Speaker:

Professor Andrew G Walder
Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor
Department of Sociology, Stanford University

Date & Time:

Monday, 1 July 2024
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm (Singapore Time)

On-site venue:

EAI Conference Room
NUS Bukit Timah Campus, Tower Block #06-01,
469A Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259770

Video recording:

Please click on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaj4HZB6UfE or visit https://www.youtube.com/EastAsianInstituteNUS.

Abstract:

With a remarkable 5-fold increase after 2008, China now has as many corporations among the world’s largest 500 as the United States. The rate of increase is puzzling—it was twice that of China’s economic expansion, during a period when the national growth rate declined markedly. The rapid proliferation of corporate giants was due to three developments that distinguished China from all other major economies. The first was the massive and sustained expansion of credit for domestic infrastructure projects in response to the global financial crisis. The second was the allocation of close to $2.3 trillion of China’s foreign currency surpluses to finance foreign asset acquisitions and construction projects. The third was a drive to consolidate state firms, primarily those owned by regional governments, into larger conglomerates. All these corporations, along with nonstate firms, rode the updraft of opportunities provided by the infrastructure drive and outward investment. One byproduct of this expansion is an extreme concentration of giant firms, both state and nonstate, in sectors related to infrastructure and heavy manufacturing. This corporate profile contrasts markedly with all other major economies, even with Japan’s at its height.

About the Speaker:

Andrew G Walder is the Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University where he is also a Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His recent publications include Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution (Harvard 2019), (with Dong Guoqiang) A Decade of Upheaval: The Cultural Revolution in Rural China (Princeton, 2021) and Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution in China’s Southern Periphery (Stanford, 2023).