Geoeconomics in a globalized world: the case of China's export policy

This paper explains why and how China seeks to continue to promote export-driven industrialization. This way, it comes as a corrective to the widespread assumption that the Chinese government is readying to rebalance its growth from investment and export to more domestic consumption. But the paper also presents an important case of a largely geoeconomics strategy. What explains China's quest for industry, it finds, is a quest for economic security, economic competitiveness, and more economic independence from large foreign suppliers of capital, brands, and knowhow. What characterizes the consequent policy, the paper goes on, is an increasingly more sophisticated push for exports. China's aim in that regard is not to undermine the relatively open global market, but to bend the trade flows into its advantage by means of export credit, tax rebates, and so forth.