191 CHAPTER 7 SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUNDS IN THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY: THE CASE OF CHINA Chapter to be included in Henk Overbeek and Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, eds., Neoliberalism in Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Henk Overbeek INTRODUCTION i This book deals with the crisis of neoliberalism and the forces determining its future trajectory. One of those forces in the early days of the crisis, or so it seemed at least, was the rise of government-oǁŶed iŶǀestŵeŶt fuŶds oƌ soǀeƌeigŶ ǁealth fuŶds ;“WFsͿ fƌoŵ ChiŶa, Singapore and the Arab Gulf countries which invested billions of dollars in failing Western financial institutions such as Citicorp, UBS, Merrill Lynch, and Barclays Bank (Farrell, Lund and Sadan 2008: 10). Ironically, the billions of Communist China were called in to save some of the most prominent icons of Western financial capitalism. Headlines in the international pƌess iŶĐƌeasiŶglLJ ƌefeƌƌed to the ƌetuƌŶ of the state aŶd the ƌise of state Đapitalisŵ ;e.g. Bremmer 2008, Lyons 2007). Where these SWFs originate in what Van der Pijl has called Hobbesian contender states (see Van der Pijl 1998, 2006) such as China, their increasing