This website updates and deepens our understanding of China’s international finance. These days, China’s economic expansion is at the heart of international political and economic debates. However, knowledge of how international finance works in general, and particularly the part involving China, is still limited. The goal is to expand this understanding to better grasp the geopolitical dynamics between China and the rest of the world.
Cultural differences, reflected in the methods, timing, and strategies typical of finance, seem to have played a major role in the division that eventually led to a political rupture. Certainly, China’s progressive and extensive control of supply chains, and its ability to create new standards in international relations with countries we regrettably refer to as the Global South, have significantly contributed to alarming North Atlantic political and financial elites. This marked the beginning of the descent into what we now call a new Cold War. Yet, the financial aspect of all this remains largely absent from everyday discussions.
Upon closer analysis, one can hardly blame China for the inherent problems of the financial system governed by North Atlantic institutions along the axis connecting New York to London, what academics like to call NY-LON. The key players along this axis, central and universal banks and large hedge funds, are capable of projecting influence through global financial networks and shaping the superstructure of global finance more or less to their liking. But they have partly fallen prey to overconfidence.
In short, while they focused on expanding and amplifying their ability to produce and control money flows in order to feast in the garden of financial delights, China was playing on a different field. Although finance is nothing more than a complex system of interconnected networks, North Atlantic players could do little more than continue playing chess, a game of direct confrontation, tactics, and regime change aimed at seizing the gardens of rival kingdoms.
By contrast, China was playing wéiqí (围棋), on a board of networks, like the networks finance itself is made of. It built relationships, exploited the opponent’s weaknesses, and always subordinated tactics to a broad, long-term strategy. It created financial networks to test, to learn and replicate, to project itself into the future, not to feed immediately, as do those whose vision doesn’t go beyond quarterly targets and annual bonuses.
Together with major Western institutions, China created financial networks to progressively integrate into global finance. It built stable networks, others unstable; some inclusive, others exclusive; some large, others small. More recently, it has started designing and implementing alternative systems which, however, appear more complementary than oppositional to existing ones, as they seem aimed at simplification rather than confrontation. This vast system of financial networks constitutes the Financial Silk Road. And, as a Silk Road, these networks work in both directions, in and out of China.
The underlying motivation behind this website is to understand, from the perspective of money, finance, and financial networks, what is happening between China and the West, and with the rest of the world. It’s astonishing that in these times, dominated by increasingly complex and opaque financial mechanisms, knowledge of financial relations with China is almost entirely absent from public, specialized, and academic discourse. Now that something seems to have fractured in the relationship between the North Atlantic world and China, this knowledge can help rebalance the scales and redirect future trajectories.
Understanding what the Financial Silk Road is, its history and its characteristics, is a responsibility of our time. But there are obstacles, including media noise that distracts from the essential, the difficulty of finding illuminating information for research, and nearly unbreakable preconceptions about how the financial system works and what China is or represents.
This project aims to bring some order and clarity, to deepen knowledge about Chinese international finance. It uses the following tools: the Blog, the News, and the Maps. In the Blog, you will find the Bits of History series, offering a primer on the historical and economic context behind the development of the Financial Silk Road in the past five decades. The goal is to explore across space and time the Financial Silk Road through its strategic nodes, namely international financial centres, with Hong Kong, London, and Luxembourg at the core; and through the institutions that operate along its paths, primarily those forming the banking system, but also the investors, the financial instruments and the mechanisms they’ve created.
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The Financial Silk Road 
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