APSI Visiting Scholars’ Seminar

In this seminar, APSI visiting scholar Yongyan Ye will share findings from her research, inviting the audience to engage with questions and feedback:

Yongyan Ye—“Channels Outside the Rules: Currency, Sovereignty, and the 1958 Canton Fair”

Abstract:
The Canton Fair is conventionally remembered either as a socialist enclave standing outside the capitalist world market, or as the early "window" of China's eventual opening. 

This talk argues for a third reading, approached through an entry point: currency arrangement. A late-developing state without external economic aid could not open its currency to free convertibility; an inconvertible currency could not function as hard money, only as a policy-bound "soft" currency circulating within negotiated zones; and such a state was therefore compelled to organize foreign trade through the state itself in order to manage its balance of payments. 

Read this way, the Canton Fair was neither exception nor origin, but an apparatus operating under the constraint of currency "sovereignty". It closes by asking what it means that this institution, alone among so much that broke and reformed across the second half of the twentieth century, persisted — and what this inheritance might mean for a China that now appears capital-rich.

About the speaker:

Yongyan Ye is a PhD candidate in History at Tsinghua University. Trained in history and philosophy, she is currently interested in how China's institutional arrangements in the economic sphere during the early Cold War and socialist period are entangled with its place in the world. Other research interests include economic governance; transnational economic transformations; monetary policy; and war as a pivotal moment of continuity in the long-term project of rebuilding a global economic order.