LECTURE: Nora Yitong Qiu, 'Financial Globalization: The Evolution of China’s Correspondent Banking Network, 1900–2000'

GloCoBank Associated Researcher and former Post-doctoral Researcher Dr Nora Yitong Qiu, now Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Modern East Asian History at University College London, presented a lecture on her GloCoBank project research at the International Monetary Institute of Renmin University, China on 31 December 2025 to a group of academics and researchers from various Chinese universities and corporate research institutes.

The paper, 'Financial Globalization: The Evolution of China’s Correspondent Banking Network, 1900–2000', reconstructs the global correspondent banking networks of Chinese financial institutions from 1900 to 2000, using a novel longitudinal dataset and tools from social network analysis (SNA). Drawing on archival bank directories and historical reports from Chinese and colonial-era institutions, it traces the evolving topology of China’s financial linkages across Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The analysis identifies four major episodes: imperial integration, wartime rupture, Cold War fragmentation, and post-1978 reintegration, each shaped by a distinct combination of geopolitical and domestic political shocks. Network measures (degree, betweenness, eigenvector centrality) reveal a persistent pattern of regional fragmentation and reconsolidation. Global disturbances, such as the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Asian Financial Crisis, acted as structural shocks that redefined China’s network position. In comparative perspective, China’s financial bifurcation under Cold War conditions diverged from patterns in other emerging markets. The findings demonstrate the explanatory power of SNA for capturing long-term institutional transformations and offer new insights into the historical dynamics of global financial integration.