Felix Boecking

Background

About Felix Boecking

Dr. Boecking is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese Economic and Political History at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and was recently a Fellow in the History and Public Policy Program and at the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. At the Wilson Center, he was working on his second book,"Economics on the Edge: an Intellectual and Political of Economics in the PRC since 1949". Dr. Boecking is the author of “No Great Wall—Trade, Tariffs and Nationalism in Republican China, 1927-1945”, published by the Harvard Asia Center in 2017. This book fundamentally challenges the widely accepted idea that the key to the Communist seizure of power in China lay in the incompetence of the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek by demonstrating the strength of Nationalist state building in the crucial area of taxation and fiscal policy, based on his analysis of Nationalist tariff policy. In the book, he presents a broader history of the interplay of international trade, consumption, and political nationalism in republican China.