What does the state do in China’s state-led infrastructure financialisation?

Abstract

Abstract China’s state-led financialisation of infrastructure is an alternative narrative to prevailing accounts of neoliberal financialisation in the advanced capitalist core, where the expansion of private market-based finance-led growth is theorised to transform traditional forms of public infrastructure development and production-based growth. Drawing on the case of Chinese state capital investment in Europe, we demonstrate empirically how the imperative to financialise infrastructure development is emergent from and contingent upon a productivist mode of capitalist development. We articulate two key transformations in which Chinese state capital is being used to leverage financial best practice and its network properties in service of the real economy.