ABSTRACT
Considered until recently a ‘luxurious’ type of industry, the insurance sector has never constituted a priority in China’s economic development. After decades of inactivity, it only came back to reality with the re-emergence of the People’s Insurance Company of China (PICC) in 1979; before that, the industry had been driven by foreign firms, mainly throughout the nineteenth century and during most of the Nationalist period – although in 1937 all related activities came to an end as a result of the Japanese invasion. In 1949, the newly created People’s Republic of China launched a general nationalization policy of the insurance industry as a whole, forcing foreign firms to leave the country. In 1959, all domestic insurance companies were also shut down, and only re-emerged after the launching of economic reforms in the late 1970s.1
