Associate Professor Meg Rithmire

The dynamic relationship between a country’s political system and its business environment is a topic that intrigues Meg Rithmire, the F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor of Business Administration. An expert on China, Rithmire was a Fung Global Research Fellow last year, which enabled her to spend six months in Singapore and six months in Shanghai conducting on-the-ground research and engaging with business leaders throughout the region.

“I am interested in how globalization affects domestic distributions of political power and economic power,” Rithmire says, explaining that China is a good place to conduct research on the topic. “China is in the middle of a political and economic reorganization, and we don’t know what will happen next,” she observes. “The backlash against China’s global reach is only starting.”

In her 2015 book Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism, Rithmire examined urbanization, land politics, and property rights in China. She is now exploring how both the government’s goals and the flight of capital figure into China’s increasing global presence. “When we look at what has happened in the Chinese economy in the past five years,” she says, “there has been a massive increase in overseas investments and overseas mergers and acquisitions.” “Historically,” she adds, “we thought of China as a place where foreign firms go to invest. Now, China is becoming the investor.”

Rithmire cites the Chinese government’s “belt and road” infrastructure initiative as an example of the country’s enormous potential to change the region. Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China, has committed more than $1 trillion to link China physically and economically to dozens of other countries—primarily in Asia, but also in North America, Europe, Africa, and Oceania.

Fueled by a fascination with the means through which politicians control business and the ways businesses adopt and adapt to these controls, Rithmire is now engaged in a comparative study of state-business relations in Malaysia, Indonesia, and China. While based in Singapore, she and her family traveled throughout Southeast Asia. “The fellowship enabled me to conduct research on Malaysia and Indonesia, and also to look at Chinese investments in different parts of the region,” she explains.

An award-winning teacher in the Required Curriculum, Rithmire will share her insight about China and Southeast Asia with MBA students in the spring 2019 elective course Managing International Trade and Investment.

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