Download or read book Making Rural Finance in Contemporary China written by Leqian Yu and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 2000s, the changing global financial landscape has attracted increasing attention from geographers, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis. China's rural banking sector, still a marginal site in research on the geographies of finance, is a fast-growing financial frontier. In the decade since 2008, bank credit issued to the rural sector has increased six fold to 4.6 trillion USD in 2018. The rapid expansion of this financial frontier owes much to ongoing reforms led by the Chinese state. Since 2003, the Chinese government has been initiating a series of market-based reforms aimed at building a "modern rural financial system" to better support farmers, agriculture and rural development. This dissertation explores the changes that have reshaped the banking system in rural China as a distinct case of financialization. Building on economic geography scholarship that argues the need for financialization to be understood as place-specific social processes, this research adopts a multi-scalar approach. I link a macro-level political economic analysis of China's rural financial policies with ground-level observation of financial practice. Primary research methods include ethnographically-informed research in a rural bank in Greater Chengdu Area (Sichuan Province), and textual analysis of policy documents and historical archives. The research finds that the transformation of the banking system in rural China that began in the early 2000s has an internal logic shaped by the political economic conditions of contemporary China, with traces of the ideals and practices of socialist development in China. Given such, China's rural financialization cannot be framed as following a straightforward neoliberalization process, the often-applied meta-frame for financialization. Rather than providing a local variant of neoliberal globalization, I argue that financialization in rural China needs to be understood as a localized, contextualized process - the trajectory of which is shaped by contested logics operating at multiple scales.