Law and Political Economy in China's New Era
Date: Wednesday, Oct 4, 2023
Time: 1:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. Eastern Time
Vanderbilt Hall 201 and via Zoom
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About the event
China’s dramatic economic growth over the past four decades has challenged conventional assumptions about the relationship between legal systems and economic development. While China has invested heavily in building its legal system, the role of formal law in governing Chinese markets is clearly different from its role in Western democracies. Tamar Groswald Ozery, who studies the intersection of Chinese law and political economy, will talk about the ways that law has been used in China since 2010 to reconfigure market governance to handle the consequences of prior decades of state capitalism. This reconfiguration is achieved through the mobilization of legal institutions in two directions: intensifying the presence of the regulatory state in the market, and shifting substantial market governance powers directly to the Communist Party. The talk is based on Ozery’s new book, Law & Political Economy in China: The Role of Law in Corporate Governance & Market Growth (Cambridge University Press). The book analyzes market development in China from 1978-2021, and concludes that law serves as an internal party-state instrument for allocating political-economic power.
About the speaker
Tamar Groswald Ozery is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and a scholar of both law and contemporary China. Her research and teaching focus on the legal and political elements that shape the development of the Chinese market, with a particular interest in enterprise organization, capital market formation, party-state market relations, and China’s integration into the global economy. Before joining Hebrew University, she spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance, where she was the editor of the Harvard Law Forum on Corporate Governance and an affiliated scholar with the East Asian Legal Studies program. She holds an LLM and SJD from the University of Michigan. Before her academic career, she spearheaded the China department of a leading Israeli law firm. USALI Perspectives recently published her essay, The Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act: Investor Protection or Geopolitics?