Meg Rithmire (Harvard Business School) discussed her recent book Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (2023), a novel account of the relationships between business and political elites in three authoritarian regimes in developing Asia: Indonesia under Suharto's New Order, Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional, and China under the Chinese Communist Party. In the book, Rithmire presents two conceptual models of state-business relations that explain their genesis and why variation occurs over time. She shows that mutual alignment occurs when an authoritarian regime organizes its institutions, or even its informal practices, to induce capitalists to invest in growth and development. Mutual endangerment, on the other hand, obtains when economic and political elites are entangled in corrupt dealings and invested in perpetuating each other's dominance. Rithmire contends that the main factors explaining why one pattern dominates over the other are trust between business and political elites, determined during regime formation, and the dynamics of financial liberalization.
A light lunch was provided.
This academic seminar was jointly sponsored by the Department of Government, the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, and Department of Asian Studies at Georgetown University.
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Meg Rithmire is the James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She is also 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. 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.