BIO

Meg Rithmire is the F. Warren MacFarlan associate professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit. Professor Rithmire holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, and her primary expertise is in the comparative political economy of development with a focus on China and Asia. Her first book, Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), examines the role of land politics, urban governments, and local property rights regimes in the Chinese economic reforms. A new book, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, investigates the relationship between capital and the state and globalization in Asia, comparing China, Malaysia, and Indonesia from the early 1980s to the present. The book, Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia, examines how governments attempt to discipline business and, second, how business adapts to different methods of state control. Her work also focuses on China's role in the world, including Chinese outward investment and lending practices and economic relations between China and other countries, especially the United States.  

She is a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard, and the Harvard Faculty Committee on Southeast Asia. In 2022, she joined the editorial board of The China Quarterly. In 2015, she won the Faculty Teaching Award in the Required Curriculum. 

To learn more about Dr. Rithmire's work and research, click here.