Harvard Fairbank Center For Chinese Studies

"No Great Wall: Trade, Tariffs, and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927–1945" (Harvard Asia Center, 2017), an in-depth study of Nationalist tariff policy, fundamentally challenges the widely accepted idea that the key to the Communist seizure of power in China lay in the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. It argues instead that during the second Sino-Japanese War, China’s international trade, the Nationalist government’s tariff revenues, and hence its fiscal policy and state-making project all collapsed. Drawing on the historical lessons of my research, in this talk, I will also discuss the unintended consequences of protectionism, the difficulties of strategising trade wars, and the differences between trade wars and real wars. Felix Boecking is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese Economic and Political History at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and currently a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. Among his research interests are China’s