More from the Author

• Working Paper | 2020

  The Resurgent Role of the State in China's Economy: Experimentation, Domestic Politics, and U.S. Policy

  Meg Rithmire

  Keywords: China;

  Citation:

  Rithmire, Meg. "The Resurgent Role of the State in China's Economy: Experimentation, Domestic Politics, and U.S. Policy." Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations, October 2020.  View Details

  CiteView Details Read Now

  Related

• Editorial | Washington Post | September 8, 2020

  The State Department says the Chinese Communist Party controls Chinese companies. It’s not that simple.

  Meg Rithmire

  Keywords: China;

  Citation:

  Rithmire, Meg. "The State Department says the Chinese Communist Party controls Chinese companies. It’s not that simple." Washington Post (September 8, 2020).  View Details

  CiteView Details Read Now

  Related

• Article | Studies in Comparative International Development | September 2020

  The Rise of the Investor State: State Capital in the Chinese Economy

  Meg Rithmire and Hao Chen

  The nature and extent of the role of the Chinese state in the economy is fundamental to many empirical and theoretical debates about that country’s political economy. We document and explain the rise of a novel form of intervention on the part of the Chinese state: the expansion of state capital beyond ownership of state firms. We argue that state investment as a mode of state intervention in the economy is conceptually distinct from both “state capitalism” and the “developmental state” in its introduction of new agents to distribute state capital to firms and new mechanisms through which states, especially authoritarian ones, monitor and influence business actors. We document the growth of the investor state in several ways. Case studies of three high-profile shareholding firms in China demonstrate that state capital can be deployed strategically, for example to respond to financial crisis or facilitate industrial upgrading, but also generates moral hazard, resulting in corruption and resource misallocation, and international alarm about the intentions of Chinese firms. We further compare the rise of state shareholding firms in China to similar phenomena in Brazil and Malaysia, concluding that the practice has both economic and political logics.

  Keywords: China's political economy; state shareholding; state-business relations; State capitalism; China's financial system; Economy; Business and Government Relations; Finance; System; China;

  Citation:

  Rithmire, Meg, and Hao Chen. "The Rise of the Investor State: State Capital in the Chinese Economy." Studies in Comparative International Development 55, no. 3 (September 2020): 257–277.  View Details

  CiteView DetailsFind at HarvardPurchase

  Related