"Chinese Tungsten in America’s Postwar Order"

Beginning in World War II, the Chinese government sought to acquire foreign currency through the sale of various strategic material, including tungsten ore. The sale of the ore remained a key pillar of the Chinese government’s finances in the late 1940s. But new U.S. regulations that sought to roll back the sweetheart contracts and subsidies being offered to the Chinese government helped create a crisis in China that would help exacerbate the socio-economic challenges of the Nationalist Party regime in the 1940s and ultimately lead the regime’s collapse in 1949. The policy was part of a larger effort to deregulate foreign trade, reduce the cost of procurement, and promote a larger free trade system around the world in the immediate postwar period. In this paper, I will highlight the postwar tungsten trade and its larger legacies in China, and in resource-rich countries across the Global South beyond.