Research
Books
How east asia re-engineered the stock market: The hidden fictions underwriting modern finance
How East Asia Re-Engineered the Stock Market investigates why regulators in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan employ hard paternalist tools to manage their stock markets, even as they seek to establish themselves as international financial centers. Despite new innovation-focused boards, rising foreign ownership of listed companies, and a renewed focus on shareholder value, regulators routinely block listings, limit price movements, and ban short-selling. When share prices collapse, specialized state funds intervene to shore-up markets – the Bank of Japan’s ETF stock purchases reached $430 Billion in 2022 and China’s National Team bought $23 Billion in 2025 alone. Global finance views these actions as excessive and incoherent. But the stakes are high for a region that boasts some of the world’s largest equity markets and most valuable firms. Regulatory missteps risk triggering massive sell-offs that could have wider economic consequences for industrial upgrading, welfare, and social stability. As American tariffs have sent stock prices around the world spiraling and investors in search of safe havens, any study of E. Asia’s stock markets that lacks an account of the underlying philosophy of the regulator risks being an incomplete and ultimately inaccurate presentation of the region’s financial markets.
This book argues that E. Asia’s financial regulators are guided by a host of “necessary fictions.” These are untested, unfalsifiable assumptions that serve as first principles for regulatory decision making. In contrast to the Anglosphere’s belief in rational investors, efficient markets, and laissez faire, East Asia’s regulators are driven by the specter of an irrational investor, inefficient market, and an activist state. These necessary fictions serve as axioms deductively compelling regulators towards hard paternalism and are incredibly difficult to change. In highlighting, the factory settings of the E. Asian regulator, the book draws our attention to the fictional foundations that undergird modern finance across the globe. Drawing on elite interviews with regulators and exchange officials in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, the book shows how these necessary fictions, even if just beliefs, are deeply consequential for the bottom lines of market participants and will continue to shape the region’s stock market evolution in the decades ahead
On Feeding the Masses: An Anatomy of Regulatory Failure in China (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Reviewed by The China Quarterly, The Journal of Chinese Political Science, New Books.Asia, Perspectives on Politics
On Feeding the Masses explores why China’s food safety system is failing despite concerted state efforts to reform its regulatory framework. Rather than pointing to lack of state capacity, level of economic development, or corruption, the study seeks to gain analytical leverage from the often cited but understudied notion that China’s scale lies at the core of its governance challenges. The “politics of scale” framework introduced in the book identifies three major sources of conflict in large-scale polities: (1) because scale is a social construct, regulators find it challenging to define the scale – national, provincial, municipal, county, or township - at which a problem is likely to emerge and be effectively resolved; (2) each scale of government operates according to multidimensional logics (temporal frames; types of knowledge; institutional preferences; and managerial styles) that make it difficult to coordinate governance across scales; and (3) scale externalities – decisions at one scale of governance can affect other scales in a nested system in unexpected and costly ways. In large, heterogeneous polities like China where millions of actors are operating at varying scales or "degrees of zoom" in diverse economic and geographical settings, scale politics are particularly fierce due to evolving social constructs, non-linear dimensions, and scale externalities. Drawing from over 200 interviews with food safety regulators and producers in China’s domestic, export, and organic markets and investigation over a 5 year period, the study seeks to establish new theoretical and empirical ground to explain why China’s fragmented unitary framework is ill-equipped to address its scale politics. Cross-sectoral illustrations in the aviation, fisheries, and environmental sectors in China highlight how scale politics impact many other economic sectors within China; and cross-national comparisons of Europe, India, and the United States suggest that the politics of scale framework may engage debate about contentious policy arenas and regulatory outcomes in the world's large and complex markets beyond China.
Articles
2023. “Explaining Policy Failure in China Today” The China Quarterly. (37 pages)
2023. “Regulatory Visions and the State in E. Asia: The Irrational Investor Problem in the Comparative Politics of Finance.” Comparative Political Studies. (34 pages with appendices). DOI: 10.1177/00104140231169015
2021. “Polanyi and the Peasant Question in China.” Politics and Society. 50(2): 311-347. With Julia Chuang DOI: 10.1177/00323292211032753
2021.“Regulatory State Building Under Authoritarianism: Bureaucratic Competition, Global Embeddedness, and Regulatory Authority in China.” Comparative Politics. 54(1): 123-147 DOI: 10.5129/001041521X16132233742534
2015. “Why Food Safety Fails in China: The Politics of Scale.” The China Quarterly. 223: 745-769 DOI: 10.1017/S030574101500079X
2015. “Regulatory Capitalism and its Discontents: Interdependent Governance and the Adaptability of Regulatory Style.” Regulation and Governance. 9(2): 178-192. With Christopher Ansell. DOI: 10.1111/rego.12058
2014. “Undermining Authoritarian Innovation: The Power of China’s Industrial Giant.” Journal of Politics. 76(1): 182-194, with Peter Lorentzen and Pierre Landry. DOI:10.1017/S0022381613001114
Chapters in Books
2020. “Regulatory Scaffolding: Food Safety Politics in Federal, Unitary, and Multilevel Systems.” China Policy Journal. 2(1): 1-30. DOI: 10.18278/cpj.2.1.1
2016. “Regulatory Governance” in Ansell, Christopher and Jacob Torfing. Handbook on Theories of Governance. London, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Working Papers
Necessary Fictions: The Stock Market Idea in E. Asia. Manuscript. In Progress.
“Constructing Financial Citizenship: Financial Liberalization, Regulatory Fictions and the Post-Developmental State in E. Asia.” Working Paper.
“Lost in Translation: Decoding the Financial Lexicon in China.” In Progress.
“Regulatory Impediments: The Resilience of Chinese Financial Practices.” In Progress.