China has particular reason to worry. As the world’s second-largest economy, after the United States, it relies on a rickety financial system that is mired in debt and susceptible to hidden stresses. Higher overseas interest rates could also prompt more Chinese investors to move their money out of the country, either to chase higher returns elsewhere or to avoid what some see as China’s growing problems.

The outflows are “adding to domestic banking system stresses and weakening the already fragile foundations of the entire financial system,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University who was formerly chief of the China division at the International Monetary Fund.

A healthy bond market is crucial to China’s restructuring plans. The country has been counting on its fast-growing bond market as one way to bring market discipline to its traditionally state-directed — and wasteful — economy.

In the mature financial system of the United States, businesses have plenty of ways to get money. They can borrow from a bank, raise money selling stocks or bonds, or seek funds directly from any number of investors.

But in China, state-run banks are by far the main source of funding. That helped power the country’s economic rise, but it also led to loans going to politically connected borrowers rather than to where the economy needed it most. That is one reason the Chinese economy is now stuck with more steel, glass, cement and auto factories than it needs.

Particularly in the past two years, China has taken steps to encourage the development of robust stock and bond markets as well as private lenders, needing a way to ensure the flow of money was being directed by profit-minded investors rather than politicians and their allies at state-owned banks.

The stock market crashed last year, and private lending has been slow to take off. But until this past week, the bond market had performed well. The investment arms of local governments and other large borrowers rushed in recent months to issue bonds at low interest rates and to pay off bank loans issued at higher rates — just as the government intended. Bond issuance jumped 47 percent in the first 11 months of this year from the same period last year.