How is China acquiring global influence? In this talk, Richard Carney will show how autocracies with heavy control over the corporate sector and clientelist systems are most attracted to Chinese infrastructure spending and then in turn import more technology from China and become enmeshed in China’s own technical standards regime. Carney will explore how the spread of infrastructure, technology and political influence are interconnected and all contribute to China’s growing influence on the global stage.

Richard Carney engages in political economy research with a focus on business-government relations. He is the author of ‘Authoritarian Capitalism’, which won the 2019 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize for work on the Asia Pacific. Carney is also an advisor to the World Bank for its flagship project ‘Businesses of the State’. Carney is a professor at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai where he teaches executives and MBA students. He received his PhD in political science from UC San Diego.