Speaker: James Stent, Independent Director and Chairman of the Audit Committee of XacBank of Mongolia.

Pundits have been predicting the impending collapse of the Chinese banking system. The collapse has not happened. What have these pundits been missing? Why have their predictions not materialized?

James Stent, author of China’s Banking Transformation: the Untold Story (Oxford University Press 2017) discusses the strengths and drivers of Chinese banking that arise from being embedded in the Chinese political economy and shaped by both international best practice and traditional cultural factors. A Western analytical framework will miss these essential factors and lead to wrong conclusions. Stent demonstrates that the banking system can be used as a prism for understanding how the contemporary Chinese political economy works.

Stent has made a career in banking in Asia. He served for 13 years as an independent director of two Chinese banks between the years 2003 and 2016, providing him with an insider’s view of how the transformation of Chinese banks proceeded.