Department of Political and Social Change Seminar Series
How do business–government relations evolve in authoritarian regimes? This study traces the changing relationship between the Chinese state and private capital across three decades. It identifies three successive modes of interaction—co-optation, collusion, and commandeering—showing how the expansion of state economic capacity transformed the relationship from political incorporation to increasingly direct state embeddedness in the private economy.
Speaker
Zeren Li is an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (NUS), and a recipient of the Presidential Young Professorship. His research focuses on government–business relations, bureaucracy, governance, and authoritarian politics, with a particular emphasis on China. His work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, The China Quarterly, and other leading journals. His research has received the Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for Best Comparative Politics Paper from the Midwest Political Science Association and the Gordon White Prize from The China Quarterly. He received his PhD in Political Science from Duke University. Prior to Duke, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Fudan University and an MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Before joining NUS, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Leitner Program in Political Economy at the MacMillan Center, Yale University.
This seminar is hosted by the Department of Political and Social Change at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.