GEGI: Helleiner on Sun Yat-Sen and International Development Banks
The Global Economic Governance Initiative, a research initiative at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, and the Center for the Study of Asia hosted a discussion with Eric Helleiner, Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, on Sun Yat-Sen’s legacy and influence on international development banks. The talk was attended by Boston University students and faculty, as well as Japan’s Consul General in Boston, Rokuichiro Michii.
Helleiner’s presentation, entitled “Sun Yat-Sen’s Legacy: The Neglected Chinese Origins of International Development Banks,” covered the origins of Sun Yat-Sen’s support for international development organizations, and how that thinking influenced the creation of the World Bank at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference and continues to influence Chinese policy on international development finance.
“What Xi Jinping is doing today is in fact reviving what was a Chinese idea,” Helleiner said. “We’re kind of back to an origin which we thought was Anglo-American, but was in fact Chinese. Not only is he taking Sun Yat-Sen’s ideas, but he’s invoking some key elements of them.”
According to Helleiner, one of Sun Yat-Sen’s goals in advocating for the creation of an international development organization was to protect China’s sovereignty and to fend of economic oppression such as trade deficits that caused a drain on resources and revenue lost in foreign settlements.
Sun Yat-Sen’s reasoning for soliciting foreign capital and expertise in advancing development in China was largely due to his realization that Europe and the United States were a century ahead of China in terms of industrial development in the early 1900s and that the only way to catch up was to use their capital, according to Helleiner.
Helleiner said that among Sun Yat-Sen’s many innovations concerning international development organizations were that foreign capital would not be oppressive to China if it was managed by a nationalist state and could actually be used as leverage and that slow development was a threat to China’s sovereignty.
“This is not an isolated figure writing in China that nobody really paid attention to,” Helleiner said. “His ideas on international development organizations in 1918 had considerable influence on the creation of the World Bank in 1944. He is was a pioneer, but he has a definite legacy too.”