Start

05-08-2023
04:00 PM

End

05-08-2023
05:30 PM

Location

AB3109 / Zoom

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Event details

Date and Time: Monday May 8, 4-5:15PM BJT

Venue: AB 3109 / Zoom: 931 8946 6500

Speaker: LI Xiaojun, Associate Professor of Political Science, NYU Shanghai

Moderator: Pippa Morgan, Lecturer in Political Science at Duke Kunshan University

Abstract

The political connection between the state and firms in the context of China’s corporate restructuring has been little explored. Using the clientelist framework and unpacking the incentives of both firms and the state, we analyse political connections as repeated patron–client exchanges where the politically connected firms can help the state fulfil its revenue imperative, serving as a failsafe for local authorities to ensure that upper-level tax quotas are met. Leveraging original surveys of the same Chinese firms over an 11-year period and the variations in their post-restructuring board composition, we find that restructured state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with political connections pay more tax than their assessed amount, independent of profits, in exchange for more preferential access to key inputs and policy opportunities controlled by the state. Examining taxes rather than profits also offers a new interpretation for why China continues to favour its remaining SOEs even when they are less profitable.

Bio

Xiaojun Li is an Associate Professor of Political Science at NYU Shanghai and Affiliated Professor of Politics in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at NYU. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the East-West Center in Honolulu, and the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. His recent books include How China Sees the World: Insights from China’s International Relations Scholars (Palgrave 2019), Fragmenting Globalization: The Politics of Preferential Trade Liberalization in China and the United States (University of Michigan Press 2021), and Token Forces: How Tiny Troop Deployments became Ubiquitous in UN Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press 2022).

*This event is co-sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Studies and the Center for the Study and Contemporary China.