Headline news of the on-going trade war between the United States and China shift our attention away from the fragility of another pillar of China’s rise to economic dominance: financial markets. With a highly volatile stock market, a growing real estate bubble and a substantial shadow-banking sector, China’s financial system may well turn out to be the Achille’s heel of its economy. How likely is it that current fissures lead to an explosion that will spread far beyond the economic superpower?

A renown scholar on the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the dynamics of globalization, Walden Bello provides a gloomy outlook for China’s stability and stinging criticism of our financialized global economy in his new book Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash.

He will discuss his analysis with Cornelia Woll, co-director of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies

and Victor Mallet, journalist with extensive experience in Asia and current head of the Paris Bureau of the Financial Times.