Why Companies Fund Showy Projects

In her new book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China (Cambridge, 2025), Ning Leng shows how Chinese officials systematically treat formally private firms as political instruments, extracting services that advance careers and maintain social control—often at the expense of business interests, economic efficiency and sustainable development. Ning Leng is an Assistant Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco and is the Director of USF's Master's Program in International and Development Economics.

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