What is...China’s Role in the Global Economy?

What is China's role in the global economy, and how should we understand its growing power in a world of shifting financial hierarchies and intensifying geo-economic competition? In this episode, we are joined by Johannes Petry to explore China's expanding economic influence and what it means for the global financial system, the institutions that govern it, and the future of global order itself. Johannes Petry is Senior Researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt and Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded research project “Financial Empire” which examines China’s growing global financial footprint in a world of growing geo-economic contestations as part of a larger process of empire building. Petry's research agenda brings together three interlinked themes: the development and internationalisation of China’s financial system, the role of infrastructures in the politics of global finance, and the broader post-crisis transformation of the global economic order. He is co-author of BRICS and the Global Financial Order: Liberalism Contested?, which he published with Andreas Nölke at Cambridge University Press in 2024, and his work has been published in leading journals, including Review of International Political Economy, European Journal of International Relations, and New Political Economy, among others.

Dr. Johannes Petry

Petry, J. (2025). Wall Street in China: the malleability of global finance in the age of geopolitics. Review of International Political Economy, 32(4), 970–1001.

Petry, J. (2025). China’s quest for pricing power: Financial hierarchy, autonomy and commodity futures markets. International Affairs, 101 (5), 1747–1768.

Petry, J. & A. Nölke (eds.) (2025). State, capitalism and finance in emerging markets: Between subordination and statecraft. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Pape, F., J. Petry & L. Rethel (2025) Special Section: How does the rise of Asia reshape international financial affairs? International Affairs, 101 (5).

Petry, J. & A. Nölke (2024). BRICS and the global financial order: Liberalism contested? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Petry, J. (2023) Beyond ports, roads and railways: Chinese economic statecraft, the Belt and Road Initiative and the politics of financial infrastructures, European Journal of International Relations, 29(2): 319-351.

Pape, F. & J. Petry (2023) East Asia and the politics of global finance: a developmental challenge to the neoliberal consensus? Review of International Political Economy, 31(1), 224-252.