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Consumer Finance And Financial Repression In China, Evan B. Oxhorn

Evan B Oxhorn

China is rapidly becoming the world’s largest consumer market. As the number of middle-class Chinese consumers has grown, so too has the size of China’s consumer finance system. To date, there has been little scholarship on consumer finance in China. This short Article takes a first step at filling this gap in the literature. It argues that China’s consumer finance system is fundamentally a tool of the state, which uses “financial repression” of Chinese consumers to acquire capital through shadow taxation. This political-legal system allows reallocation of consumers’ capital for political purposes and underwrites China’s rapid growth. But cheap consumer …