Meg Rithmire

Bio

Meg Rithmire (任美格) is James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit of the Harvard Business School. Professor Rithmire holds a Ph.D. 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 new book, Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (Oxford University Press, 2023), investigates the relationship between capital and the state and globalization in Asia, comparing China, Malaysia, and Indonesia from the early 1980s to the present. Professor Rithmire examines how governments attempt to discipline business and, second, how business adapts to different methods of state control. 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 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. 

Research Interests: contemporary Chinese politics; relationship between urban planning and post-1978 economic reforms.

Selected Publications

Books

• Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia. Oxford University Press, 2023.
• Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism: The Politics of Property Rights under Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Recent Articles and Publications

• Rithmire, Meg. “Local States of Play: Land and Urban Politics in Reform-Era China.” In Inside Countries: Subnational Research in Comparative Politics, edited by Agustina Giraudy, Eduardo Moncada, and Richard Snyder, 318–350. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
• Pearson, Margaret, Meg Rithmire, and Kellee Tsai. “Party-State Capitalism in China.” (pdf) Current History 120, no. 827 (September 2021).
• Rithmire, Meg, and Hao Chen. “The Emergence of Mafia-like Business Systems in China.” China Quarterly 248 (December 2021): 1037–1058. 
• Rithmire, Meg. “Going Out or Opting Out? Capital, Political Vulnerability, and the State in China’s Outward Investment.” Comparative Politics 54, no. 3 (April 2022): 477–499.
• 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.
• Looney, Kristen, and Meg Rithmire. “China Gambles on Modernizing Through Urbanization.” Current History 116, no. 791 (September 2017): 203–209.
• Rithmire, Meg. “Land Institutions and Chinese Political Economy: Institutional Complementarities and Macroeconomic Management.” Politics & Society 45, no. 1 (March 2017): 123–153.
• Rithmire, Meg. “China’s ‘New Regionalism’: Subnational Analysis in Chinese Political Economy.” World Politics 66, no. 1 (January 2014).
• Rithmire, Meg. “Land Politics and Local State Capacities: The Political Economy of Urban Change in China.” China Quarterly, no. 216 (December 2013): 872–895.
• Book Chapters
• Rithmire, Meg. “Will Urbanization Save the Chinese Economy or Destroy it?” Chap. 16 in The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power, edited by Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Media

• How China’s communist officials became venture capitalists, The Seattle Times, 2022
• “Low-Hanging Fruit”: Experts Criticize Senator Marco Rubio’s Letter Questioning Harvard’s Ties to China, The Crimson, 2022
• Sri Lanka’s crisis is not just a Sri Lankan problem, CGTN, 2022
• Chairman Xi, China’s Looming Crisis, And The Myth of Infallibility, Forbes, 2021
• How the Clean Network Changed the Future of Global Technology Competition, Harvard Business School, 2021
• Podcast: How the Clean Network Changed the Future of Global Technology Competition, Harvard Business Review, 2021
• “A different kind of moral hazard”: The history and politics behind the Evergrande debt crisis, MarketWatch, 2021
• Op Ed: The State Department says the Chinese Communist Party controls Chinese companies. It’s not that simple, The Washington Post, 2020
• The Road to the Middle Kingdom: China’s New Silk Road, Harvard Political Review, 2018
• 7 projects win Global Institute grants, The Harvard Gazette, 2018