Imagining Monetary Futures: China’s Post-Crisis Reform Proposals and the Limits of the Supranational Currency Debate.
Download Working Paper 8/2025
Abstract: As trade tensions rising again, and skepticism toward the U.S. dollar grows, proposals for alternative global monetary arrangements have resurfaced in international debates, including within China. This paper revisits a largely forgotten episode from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when Chinese economists and policymakers briefly advanced a diverse wave of supranational currency proposals— from Ma Guoshu’s eccentric Global Independent Money scheme and Xie Ping’s bond-backed global currency to Li Chong’s sophisticated “world dollar” program. While China’s central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan’s 2009 call for the creation of a Keynes-inspired supranational currency is often remembered as an isolated event, it was in fact part of a broader, pragmatic Chinese engagement with the contradictions of the dollar-based system.
Drawing on Chinese-language sources, this study reconstructs the debates of the post-2008 period to reveal how Chinese theorists of supranational currencies sought not to displace U.S. leadership, but to stabilize the international monetary order through multilateral, pragmatic reform. It shows how later Chinese scholarship became increasingly focused on the promotion of renminbi internationalization, ultimately narrowing the horizon for broader visions pathways to supranational alternatives. It also challenges the post-crisis academic binaries between optimists, who expected China to replace the dollar, and skeptics, who saw China as trapped under U.S. dominance, by recovering a more complex history of creative and pragmatic Chinese engagement. These debates, though relatively short-lived, represent an important case of collective learning in the context of systemic crisis, which remains highly relevant amid renewed global trade wars and the uncertain future of dollar hegemony today. By recovering the breadth of Chinese proposals, this paper highlights opportunities for more inclusive and cooperative approaches to international monetary reform.
Keywords: International Monetary System, Post-GFC, Chinese proposals, supranational currency, Zhou Xiaochuan