This book explores China's private lending market from historical, economic, legal, and regulatory perspectives. Private lending refers to moneylending agreements between business borrowers and their debt investors without the involvement of banks. In China, it remains difficult for private entrepreneurs to obtain sufficient loans from state-owned banks. Thus, private lending has been a vital alternative financing channel for over 80 million businesses which are reliant on private funds as their major source of operating capital. The market volume of private financing stands at 5 trillion yuan ($783bn), making it one of the largest shadow banking systems in the world. Despite the wide popularity and systemic importance of private lending activities, they have remained outside of the official regulatory framework, leading to extra financial risks. In 2011, China's private lending sector encountered a severe financial crisis, as thousands of business borrowers failed to repay debts and fell into bankruptcy. Lots of bosses who found it impossible to liquidate debts ran away to hide from creditors. The financial turmoil has caused substantial monetary losses for investors across the country, which triggered social unrest and undermined the financial stability. This book is a timely work intended to demystify China's private lending market by investigating its historical development, operating mechanism, and special characteristics. It evaluates the causes and effects of the latest financial crisis by considering a number of real cases relating to helpless investors and runaway bosses. It conducts an in-depth doctrinal analysis of Chinese laws and regulations regarding private lending transactions. It also examines China's ongoing financial reform to bring underground lending activities under official supervision. Finally, the book points out future development paths for the private lending market. It offers suggestions for global policymakers devising an effective regulatory framework for shadow banking. It appeals to researchers, lecturers, and students in several fields, including law, business, finance, political economy, public policy, and China study.

Examines how the private sector in China manages to grow without secure property rights.

Chinese entrepreneurs have founded more than thirty million private businesses since Beijing instituted economic reforms in the late 1970s. Most of these private ventures, however, have been denied access to official sources of credit. State banks continue to serve state-owned enterprises, yet most private financing remains illegal. How have Chinese entrepreneurs managed to fund their operations? In defiance of the national banking laws, small business owners have created a dizzying variety of informal financing mechanisms, including rotating credit associations and private banks disguised as other types of organizations. Back-Alley Banking includes lively biographical sketches of individual entrepreneurs; telling quotations from official documents, policy statements, and newspaper accounts; and interviews with a wide variety of women and men who give vivid narratives of their daily struggles, accomplishments, and hopes for future prosperity. Kellee S. Tsai's book draws upon her unparalleled fieldwork in China's world of shadow finance to challenge conventional ideas about the political economy of development. Business owners in China, she shows, have mobilized local social and political resources in innovative ways despite the absence of state-directed credit or a well-defined system of private property rights. Entrepreneurs and local officials have been able to draw on the uncertainty of formal political and economic institutions to enhance local prosperity.

An Economist Book of the Year Every minute of every day, our data is harvested and exploited… It is time to pull the plug on the surveillance economy. Governments and hundreds of corporations are spying on you, and everyone you know. They're not just selling your data. They're selling the power to influence you and decide for you. Even when you've explicitly asked them not to. Reclaiming privacy is the only way we can regain control of our lives and our societies. These governments and corporations have too much power, and their power stems from us--from our data. Privacy is as collective as it is personal, and it's time to take back control. Privacy Is Power tells you how to do exactly that. It calls for the end of the data economy and proposes concrete measures to bring that end about, offering practical solutions, both for policymakers and ordinary citizens.

The nonprofit sector in China (including nongovernmental organizations, foundations, and charities) is fairly new, especially to foreigners, since the rapid development of this "third sector" has not been widely studied in Western scholarship. The contributors to this volume have been engaged in research of China's nonprofit sector for many years, and are intimately familiar with the operation of Chinese nonprofit organizations. China's Nonprofit Sector describes the development of China's nonprofit sector since 1995, including discussions on the rise of corporate responsibility and charitable foundations, grassroots organizations, and the microphilanthropy that arose after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. It enumerates the shifting legal framework, the complex relationship between government-affiliated and private sector organizations, the media's role, the emergence of microphilanthropy, and the lack of knowledge of the general public regarding philanthropic enterprises. This volume, in Transaction's Asian Studies series, directly addresses the topic of China's nonprofit sector and gives a coherent and comprehensive account of its development and challenges. This work will be of value for all policy specialists, Asian Studies scholars, and all individuals interested in China.

" In 1978, China launched economic reforms that have resulted in one of history’s most dramatic national transformations. The reforms removed bureaucratic obstacles to economic growth and tapped China’s immense reserves of labor and entrepreneurial talent to unleash unparalleled economic growth in the country. In the four decades since, China has become the world’s second-largest economy after the United States, and a leading force in international trade and investment. As the contributors to this volume show, China also faces daunting challenges in sustaining growth, continuing its economic ransformation, addressing the adverse consequences of economic success, and dealing with mounting suspicion from the United States and other trade and investment partners. China also confronts risks stemming from the project to expand its influence across the globe through infrastructure investments and other projects under the Belt and Road Initiative. At the same time, China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, appears determined to make his own lasting mark on the country and on China’s use of its economic clout to shape the world around it. "