Meg Rithmire

Meg Rithmire

James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration

James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration

Business, Government and the International Economy
+1 (617) 495-1097
 
Meg Rithmire
Unit
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(617) 495-1097
Featured Work Publications Research Summary Awards & Honors
Overview
My research and course development focus on questions of how markets and market mechanisms interact with concentrated political power, especially in the context of authoritarian or illiberal regimes. Geographically, my expertise is in the political economy of Asia, especially the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but over the last ten years, my work has evolved from a detailed empirical focus on China’s domestic political economy to putting China in comparative and historical perspective and understanding its influence in the world as Chinese economic actors have globalized.
US-China Relations
Economic interdependence between the US and China was imagined years ago to be a source of security and prosperity for both countries, but is now the site of concerns about risk and national security on both sides. My work has examined how that shift has come about, what tools the US and other countries have adopted to manage security in the context of interdependence, and what role US businesses have in managing risk. 

I am co-chairing an initiative at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation on Business Geopolitical Risk and Resilience focusing on how US firms can and should manage risk, especially national security risk, when engaging with and in China. 
Land in China's Political Economy

Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism: The Politics of Property Rights under Reform

Published October 2015

China since the 1980s has been the scene of unprecedented efforts at urban construction and growth, even in the absence of privatization of ownership over land. These efforts were made possible by the separation of land use and ownership rights and, therefore, the initiation of markets in land in the late 1980s. This book examines the emergence of property rights practices over urban land and property at the national and subnational levels in China. At the national level, I draw on government documents and other Chinese sources to analyze the decision to initiate land markets in 1988, the first national experience with real estate markets, and policy changes thatreorganized land, fiscal, and financial institutions in the 1990s. At the subnational level, I rely on a controlled comparison of three cities in a single region—China’s Northeastern “rustbelt”—to examine how different local political economies differently configured property rights practices. The book advances a novel theoretical argument about the politics of property rights as endogenous to the process of political reform. I emphasize the roles of political bargaining (the articulation and recognition of property rights claims as a form of political accommodation) and moral argument (competing claims to legitimacy) in property rights change. The empirical contribution of the book concerns the centrality of property rights to China’s local and national economic development strategies. Property rights were deployed as political and economic resources at the local and national levels, figuring prominently in various groups’ efforts at capital accumulation as well as state strategies of political inclusion and appeasement. Ultimately, by illuminating subnational practice in land politics and national level development of land institutions, this book puts land at the center of explaining the unique evolution of Chinese capitalism in its first three decades, and concludes that the fiscal and financial systems make reliance on land revenue hard to break.

State-Business Relations
In Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (Oxford University Press, 2023) and related papers, I examine the political foundations and economic effects of different patterns of state-business relations in authoritarian regimes with a focus on China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The book distinguishes between mutual alignment, when the interests of business and the state are mostly aligned with each other and with efforts toward economic growth, and mutual endangerment, when business elites adapt to distrust and vulnerability by impressing one another and political elites into dangerous relationships that have negative effects on society and economic stability. I show that mutual endangerment manifests in asset expatriation, financial malfeasance, and weaponization of information, or kompromat.

Meg Rithmire is the James E. Robison Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit. Professor Rithmire holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, and her primary expertise is in the comparative political economy of development with a focus on China and Asia. Her first book, Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), examines the role of land politics, urban governments, and local property rights regimes in the Chinese economic reforms. Her second book, Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (Oxford University Press, 2023) examines state-business relations in Malaysia, Suharto's Indonesia, and the People's Republic of China. The book shows how trust or distrust between business and political elites and financial liberalization in authoritarian regimes interact to create different patterns of state-business relations. In the cases of Indonesia and contemporary China, Rithmire shows that distrust and financial liberalization produced mutual endangerment, by which business and political elites impress one another into dangerous and corrupt relationships that can be economically and politically destabilizing. Her work also focuses on China's role in the world, including Chinese outward investment and lending practices and economic relations between China and other countries, especially the United States. A new project on business geopolitical risk and resilience, for which she is co-chairing an initiative with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, focuses on how firms can and should change their governance practices to deal with geopolitical and especially national security risk. 

She is a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard, and the Harvard Faculty Committee on Southeast Asia. In 2022, she joined the editorial board of The China Quarterly. In 2015 and 2023, she won the Faculty Teaching Award in the Required Curriculum. She is also a member of the editorial boards for the China Quarterly and the China Journal. 

Featured Work
Party-State Capitalism in China
How has China's economic model evolved, and what kind of capitalism does China practice? In this essay, three scholars of China's political economy describe the system as "party-state capitalism," in which China's economy is organized around the regime's political goals.
Evergrande on the Edge: Implications of a Corporate Crisis
In this video, produced by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, Prof. Rithmire speaks with Keith Abell about how the Chinese economy became so reliant on real estate development and debt and what the Evergrande crisis means.
Going Out or Opting Out? Capital, Political Vulnerability, and the State in China's Outward Investments
This article, in Comparative Politics (April 2022), explains patterns of China's outward investments in political terms. The Chinese party-state does not direct all Chinese companies in their outward investments, but rather pushes global investment through campaigns it often cannot control. The paper shows how "crony capital" veers toward the developed world for safety rather than implementing the Chinese state's vision.
Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism: The Politics of Property Rights Under Reform
Land reforms have been critical to the development of Chinese capitalism over the last several decades, yet land in China remains publicly owned. This book explores the political logic of reforms to land ownership and control, accounting for how land development and real estate have become synonymous with economic growth and prosperity in China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, the book tracks land reforms and urban development at the national level and in three cities in a single Chinese region. The study reveals that the initial liberalization of land was reversed after China's first contemporary real estate bubble in the early 1990s and that property rights arrangements at the local level varied widely according to different local strategies for economic prosperity and political stability. The book explains how land development became central to urban strategies for growth and to the overall Chinese political economy. 
Books
Journal Articles
Book Chapters
Working Papers
Cases and Teaching Materials
Other Publications and Materials
Research Summary
Overview
My research and course development focus on questions of how markets and market mechanisms interact with concentrated political power, especially in the context of authoritarian or illiberal regimes. Geographically, my expertise is in the political economy of Asia, especially the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but over the last ten years, my work has evolved from a detailed empirical focus on China’s domestic political economy to putting China in comparative and historical perspective and understanding its influence in the world as Chinese economic actors have globalized.
US-China Relations
Economic interdependence between the US and China was imagined years ago to be a source of security and prosperity for both countries, but is now the site of concerns about risk and national security on both sides. My work has examined how that shift has come about, what tools the US and other countries have adopted to manage security in the context of interdependence, and what role US businesses have in managing risk. 

I am co-chairing an initiative at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation on Business Geopolitical Risk and Resilience focusing on how US firms can and should manage risk, especially national security risk, when engaging with and in China. 
Land in China's Political Economy

Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism: The Politics of Property Rights under Reform

Published October 2015

China since the 1980s has been the scene of unprecedented efforts at urban construction and growth, even in the absence of privatization of ownership over land. These efforts were made possible by the separation of land use and ownership rights and, therefore, the initiation of markets in land in the late 1980s. This book examines the emergence of property rights practices over urban land and property at the national and subnational levels in China. At the national level, I draw on government documents and other Chinese sources to analyze the decision to initiate land markets in 1988, the first national experience with real estate markets, and policy changes thatreorganized land, fiscal, and financial institutions in the 1990s. At the subnational level, I rely on a controlled comparison of three cities in a single region—China’s Northeastern “rustbelt”—to examine how different local political economies differently configured property rights practices. The book advances a novel theoretical argument about the politics of property rights as endogenous to the process of political reform. I emphasize the roles of political bargaining (the articulation and recognition of property rights claims as a form of political accommodation) and moral argument (competing claims to legitimacy) in property rights change. The empirical contribution of the book concerns the centrality of property rights to China’s local and national economic development strategies. Property rights were deployed as political and economic resources at the local and national levels, figuring prominently in various groups’ efforts at capital accumulation as well as state strategies of political inclusion and appeasement. Ultimately, by illuminating subnational practice in land politics and national level development of land institutions, this book puts land at the center of explaining the unique evolution of Chinese capitalism in its first three decades, and concludes that the fiscal and financial systems make reliance on land revenue hard to break.

State-Business Relations
In Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (Oxford University Press, 2023) and related papers, I examine the political foundations and economic effects of different patterns of state-business relations in authoritarian regimes with a focus on China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The book distinguishes between mutual alignment, when the interests of business and the state are mostly aligned with each other and with efforts toward economic growth, and mutual endangerment, when business elites adapt to distrust and vulnerability by impressing one another and political elites into dangerous relationships that have negative effects on society and economic stability. I show that mutual endangerment manifests in asset expatriation, financial malfeasance, and weaponization of information, or kompromat.
Awards & Honors
Recipient of the 2023 HBS Student Association Faculty Teaching Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Elective Curriculum.
Received the 2020 Greenhill Award for Outstanding Service to the HBS Community.
Recipient of the 2015 Charles M. Williams Award for Teaching Excellence.
Received the 2015 HBS Student Association Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Required Curriculum.
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