Thammasat University students interested in economics, business, politics, international relations, law, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 18 December Zoom webinar on Special Zone Currency: Shenzhen’s Monetary Experiment and China’s Foreign Exchange Reform.
The event, on Wednesday, 18 December 2024 at 8am Bangkok time, is presented by the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of Chinese currency.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://hku.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3XbmiOI7SXaMNyI7p1Km1w#/registration
With any questions or for further information, students may write to the following email address:
ihss@hku.hk
According to the event webpage:
Abstract
Between 1981 and 1985, policymakers in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) initiated discussions and preparations for the issuance of a “special zone currency,” a proposed legal tender designed exclusively for use in Shenzhen, the country’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ).
During this early reform era, as Shenzhen opened to international trade and foreign investments, three currencies simultaneously circulated in the SEZ: the PRC’s official currency, the Renminbi (CNY); the Foreign Exchange Certificate, designated for tourists, members of the Chinese diaspora, and entities eligible for foreign trade; and the Hong Kong Dollar (HKD).
Despite its official prohibition in mainland China, the HKD was widely accepted and even preferred by local restaurant owners, shopkeepers, and taxi drivers. Interestingly, Chinese authorities themselves showed a preference for HKD. To bolster the state’s foreign currency reserves, the Shenzhen Municipal and Guangdong Provincial Governments mandated that Sino-foreign joint ventures pay their electricity bills in HKD.
The proposed special zone currency aimed to resolve the confusion caused by the coexistence of these three currencies and, more importantly, to “expel the Hong Kong Dollar,” which had become the de facto dominant currency in Shenzhen, overshadowing the CNY. Despite these plans, the proposal for a special zone currency was permanently shelved in 1985, even after the Shenzhen Municipal Government had gone so far as to stockpile special paper for printing the currency.
This presentation examines the debates among Chinese economists, policymakers, and foreign advisors from Japan and Singapore regarding the special zone currency, highlighting how Shenzhen’s aborted monetary experiment became a pivotal chapter in the history of China’s foreign exchange reform. It also underscores the experiment’s implications for the Chinese government’s ongoing efforts to internationalize the CNY.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Taomo Zhou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies and Dean’s Chair in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. Her first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), won a Foreign Affairs “Best Books of 2020” award and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. […]
The books by Professor Zhou are available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
On her personal website are posted articles published earlier this year, including one on The Multidirectional Diaspora: Writing Chinese Migration History in a Time of Global Racial Reckoning.
It begins:
In On not speaking Chinese, cultural studies scholar Ien Ang characterizes migrant scholars as ‘tactical interventionists’; instead of making counterhegemonic claims, they usually bring out the contradictions and the violence inherent in all posited truths.1 In the spirit of this claim, I thought long and hard about how to make the best use of my connections to both worlds– my lived experience of growing up in China and my access to academic resources in English-language academia.
As James Gethyn Evans will show in his essay in this roundtable, ‘decolonizing’ the field of Chinese history should involve the dual tasks of questioning the hegemonic narratives propagated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government and the concentration of knowledge production in the Global North.
Without the participation of PRC-based scholars, the current ‘decolonization’ movement would become a Western enterprise just like colonization. My fellow panellists’ essays successfully de-centre the PRC state in historical narratives about non-Sinitic states, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Maoist organizations in places such as India and Peru. Yet we have not fully addressed the issue that prestige gravitates toward the English-language world.
As a result, scholars who receive their training, write, and teach entirely in Chinese are peripheral relative to global academic networks.2 As Stuart Hall says, ‘everyone speaks from positions within the global distribution of power’.3 From my privileged and protected position as a US-trained researcher now working in Singapore, I do not see myself as a representative of the PRC intellectual community, which is self-reflective, self-reflexive but often silenced by a political regime that induces systematic malformations of knowledge.
But I aspire to use this opportunity to bring in an awareness about the complicated entanglement we are all embedded in. Our conversation here about Chinese history is inspired by the rising social justice movements in North America. In the past few years, the word ‘decolonization’ has gained an extended scope beyond its original meaning of ‘making a colony into a self-governing entity with its political and economic fortunes under its own direction’.
In the domains of education and culture, the loosely defined term ‘decolonization’ commonly refers to efforts to empower marginalized groups by questioning Eurocentric knowledge production. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to this broadened understanding of the concept as the ‘decolonization paradigm’. In the field of Chinese migration studies, literature scholar Shih Shu-mei has pioneered the adoption of ‘colonialism’ to characterize the domination by mainland China’s homogeneous representation of ‘Chineseness’ over various forms of Chinese identities worldwide. Shih wrote as early as 2011, ‘Writers and artists on the multifarious margins in China and outside have critiqued China-centrism and the hegemonic call of Chineseness, considered as colonial impositions of arbiters of identity.’
Shih and many other scholars are rightfully alarmed by the PRC’s economic and geopolitical ascent and its growing efforts to engage the Chinese overseas. In Xi Jinping government’s official discourse, Chinese migrants and settlers, whose lineages might have been outside China for generations, are unified by ‘a common root of the Chinese ethnicity, a common soul of the Chinese culture, and a common dream for the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’.
Given the popularity of the decolonization paradigm in the Euro-American context, should we– historians of China in the English-speaking worldmobilize it for our critique of the PRC state? More specifically, would the ‘decolonization paradigm’ help us destabilize a civilizational discourse that defines Chineseness by blood and descent? Would it help us counteract the PRC government’s propaganda that conflates ethnicity with cultural conformity and expects affinity for a monolithic homeland? […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)