Speaker: Meg Rithmire, F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Moderator: Daniel Koss, Associate Senior Lecturer on East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

The last 25 years have been turbulent ones for the PRC’s financial system. Efforts at liberalization in the early 2000s accelerated early in Xi Jinping’s tenure, only to be met with a stock market crisis in 2015, a crackdown on official and private sector market participants, and then a serious reconfiguration of financial system governance. Now China appears on the verge of another stock market crisis. To transition from export and investment-driven growth to domestic consumption and innovation requires a modern financial system, but modern financial systems do not tend to thrive under authoritarian rule. Is it possible for the CCP to develop deep financial markets? What do financial developments in China mean for its growth trajectory and its role as international financier?

Meg Rithmire (任美格) is an associate professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit, where she teaches the course of the same name in the MBA required curriculum. 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. 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. A new project investigates the influence of diasporas, and the overseas Chinese communities in particular, in the progress of economic and political reforms in the homeland. She is a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard. In 2015, she won the Faculty Teaching Award in the Required Curriculum at Harvard Business School.