A service of the National History Center, the Events Calendar includes information about history-related events sponsored by an array of institutions in the DC area. The Center is not responsible for the accuracy of the information. To list events, please contact Rachel Wheatley at rwheatley@historians.org.

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No Great Wall: Trade, Tariffs, and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927-1945
April 22, 2019 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
RSVP here: No Great Wall: Trade, Tariffs, and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927-1945
No Great Wall, an in-depth study of Nationalist tariff policy, fundamentally challenges the widely accepted idea that the key to the Communist seizure of power in China lay in the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. It argues instead that during the second Sino-Japanese War, China’s international trade, the Nationalist government’s tariff revenues, and hence its fiscal policy and state-making project all collapsed. Drawing on the historical lessons of his research, Felix Boecking will also discuss the unintended consequences of protectionism, the difficulties of strategizing trade wars, and the differences between trade wars and real wars.
Felix Boecking is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese Economic and Political History at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and currently a Fellow at the Wilson Center. Among his research interests are China’s political economy, the history of economics in the People’s Republic of China, and the history of China’s foreign relations. His current project at the Wilson Center is “Economics on the Edge: An Intellectual History of Economists in the PRC since 1949.”
The Washington History
This event is sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States
April 22
Felix Boecking on No Great Wall: Trade, Tariffs, and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927-1945
All seminars take place at 4:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Boardroom
Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop