Research
Books
necessary Fictions: The State, Stock MArketS, and growth in East Asia
My current book project considers the ideational politics undergirding regulation, and focuses on why East Asia’s stock markets, particularly in mainland China, have failed to thrive despite significant state efforts and private sector initiatives to see them mature. Despite their growth, these stock markets are plagued by persistent problems: China’s equities markets have been compared to casinos, Korean stocks face a “Korea Discount,” Taiwan’s exchange remains a financial backwater, and Japan’s stock markets have failed to coax households into the market. Only Hong Kong has managed to escape the region’s financial fate. Rather than consider the East Asian stock market experience as simply a departure from economic rationality, my current project seeks to understand why market regulators persist in taking “irrational” actions, at least from the perspective of outsiders.
A grant from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation has enabled me to conduct 16-months of fieldwork in the region, where I interviewed over 100 regulators, stock exchange officers, and executives in the financial sector. The book explores how core financial ideas about risk, valuation, fairness, and efficiency are embedded in a state’s “regulatory narrative.” I explore the political origins of a country’s regulatory narrative and its consequences on the overall pattern of financialization. Chapters investigate state policies towards retail and institutional investors, government interventions during stock market crises, efforts to re-fashion cities as international financial centers, and failed attempts to develop NASDAQ-like boards to spur innovation. The results of the study will contribute to discussions on the evolution of state capitalism in a financialized context, and on how economic ideas, rational or irrational, become rooted in political economies.
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 (forthcoming)
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
Forthcoming. “Explaining Policy Failure in China Today” The China Quarterly. (37 pages)
Forthcoming. “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.