalized its ﬁnancial regime under the IMF’s
inﬂuence (Ferdinand and Wang 2013).
However, existing studies following the socialization logic do not explain why
China has become increasingly intractable facing the IMF on certain issues.
Socialization theories normally expect the states to be further ‘socialized’ into
accepting the existing norms of the IOs, thanks to the mutual sympathy and
understanding established between them over time. However, after two decades of
peaceful collaboration between China and the IMF, a number of issues have caused
heated tension between the two in the new millennium. For instance, they had
serious disputes on whether or not the Chinese government manipulated the RMB
exchange rate in the late 2000s. China also protested with strong actions against the
IMF’s western-dominated governance structure and its ‘biased surveillance focuses’
against China and other emerging economies.
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It is largely because existing studies failed to trace the changing interests and
objectives of Chinese actors. As the Chinese economy grew into different stages and
its inﬂuence in the international affairs strengthened, China’s interests and
objectives regarding its domestic economic development and outward expansion
have also evolved. The socialization approach, which often regards states as passive
receivers of static norms, fails to capture the dynamic changes in the Chinese actors’
interests and objectives that actively shape Beijing’s interaction with IOs. In its
collaboration with the IMF, especially in the early periods, the Chinese government
has hoped to learn advanced methods and techniques of ﬁnancial governance that
meet the international standards; it has also hoped to gain feedback for its own
economic policies and useful information about the economic development of other
countries. Nevertheless, as China became more assertive about its own political and
economic regimes, it has also developed stronger resistance against the IMF advice
that is perceived as intrusive or harmful for China’s own development. For example,
the IMF’s advice on evaluating the RMB was conceived as one. Meanwhile,
China’s aspiration to enlarge its inﬂuence in the IMS has surged, and sometimes
going beyond the IMF’s capacity. These dynamics in China’s interests and
objectives largely reﬂect as well as shape China’s political identities and economic
norms, two core elements that determine a state’s actions in international affairs
from a social constructivist perspective. Hence, only by taking into consideration
China’s dynamic interests and objectives regarding key economic and political
issues, the socialization approach can capture a comprehensive and updated picture
of China’s actions in international ﬁnancial affairs.
On the other hand, states’ interests and objectives are the focus of rational choice
approaches to studying state-IO relationship. For instance, the Principal-agent
theory argues that states hire IOs to perform some functions to achieve the
objectives of the former (Nielson and Tierney 2003; Hawkins et al. 2006). This
logic, combined with the international institutionalist interpretation of states’
reliance on IOs to solve transnational issues, largely explains why states have
become more involved in existing IOs or endeavoured to establish new ones in the
past decades. Following this logic, the strong inﬂuences of the US political interests
in the IMF’s lending decisions are particularly evident (Thacker 1999; Broz and
Hawes 2006). This logic is, however, rarely applied to the interactions between
emerging market countries and IOs. In the realm of global ﬁnancial governance, the
emerging economies lacked any effective inﬂuence in IFIs, let alone the possibility
of instigating IFIs to undertake certain policy, until the more recent years. In
particular, when a series of regional and global ﬁnancial crises took place in the 80s
and 90s, some emerging economies were forced to submit to the political
conditionalities of the IMF and other regional and international ﬁnancial institutions
to receive loans.
The balance between strong IFIs and weak emerging and developing economies
was, however, broken by the 2008 global ﬁnancial crisis. China survived the crisis
as a new leader of the international ﬁnancial system, whereas the former leaders,
namely the US and other advanced western economies remained deeply mired.
China requested larger decision-making power in the traditional IFIs such as the
IMF and the World Bank, and (co-) established new ones such as the New
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Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). In
the realm of monetary governance, China encouraged the IMF to take the initiative
in shifting the focus of IMS away from the US, while actively seeking leadership in
the reformed system via a series of collaboration with the Fund. A good example of
such collaboration would be the RMB’s entry into the SDR basket in 2016. Just like
the US and other western developed economies, China has also made decisions
upon collaborating with IFIs based on its own interests and objectives regarding key
economic and political issues. Moreover, as an emerging power in the international
ﬁnancial system that it did not build from the beginning, China relies even more on
the existing IOs for pursuing leadership in the system. The abovementioned case of
China-IMF collaboration showed this point, and it will be elaborated later in the
paper. Therefore, clarifying China’s interests and objectives not only complements
the socialization approach by adding more dynamic elements to the question but
also updates the rational choice approach to studying the state-IO relationship by
including a key rising power, namely China’s role in global ﬁnancial governance.
2.2 Analyzing China-IMF Collaboration
China’s interests in domestic economic development and its objectives in pursuing
greater inﬂuence in global ﬁnancial governance do not stand as the sole
determinants of China’s collaboration with the IMF. The latter also largely depends
on what the IMF could offer to help China fulﬁl its interests and objectives. The
study of China-IMF collaboration in this paper relates China’s interests and
objectives to the IMF’s functions, and assesses the extent to which the latter meet
the requests of the former. This rational choice approach to analyzing the ChinaIMF
relationship accords with China’s enhanced voices, growing interests, and
pragmatic manners in international affairs. Meanwhile, the IMF also has distinct
interests and objectives that guide its interactions with China.
The IMF’s essential objective is to maintain its authority and autonomy in global
ﬁnancial governance by providing its member states with useful loans, training, and
advice. Although the IMF attempts to stay neutral, its organizational culture, like
that of the World Bank, is often considered to be a ‘‘Washington-centric approval
culture’ that is guided by ‘neoliberal economic theory’ and characterized by ‘a
technocratic approach to problems’ (Nielson et al. 2006: 109; Park and Vetterlein
2010). This, however, does not mean that the IMF holds on to the neoliberal
economic ideology to the same extent in all the policy practices.
When China’s interests and objectives converge with those of the IMF, its
collaboration with the IMF tends to generate the result that fulﬁls China’s needs. If
China and the IMF have diverging interests and objectives, the result of their
collaboration is less pleasant. Another important determinant of the result of ChinaIMF
collaboration is China’s role in the IMF’s institutional governance, which will
be explained brieﬂy in the next section. China’s institutional role in the IMF
depends on its relative inﬂuence in the Fund’s decision-making process in
comparison with other member states. The larger a state’s relative decision-making
power is, the more capable it is to convince the IMF to make a policy decision that
matches the state’s own interests, and vice versa. Hence, smooth collaboration
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between China and the IMF has two conditions: matching interests and objectives
between China and the IMF and a strong Chinese position in the IMF’s institutional
governance.
3 China in the IMF’s Institutional Governance
A member state’s decision making power in the IMF is divided into two categories:
formal and informal, referring to the state’s relative position in the IMF’s formal
and informal governance structures, respectively.
3.1 Formal Decision-Making Power
A state’s formal decision-making power is determined by its relative voting share in
the Executive Board (EB), the IMF’s central governance body. The EB is
responsible for conducting the day-to-day business of the IMF. The EB includes 24
executive directors (EDs), who are either appointed or elected among the
representatives of all member states. Most of the EDs represent a constituency of
several member states, whereas 8 EDs represent a single country, the US, Japan,
China, Germany, France, the UK, Russia and Saudi Arabia, respectively. They are
also the Fund’s 8 largest member states by voting share.1
China is currently the IMF’s third largest member by voting share. This is a
recent result of China’s decade long struggle for larger voices in the IMF’s formal
governance. Before that, China, along with other emerging economies, had been
under-represented for a long time. Thus, China joined the campaign for IMF
governance reforms that focused on increasing the emerging and developing
economies’ voices in the Fund. China has beneﬁted from three most recent IMF
governance reforms, launched in 2006, 2008 and 2010, respectively. Among all, the
2010 reform represented the largest power shift in favour of the Fund’s emerging
and developing economy members in the history according to the then IMF
Manager Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (IMF 2010a). The 2010 reform
nevertheless only became effective in January 2016, after a severe delay. It was
mostly because the US Congress did not ratify the reform in time, without which the
reform could not be implemented according to IMF regulations. The Chinese
authorities repeatedly urged the IMF to implement the reform, but the IMF could
not do much without the US approval.
After the 2010 reform was ratiﬁed, China’s voting share among all IMF member
states increased from 3.8 to 6.1%, making China the IMF’s third largest member
after the US and Japan. This change marked China’s signiﬁcant achievement in
winning larger formal decision-making power in the IMF. It, however, did not
fundamentally alter the IMF’s Western-dominated governance structure. Despite the
1
The EB makes decisions upon all the proposals, whether to pass or reject them, mostly by consensuses.
If a consensus could not be reached, the EDs would vote to generate a decision, but they rarely need to do
so. When the EDs have contradictory preferences, they must go through several rounds of negotiations to
reach a decision. Such decisions often require the less inﬂuential EDs to compromise in order to satisfy
the powerful EDs’ preferences.
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slight decline in the US voting share from 16.7 to 16.5%, the US continued to hold a
veto right in the EB’s formal decision-making process. With the veto power the US
can block any change from the status quo in the IMF, including quota and voting
share changes. In other words, unless the US voluntarily gives up its veto right, it
will continue to dominate the IMF’s formal governance. EU countries—by adding
their voting shares altogether—also secured a veto right (IMF 2010b).
3.2 Informal Decision-Making Power
A state’s informal decision-making power is determined by its capacity in
inﬂuencing IMF policy decisions via IMF staff directly and/or through the Fund’s
informal forums and groups (Stone 2011: 55). First of all, all of the proposals to be
approved by the EB are prepared by IMF staff as a product of rigorous fact
investigation and data analysis. They would not submit a proposal knowing it is
likely to fail; and the Fund’s board meeting record did show that the EB rarely
declined proposals (Martin 2006: 143). In this way, the IMF staff effectively run
‘quality-controls’ on the EB’s policy decisions. The high proposal approval rate, or
the successful ‘quality control’ in other words, is backed by the regular
communication between IMF staff and the EDs ofﬁces. Secondly, a number of
informal groups, such as the G7, the group of EU representatives to the IMF and the
Asia Paciﬁc Group, often actively engage in leveraging preferential access to IMF
senior management and staff to affect the institutional agenda (Woods and
Lombardi 2006; Lombardi 2011).
Although China’s inﬂuence among IMF staff and in informal groups has
increased rapidly since 1980, it yet lags behind the G7 countries. Among all the IMF
members, the US has the largest capacity in inﬂuencing IMF staff’s proposals and
the Fund’s agenda, either alone or through the G7. This is because the US has
distinct institutional advantages over other countries, backed by its extensive
diplomatic corps, inﬂuential private ﬁnancial institutions, advantages in gathering
information, and last but not least, the advantage of having the IMF located in
Washington, DC (Stone 2011: 51–79). The rest of the G7 members often keep their
voices consistent with the US. China, on the other hand, does not have any of the
abovementioned advantages.
4 China’s Collaboration with the IMF
When the Bretton Woods system was established in 1944, China was one of its
initial founding members. Through this newly established international ﬁnancial
mechanism, the Kuomintang (KMT) government was eager to get access to external
ﬁnancial resources to help China solve balance of payments issues (Helleiner and
Momani 2014: 50–58). The KMT government also believed that playing an
important role in the IMF would enhance China’s status in the international
economy. These self-interested objectives coincided with those of the Communist
Chinese government when it took over the representation of China in the IMF in
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1980. Beijing’s take-over of China’s IMF membership was motivated by a number
of explicit goals (Jacobson and Oksenberg 1990):
• To learn methods and techniques of running a modern ﬁnancial system that meet
the international standards;
• To get information about foreign economies;
• To (re)-connect with foreign economic institutions via IMF programmes;
• To accelerate the expulsion of Taiwan from the international political society by
demonstrating the People’s Republic of China’s legal membership in the IMF;
• To become a friendly member of the international political society to smoothen
potential cooperation with foreign states.
Since then, China’s goals regarding collaborating with the IMF have developed
as its own interests in domestic economic development and its objectives in
pursuing greater inﬂuence in global ﬁnancial governance evolved. To fulﬁl the
updated goals, the Chinese authorities have participated in a series of IMF
programmes. As noted above, the Chinese government engages with the IMF based
upon the Fund’s functions in helping China meet its interests and objectives. Hence,
this section discusses the China-IMF collaboration according to the IMF’s
functions, divided into two main categories ‘IO specialization’ and ‘agenda setting
power.’ The collaboration in the latter category particularly reveals how China
pursues leadership in global monetary governance through the IMF.
4.1 IO Specialization
China engages with the IMF due to the latter’s outstanding expertise, political skills,
and resources to perform various tasks, which are characterized as ‘IO specialization’
by Hawkins et al. (2006: 15).
4.1.1 Technical Assistance
The IMF provides their member states with TA in a variety of areas, such as central
banking, monetary policies, ﬁscal policies and administration, exchange rate
policies and ofﬁcial statistics, to help them improve economic policy design and
practices. Aiming to learn the advanced methods and techniques in the abovementioned
areas that meet the international standards, the Chinese authorities make
requests for the IMF’s TA based upon their own government ofﬁcials’ updated
needs (Jacobson and Oksenberg 1990; IMF 2009a). China has received a
considerable amount of TA from the IMF since the 1980s via training courses in
IMF institutes, visits by IMF experts to China, and periodical postings of Chinese
ofﬁcials in both IMF headquarters and its Beijing ofﬁce. The Chinese ofﬁcials
learned from the IMF how to use internationally standardized methods to format and
process ﬁnancial data and policies. For example, up to the mid-1980s, China was
using ﬁgures for net material product (NMP) to measure its economy, which
excluded the service sector. Under the IMF and the World Bank’s aid, China
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switched to gross domestic product (GDP) measurements, and consequently gave
prominence to the service sector (IBRD 1983, 1985).
In 2000, the IMF and China co-established the Joint IMF-China Training
Programme (CTP) to provide policy-oriented training in economics and the related
operational ﬁelds for Chinese ofﬁcials. The IMF and the People’s Bank of China
(PBC) jointly decide the course schedule for the Programme. Due to the rising
popularity of IMF training courses among Chinese ofﬁcials, the Fund and the PBC
built a training centre speciﬁcally for Chinese ofﬁcials in Dalian in 2004.
Among all the IMF departments, the IMF Institute for Capacity Development has
organized the largest number of training courses in economic management under the
CTP. It also organizes high-level seminars for China’s economic policy makers
together with the world leading experts. For example, the Institute organized a highlevel
seminar in 2004 to facilitate dialogues between international analysts and key
Chinese policy makers on China’s then controversial exchange rate issues. The IMF
Statistics Department is the Fund’s second largest training provider for China. It has
organized a considerable amount of training programmes for the ofﬁcials from
China’s crucial economic institutions, including the PBC, the Ministry of Finance,
the National Bureau of Statistics, the China Banking Regulatory Commission, and
the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. The programmes covered macroeconomic
statistics, balance of payments, ﬁscal reform, taxation, and budgetary and
monetary operations (IMF 2009a: 7–17).
The successful collaboration between IMF staff and Chinese authorities in TA
programmes is largely because they have had converging goals, that is to ensure that
Chinese ofﬁcials are able to learn the methods and techniques in ﬁnancial
governance that meet the IMF’s standards. Moreover, the IMF’s TA programmes do
not directly impinge upon China’s domestic economic policies, because they focus
mostly on methodological issues instead of ideological and structural ones in the
core of China’s economic policy making (Ferdinand and Wang 2013: 901). The
Chinese government can control the contents of TA training programmes and the
extent to which the programmes can reach Chinese ofﬁcials, so that they do not feel
being intruded by the Fund.
4.1.2 Surveillance and Policy Advice
IMF surveillance and policy advice is designed to oversee the international
monetary system and examine the member states’ economic policies and provide
them with constructive advice. It is one of the IMF’s most conventional functions,
thanks to the Fund staff’s expertise in (macro-) economic policies and the Fund’s
authority in international ﬁnancial governance. It is also one of the IMF’s most
controversial functions, as the IMF is often accused of providing ‘one size ﬁts all’
prescriptions to its member countries. For example, some IMF advice was
notoriously unhelpful during a number of emerging market crises in the 1990s (Chin
2010). China participates in the IMF’s surveillance and policy advice programmes
in order to get useful feedback about its own economic policies. To get useful
information and keep IMF surveillance accountable, the Chinese authorities must
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sacriﬁce a certain level of (economic) sovereignty and submit data and information
to the Fund.
IMF country surveillance, namely the annual Article IV Consultation, channels
most of the IMF policy advice to the Chinese authorities. IMF policy advice has
tackled some essential issues in the Chinese economy, such as the under-valuation
of RMB exchange rate, lack of transparency in ﬁnancial management, banking
sector reforms, and China’s internal imbalances. The Chinese authorities nevertheless
have the ultimate right to decide whether or not they will accept IMF advice and
how they want to implement the advice.
Several changes in China’s exchange rate policies could be attributed to IMF
advice, for example China took the IMF’s advice to devalue the RMB by 15.8% to
solve the balance of payments issues in the mid-1980s (Lardy 1992). Under the
IMF’s inﬂuences, China gradually loosened the control on currency convertibility
(Feeney 1998; PBC 1996), and eventually complied with Article VIII of the IMF
Articles of Agreement to make its currency freely convertible on the current account
in 1996 (IMF 1996). In addition, a series of institutional reforms in China’s ﬁnancial
sector, including the advancement of the central banking system and several
changes in corporate governance and ﬁnancial legislation, were largely compatible
with the IMF’s policy advice for China’s economic modernization (Kent 2007;
Lardy 1998, 1999).
However, the Chinese authorities did not willingly accept all IMF advice. For
instance, they battled hard against the IMF on China’s exchange rate issues in the
second half of the 2000s. The drastic increase in China’s trade and current account
surplus in the mid-2000s made the US and other western economies alert of China’s
‘under-valued’ RMB. The US Treasury forced the IMF to revise the bilateral
surveillance guidelines to discipline China’s ‘problematic’ exchange rate regimes
(IMF 2007; Blustein 2013). The revision was approved by the EB as the ‘2007
Decision on Bilateral Surveillance.’ Pressurized by the G7, especially the US, the
IMF became increasingly critical toward China’s monetary policies during the
bilateral surveillance and pushed China to adjust the exchange rate of the RMB.
They contended that the undervalued RMB reduced the scope for running a more
proactive and independent monetary policy with higher real interest rates, and that it
also created distortions in relative prices that undermined the government’s efforts
to raise household income and to develop the service sector (IMF
2006, 2010c, 2011a, 2012, 2013).
The Chinese authorities, however, rebutted the IMF’s claims and insisted that the
RMB and the foreign exchange market were close to equilibrium, despite
conducting some very moderate RMB appreciations from 2006 onwards. China’s
resistance toward a substantial RMB appreciation was backed by strong domestic
economic and political interests. Revaluing the RMB would severely harm China’s
manufacturing-based export industries, the main job providers for the country’s
large population (Xinhua 2010; Renminwang 2009), especially on top of the
declining external demands during the global ﬁnancial crisis. The Chinese
authorities stated that the RMB was found undervalued because of the IMF’s
incorrect assessment based upon an uncertain forecast of the future current account
and its failure to take a broader view on the path of the real exchange rate (IMF
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2011a: 19). Beijing rejected the IMF’s 2007 Decision on Bilateral Surveillance and
withdrew from the bilateral surveillance with the IMF between 2007 and 2008 (IMF
2007; Foot and Walter 2011). The IMF hereafter entered a historical-low
relationship with China. Their relationship only started to improve after the crisis
burst, when both the US and the IMF tuned down the criticism of China’s exchange
rate policies.2
But minor conﬂicts still exist in the surveillances. In the post-crisis era, the IMF
encouraged the Chinese authorities to deepen domestic economic reforms and to
transform its unsustainable investment-led growth model into one that was driven
by domestic consumption (IMF 2012). The IMF’s advice, although compatible with
the core of the central Chinese government’s 12th 5-year plan as well as the PBC’s
pro-reform preference, has not yet generated any substantial result. The strongest
resistance came from a number of powerful domestic interest groups whose
economic and political beneﬁts were deeply embedded in the status quo (Walter
2014; Jiang 2014; Chin 2014). For instance, the provincial governments were
reluctant to reduce investment, which served as the main driving force of GDP
growth for three decades. Neither did they want to close down the large factories
with excess capacity and face the risk of social unrest arising from job reductions.
Moreover, the Chinese state-dominant banking sector evidently blocked several
profound ﬁnancial reforms (Freeman and Yuan 2011).
In summary, the example of China’s resistance to the IMF’s advice on revaluing
the RMB in the second half of the 2000s indicated that the contrast between Chinese
and IMF economic and political interests hindered the collaboration between the
two. Moreover, even when the IMF’s interests and objectives converged with those
of the Chinese central government, in the case of deepening Chinese domestic
economic reforms in the post-crisis era, the conﬂicted preferences of local Chinese
authorities prevented the central government from engaging further with the
economically liberal-minded IMF.
4.2 Agenda-Setting Power
States sometimes consult the IMF when they face difﬁculties in reaching an
agreement on urgent and/or contentious issues on their own, as the IMF’s ‘agendasetting
power’ can help them ﬁnd a negotiated equilibrium (Hawkins et al. 2006:
16). Thanks to its authority in multilateral governance, the IMF provides states with
common policy space to solve issues and set agendas for the disputed issue areas. A
resolution passed through the IMF is considered to be more credible than that
reached unilaterally or bilaterally. And solving issues in a cooperative manner with
the IMF’s other members can help China improve its international reputation.
Moreover, when China lacks the capability to resolve disputes with stronger
opponents directly, it often attempts to seek the IMF’s intervention to either resolve
the disputes or alter the policy environment in favour of the weaker.
2
Blustein (2013) told exhaustive stories about how the US designed the IMF’s attack on China’s
exchange rate policies via the 2007 Decision on Bilateral Surveillance. The US however retreated quickly
from the attack after the global ﬁnancial crisis burst, as it realized China could be useful in helping the US
release the pain from the crisis.
72 Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. (2018) 3:62–80
123
4.2.1 International Monetary Reforms-Diversifying the IMS and Expanding
the SDR
When the market expectation of the collapse of US dollar escalated after the 2008
crisis burst, the Chinese authorities became extraordinarily anxious about the safety
of their enormous holdings of US dollar assets. The Chinese government repeatedly
urged the US to protect the value of China’s US dollar assets and guarantee the
Chinese capital’s access to US product markets, but its efforts failed to generate
effective results. Although China’s governmental and private US assets holders
became increasingly frustrated with this situation, they could not simply dump their
US assets, for multiple reasons. First of all, they held so many US dollar assets that
an initial sell would send the market a worrying signal and trigger value drops in the
remaining investment. Second, the emerging economies believed in ‘self-insurance’,
and thus continued to accumulate US government securities, which were
some of the safest options during the 2008 crisis. Third, according to the Bretton
Woods II story, a country would accumulate foreign reserves along with its export
oriented-growth (Dooley et al. 2003). Therefore, being a large exporter, China was
motivated to keep its US dollar reserves high and the RMB exchange rate low.
Moreover, China’s powerful state owned enterprises and some domestic political
elites had signiﬁcantly beneﬁted from the investment-led and export-dependent
growth model, and were reluctant to move away from it (Vermeiren 2013; Schwartz
2009).
Helleiner (2014) quoted Susan Strange’s argument about the ‘structural power’
of the US in the global political economy to explain why foreigners continued to
support the dollar during the crisis. However, the Chinese were aware of the longterm
risk of the ‘dollar trap’ and sought to free themselves without sacriﬁcing their
US dollar assets. Along with other BRICs countries, the Chinese authorities
questioned the legitimacy and sustainability of the US dollar-dominated IMS and
demanded reforms. China’s then president Hu Jingtao advocated diversifying the
IMS to include more currencies as the main international currencies at the 2008 G20
Washington Summit, which was regarded as China’s ﬁrst explicit assertion about
international monetary reforms (Xinhua 2008). Confronted with the US structural
power, China alone was unable to destabilize the ‘US dollar-dominance’; and,
therefore, it called on the IMF to intervene and set new agendas for the reformed
IMS. Chinese ofﬁcials urged the IMF to strengthen its surveillance on the major
reserve currency issuer countries (Baston 2009: A10; IMFC 2013, 2014), especially
the US, and to promote diversifying the IMS and disconnecting it from the US
domestic economic conditions and political interests.
The highlight of China’s attempts to undermine the US dollar came from the
PBC governor Zhou Xiaochuan. In early 2009, he published an essay ‘Reform the
International Monetary System,’ proposing to eliminate the inﬂuence of (US)
sovereign interests in international liquidity management, to enlarge the use of the
IMF’s SDR as a super-sovereign reserve currency and to add more currencies to the
SDR basket (Zhou 2009). The last suggestion implied the PBC’s attempt to push the
RMB to join the SDR basket. Just a few months after Zhou’s proposal, the IMF took
a few moves to strengthen the SDR’s role, including a general allocation and a
Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. (2018) 3:62–80 73
123
special allocation of SDR 193 billion in total and an issuance of SDR-denominated
bonds. (IMF 2009b)
China’s advocacy for international monetary reforms received some immediate
support from the international community, including other BRICs leaders,
the Argentinean and French government, and some high-proﬁle US economists
including Joseph Stiglitz and Fred Bergsten. However, such support was soon
overshadowed by both practical and political obstacles to the SDR. First of all,
SDR expansion would be practically challenging, as the SDR—unlike the US
Dollar—was not broadly issued and used in the private sectors and that the IMF
lacked institutional resources to manage ‘a super-sovereign reserve currency.’
Some EDs in the IMF worried that regular SDR allocations would reduce
reserve accumulation and cause moral hazard (IMF 2011b). Fund staff were not
conﬁdent about the SDR’s potential role in maintaining future international
monetary stability (IMF 2011c). Second, Helleiner (2014) pointed out that the
US agreed to the SDR allocations in 2009 as a ‘cheaper’ way—compared to IMF
quota reforms—to boost IMF resources and buffer countries from balance of
payments shocks. But in the long run, the US prevented fundamental reforms
from happening in the IMS, as many powerful US multinational ﬁrms and its
ﬁnancial sector had gained massive beneﬁts from the existing system. Chin
(2014: 195–203) detailed how G7 countries, especially the US, successfully
impeded China and other BRICs countries’ pursuit of SDR expansion and
international monetary reforms. Hence, although the Chinese ofﬁcials continued
to lobby for SDR expansion along with other international monetary reforms at
the IMF and World Bank meetings in the following years, the popularity of the
topic quickly declined. This shows that the US still had the dominant voice in
the governance of international monetary affairs, whereas China lacked effective
inﬂuences in the IMF to push forward substantial changes that might hurt the US
interests.
4.2.2 International Monetary Reforms-the RMB’s Entry to the SDR Basket
China’s pursuit of international monetary reforms, however, reached a signiﬁcant
breakthrough. On 30 November 2015, IMF Executive Board decided to include the
RMB in the SDR basket as the ﬁfth currency next to the US dollar, the euro, the
Japanese yen and the British pound, effective on 1 October 2016 (IMF 2015a). It
was an important achievement for China’s RMB internationalization strategy,
accomplished together with the IMF. Being a SDR currency was expected to
strengthen the RMB’s international role without directly challenging the US dollar.
Moreover, the RMB’s entry to the SDR basket helped the PBC justify and enforce
ﬁnancial reforms against domestic resistances. In other words, the IMF helped the
PBC set agendas for ﬁnancial liberalization in China.
The IMF considered the possibility of adding the RMB to the SDR basket during
the 2010 5-year SDR review, but the EB rejected the idea, as the RMB did not fulﬁl
one of the two criteria for SDR currencies: being freely usable (IMF 2010d). In
particular, a Fund report pointed out that adding a non-convertible currency such as
74 Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. (2018) 3:62–80
123
the RMB to the SDR basket would ‘reduce the attractiveness of the SDR’ and ‘lead
the current SDR system to collapse’ (IMF 2011c).
The EB nevertheless approved the RMB’s entry to the SDR basket 5 years later
following the Fund’s 2015 5-year SDR review. The 2015 review speciﬁcally
focused on whether the RMB was ‘freely usable,’ including (1) whether it was
widely used to make payments for international transactions; and (2) whether it was
widely traded in the principal exchange markets. The IMF staff team suggested in a
report released in July 2015 that the RMB was exhibiting ‘a signiﬁcant degree of
international use and trading’ (IMF 2015b). The data in the report, however, showed
that while the RMB’s ranks for a number of indicators of the ‘widely used’
condition had risen rapidly since 2010, they had not only fallen far behind the
existing SDR currencies but also failed to stand out among a number of ‘secondtier’
currencies including the Swiss Franc, Canadian Dollar and Australian dollar.
The indicators of ‘widely traded’ condition showed even lower performance of the
RMB. For example, the existing SDR currencies accounted for roughly 80% of the
total foreign exchange turnover in 2013 while the RMB contributed merely 1.1%
(IMF 2015b).
Despite the RMB’s relatively small portion in international transactions and
trades, this report instead emphasized the growing tendency of the RMB’s
international use across a range of instruments. The report acknowledged the
RMB’s achievement in the internationalization process while questioning the
representativeness of the Fund’s own indicators for the ‘freely usable’ criterion. In
addition, the report also listed a few key operational requirements for the RMB to
meet to join the basket, which provided the Chinese authorities (especially the PBC)
with explicit guidelines for further work in the following months (IMF 2015b).
The Chinese authorities thus implemented a series of ﬁnancial reforms to fulﬁl
these operational requirements, which, however, triggered severe market ﬂuctuations.
The highlight of the reforms was that on 11 August 2015, the PBC announced
a new mechanism to determine the daily reference exchange rate based on the
previous day’s closing onshore RMB rate, supply and demand conditions in the
market and price movement of other major currencies (IMF 2015c; Xinhua 2015).
The main purpose of the August reform was to include more market information and
reduce government control in determining daily reference exchange rates, to meet
the SDR basket entry requirement (Inman 2015). However, this change also forced
the PBC to devalue the RMB, which evoked market concerns with growth
prospects. The increasing expectation of RMB devaluation triggered large capital
outﬂows in the following months (Xiao 2015). Noticing the market ﬂuctuations in
China, the IMF nevertheless suggested that the RMB was freely usable (IMF
2015c). Although the PBC’s market-based exchange rate practices were not to be
blamed solely for the ﬂuctuations, the negative impacts of the August reform did
show that the RMB was probably not truly ready for the SDR basket. If this was the
case, why did the IMF bend its rules to add the RMB to the SDR basket?
Since China was the only strong SDR advocator, satisfying China’s demand for
letting the RMB join the SDR basket would strengthen the Fund’s own inﬂuence in
the IMS. Eswar Prasad, a former head of the IMF’s China team commented that it
was clever for the IMF staff to bend the rules to accept the RMB, by which the Fund
Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. (2018) 3:62–80 75
123
could gain global legitimacy from giving a leading role to Beijing (Prasad quoted in
Donnah and Anderlini 2015). Hence, the IMF’s interests converged with those of
China on this issue. In addition, lowering the criteria for SDR basket currencies to
include the RMB enabled the IMF to balance between China and the US amid a
number of disputed issues. On the one hand, China was frustrated with its
disadvantaged position in a number of IMF related issues in the late 2000s and early
2010s. For example, the ratiﬁcation of the 2010 IMF governance reform was
severely delayed; the Chinese believed that the IMF attempted to lash out against
China’s exchange rate policies under the US instigation; and the IMF failed to divert
the IMS away from its focus on the US dollar. Letting the RMB join the SDR basket
thus served as a compromising solution to appease China’s growing dissatisfaction
with the IMF’s inability to fulﬁl China’s needs. On the other hand, the RMB’s entry
to the SDR basket would not challenge the US dollar’s dominance in the IMS nor
change the key operating rules of the current IMS in the short run (Zhang 2015;
Bernanke 2015). Therefore, it was an appropriate move for the IMF to make facing
the strong US inﬂuence in the Fund.
5 Conclusion
To conclude, when the Chinese authorities and the IMF have converging interests
and objectives, in the cases of TA programmes and the RMB’s entry to the SDR
basket, their collaboration tend to generate satisfying results for both sides.
However, if China’s interests and objectives are incompatible with those of the IMF,
the result of the collaboration is less satisfying to the Chinese. The dispute between
the Chinese authorities and the IMF on China’s exchange rate issues in the late
2000s was a good case in point. Even when the IMF’s interests and objectives
converged with those of Beijing, in the context of deepening Chinese domestic
economic reforms in the post-crisis era, the conﬂicted preferences of local Chinese
authorities prevented their central government from engaging further with the
economically liberal-minded IMF.
In addition, China’s relative inﬂuence in the IMF’s institutional governance also
largely impacts upon the result of China-IMF collaboration. China’s inﬂuence in the
IMF has increased along with its own economic power and its role in international
ﬁnancial affairs. This enabled China to engage more proactively in the IMF, for
example to push for IMF governance reforms in favour of the Fund’s emerging and
developing economy members, to resist IMF advice that was perceived as harmful
for the Chinese economy, to push the IMF to engage in IMS reforms, and to
convince the IMF to add the RMB to the SDR basket. China’s efforts were,
however, hindered by its limited inﬂuence in the IMF’s institutional governance,
especially facing the mighty dominant power the US. Thanks to its strong inﬂuence
in both the IMF’s formal and informal governance, the US effectively forced the
IMF to pass the 2007 decision on Bilateral Surveillance to discipline China’s
exchange rate policies; it blocked the ratiﬁcation of the 2010 IMF governance
reform; and it also prevented fundamental reforms from happening in the IMS
despite China’s requests.
76 Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. (2018) 3:62–80
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The results of China-IMF collaboration indicate that although China has gained
larger inﬂuence in global monetary governance with the IMF’s assistance in the past
years, its effort toward leadership in the realm has encountered inevitable hurdles,
especially those built by the US. As China’s interests and objectives regarding key
economic and political issues continue to grow, it will pursue further inﬂuence in
global ﬁnancial governance toward greater leadership. China’s rapid outward
expansion through trade and foreign investment, along with the rise of new IFIs
such as the NDB and the AIIB, indicate Beijing’s ambition and capacity in
establishing an option outside the traditional international ﬁnancial regime guided
by the Bretton Woods System and centred around the US. While no evidence shows
that China is ditching the existing option, as seen by China’s increasing
collaboration with the IMF (and the World Bank), the IMF does feel the urge to
adjust its governance structure and policy practice to accommodate China’s needs
better, and thus keeping China on its side. The RMB’s entry into the SDR basket is a
good example of this emerging relationship between China and the IMF.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were
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