Book
China’s State-Owned Enterprises: Leadership, Reform, and Internationalization.
(Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
11. Austin Strange, Elizabeth Plantan, and Wendy Leutert. “Complementary Partners? Attitudes toward Multi-Actor Development Projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” The Journal of Politics (forthcoming).
Although multi-actor projects are common in international development, existing research centers on
perceptions of individual participants. How do citizens in developing countries perceive international
development projects involving multiple actors? Do these actors accumulate credit or blame equally? In
this study, we argue that multi-actor projects can generate more approval than single-actor projects
because of perceived actor complementarity. We assess this claim using evidence from Eastern
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We implement a large-N survey experiment about an infrastructure
project involving an international non-governmental organization (INGO) and a Chinese state-owned
enterprise (SOE), along with follow-up focus group discussions and a data quality audit. We find that
respondents report higher satisfaction toward multi-actor projects, in part due to perceived
complementarity between actors. However, the actor with a reputation for more stringent standards–the
INGO–is more likely to be credited or blamed for positive or negative externalities created by the project.
10. Wendy Leutert, Elizabeth Plantan, and Austin Strange. “Puzzling Partnerships: Overseas Infrastructure Development by Chinese State-Owned Enterprises and Humanitarian Organizations.” Studies in Comparative International Development (2022).
Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are now working with humanitarian organizations to develop
infrastructure abroad. This emerging phenomenon is puzzling: when, where, and why do Chinese SOEs,
best known for constructing massive overseas infrastructure projects for commercial and political gain,
execute smaller, lower-profile humanitarian projects? Similarly, why would humanitarian organizations
––often with minimal experience in infrastructure contracting––select partners criticized for lack of
emphasis on the international standards and best practices that they seek to promote? We address these
questions through qualitative case studies of Chinese SOE-humanitarian organization collaboration in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and the Republic of Congo. These cases suggest that such
partnerships are more likely when a humanitarian organization has previous experience working in China
or with Chinese actors, when Chinese SOEs aim to enter new markets, or when these firms operate in
dangerous or politically unstable environments. This study contributes to scholarship on China’s evolving
role in international development by providing the first empirical analysis of Chinese SOE-humanitarian
organization partnerships.
9. Isaac Kardon and Wendy Leutert. “China’s Power Position in Global Ports.” International Security (2022).
China is a leader in the global transportation industry, with an especially significant position in ocean
ports. A mapping of every ocean port outside of China reveals that Chinese firms own or operate terminal
assets in ninety-six ports in fifty-three countries. An original dataset of Chinese firms' overseas port
holdings documents the geographic distribution, ownership, and operational characteristics of these
ports. What are the international security implications of China's global port expansion? An investigation
of Chinese firms' ties to the Party-state reveals multiple mechanisms by which the Chinese leadership
may direct the use of commercial port assets for strategic purposes. International port terminals that
Chinese firms own and operate already provide dual-use capabilities to the People's Liberation Army
during peacetime, establishing logistics and intelligence networks that materially enable China to project
power into critical regions worldwide. But this form of networked state power is limited in wartime
because it depends on commercial facilities in non-allied states. By providing evidence that overseas
bases are not the sole index of global power projection capabilities, findings advance research on the
identification and measurement of sources of national power. China's leveraging of PRC firms'
transnational commercial port network constitutes an underappreciated but consequential form of state
power projection.
8. Wendy Leutert. “Sino-Japanese Engagement in the Making of China’s National Champions.” New Political Economy (2022).
Japan’s rapid post-war economic growth prompted Chinese leaders to look to their neighbor as they
initiated market reforms from the late 1970s. How did movements of people and ideas between China
and Japan occur, and what were their effects on Chinese enterprise policies? From the 1970s through the
1990s, Chinese officials, scholars, and enterprise representatives invited Japanese advisors to China,
conducted myriad exchanges through associations like the Sino-Japanese Economic Knowledge
Exchange and the Japan-China Economic Association, and actively studied Japan’s economy and
companies. Chinese policy-makers gained insights from Japan about market-responsive forms of
corporate structure, organizational solutions to state ownership dilemmas, evidence that consolidation
could aid economic performance and technological upgrading, and strategic commitment to building
large state-owned enterprise groups. However, this episode of intense engagement between China and
Japan generated neither unilateral ‘diffusion’ nor unitary influence. Instead, it reveals how China has
developed its own path of economic development through what I term “policy collaging”: seeking,
selecting, and creatively combining policy ideas and practices from international sources.
7. Wendy Leutert and Sarah Eaton. “Deepening Not Departure: Xi Jinping’s Governance of China’s State-Owned Economy.” The China Quarterly (2021).
To what extent has governance of China’s state-owned economy changed under Xi Jinping? Against the
background of momentous shifts in the political arena since 2012, some observe a decisive departure in
Xi’s approach to managing state-owned enterprises (SOEs): towards tight centralized control by the
Chinese Communist Party and away from gradual marketization. Analyzing the main aims and methods of
SOE governance over the last two decades, we find that SOE policy under Xi exhibits a deepening of pre-
existing trends rather than a departure. First, the essential vision of SOE functions articulated under Xi is
strikingly consistent with that of his predecessors. Second, his administration’s approach to governing
SOEs is not novel; it relies on established mechanisms of bureaucratic design, the cadre management
system, Party organizations, and campaigns. While Xi has amplified Party-centered tools of command and
control, this appears to be an incremental rather than a radical shift in approach.
6. Wendy Leutert and Samantha Vortherms. “Personnel Power: Governing State-Owned Enterprises.” Business and Politics (2021).
State-owned enterprises (SOEs) retain a strong presence in many economies around the world. How do
governments manage these firms given their dual economic and political nature? Many states use
authority over executive appointments as a key means of governing SOEs. We analyze the nature of this
“personnel power” by assessing patterns in SOE leaders’ political mobility in China, the country with the
largest state-owned sector. Using logit and multinomial models on an original dataset of central SOE
leaders’ attributes and company information from 2003 to 2017, we measure the effects of economic
performance and political connectedness on leaders’ likelihood of staying in power. We find that leaders
of well-performing firms and those with patronage ties to elites in charge of their evaluation are more
likely to stay in office. These findings suggest that states leverage personnel power for economic and
political stability when SOE management is highly politically integrated.
5. Wendy Leutert. “Innovation Through Iteration: Policy Feedback Loops in China’s Economic Reform.” World Development (2020).
How did China overcome information problems and institutional gaps to successfully implement early
market reforms in its state-owned economy? When the Chinese government initiated economic reform in
1978, it needed to stimulate information sharing across hierarchical bureaucracies and incentivize
adaptation to varying market and local conditions. Neither state design nor grassroots efforts alone could
overcome these gaps. Instead, policy feedback loops—driven by flows of people, information, and ideas
linking enterprises with the state—facilitated dual bureaucratic and economic transformation. Process
tracing using qualitative and quantitative data reveal how policy feedback loops functioned for three
reforms with varying degrees of success: contract responsibility system reform, cost control system
reform, and procurement management system reform. This analysis extends the concept of policy
feedback beyond advanced industrial democracies, suggests that overlap between policy
experimentation and implementation can facilitate adaptive policy-making, and illuminates the
centralization and exercise of state authority in China’s economic reform.
4. Wendy Leutert and Zoe Haver. “From Cautious Interaction to Mature Influence: China’s Evolving Engagement with the International Investment Regime.” Pacific Affairs (2020).
As the Belt and Road Initiative expands the global footprint of Chinese firms, Beijing is increasingly relying
on international law to protect investments abroad. How and why has China’s engagement with the
international investment regime evolved over the past four decades? This article addresses these
questions by examining bilateral investment treaties (BITs): the central component of the international
investment regime. By analyzing China’s BIT practice and security exceptions in 1,173 BITs concluded by
China and its treaty partners, the article provides evidence of changing engagement from cautious
interaction (1978-1991) to active participation (1992-1997), committed implementation (1998-2012), and
mature influence (2013-present). As Beijing accepts, applies, and shapes the rules and norms of the BIT
system, China’s treaty practice co-evolves with the international investment regime. A co-evolutionary
approach illuminates why—and how—state behavior and international orders change over time.
3. Wendy Leutert. “The Political Mobility of China's Central State-Owned Enterprise Leaders.” The China Quarterly (2018).
Extensive research on the political mobility of Chinese officials at central, provincial, municipal and county
levels has yet to fully consider an important group of elites – the leaders of China’s core central state
owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper presents the first systematic analysis of their political mobility
between 2003 and 2012 using an original biographical dataset with 864 leader-year observations. Under
the Hu Jintao administration, these leaders emerged as a distinctive group within China’s top political
elite: increasingly well-educated but lacking experience beyond state-owned industry, with both
lengthening leadership tenures and years of previous work in their companies. Instead of a “revolving
door” through which these individuals rotate routinely between state-owned business and the party-state
to positions of successively higher rank, a top executive posting was most often a “one-way exit” to
retirement. Of those who advanced politically, virtually all were transferred laterally along three career
pathways with little overlap: to other core central SOEs; provinces; and the centre. This paper
underscores the theoretical importance of disaggregating types of lateral transfer to research on Chinese
officials’ political mobility and the cadre management system.
2. Wendy Leutert. “Firm Control: Governing the State-Owned Economy Under Xi Jinping,” China Perspectives (2018).
How has the Xi Jinping administration recentralised authority over China’s politics and economy? Studies
of Xi’s rule often suggest that his “core leader” status, revolutionary heritage, and informal network of
loyalists underpin this consolidation of central control. In contrast, this article focuses on the state sector
to highlight how the Xi administration’s recentralisation of authority is grounded in existing governance
mechanisms and techniques: central leading small groups, the cadre management system, Party
committees, and campaigns. Using policy documents and an original dataset on central state-owned
enterprise leaders, I provide evidence that the Xi administration has leveraged each of these four
methods to reclaim central authority relative to the preceding Hu Jintao administration. These findings
contribute to scholarship on adaptive authoritarian governance and economic reform in China by
underscoring that administrations can use existing instruments of central control in divergent ways.
1. Wendy Leutert. “Challenges Ahead in China’s Reform of State-Owned Enterprises,” Asia Policy (2016).
(Translated version: 《披荆斩棘:央企改革攻坚》, 《金融市场研究》2017年 第2期, 101-111).
The Xi Jinping administration has identified the reform of state-owned enterprises (SOE) as an essential
step in the structural transformation of China’s economy. Three key challenges, however, block the path
ahead: deciding when and how to grant market forces a greater role, especially after stock market
turmoil; aligning managerial incentives with firm performance and corporate governance priorities; and
overcoming company-level obstacles. First, continuing to restrict competition in protected sectors while
merging centrally owned firms will increase their market share at the risk of long-term competitiveness
and efficiency gains. Yet such performance concerns are a lesser priority for SOEs in strategic industries,
where political rather than market logic remains paramount. Second, while the Chinese Communist Party
under Xi is actively exercising its authority to appoint and remove the top leaders of yangqi, shuffling
executives cannot eliminate their multiple and often conflicting incentives. Finally, the size, complexity,
and organizational culture of centrally owned firms will complicate reform implementation.
Book Chapters
4. Wendy Leutert and Nicholas Atkinson. “Crafting Narratives of COVID-19 Through China’s Twitter
Diplomacy.” Pandemic Crossings: Digital Technology, Everyday Experience, and Governance in the COVID-19 Crisis, edited by Guobin Yang, Bingchun Meng, and Elaine J. Yuan (Michigan State University Press, forthcoming).
A wave of Twitter debuts by Chinese ambassadors since 2019 reflects a concerted, deliberate effort by
Chinese officials to shape global and domestic narratives about China and COVID-19. This chapter
presents the first systematic study of China’s Twitter messaging about COVID-19 using quantitative and
qualitative analysis of an original dataset of 13,116 Chinese ambassador Tweets between June 2019 and
July 2020. It finds that by combining positive messaging with digital displays of anger primarily toward
the U.S., Chinese diplomats aim to construct narratives about COVID-19 promoting China as a responsible
international leader while fostering favorable public opinion at home. More broadly, Twitter diplomacy
reflects the pluralization of global narratives on key issues involving China and its government’s embrace
of Western social media platforms to pursue discourse power on a global scale.
3. Wendy Leutert. “China’s Enduring Pursuit of State-Owned Enterprise Reform.” The New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the Next Decade, edited by Frank N. Pieke and Bert Hofman (National University of Singapore Press, 2022).
The Chinese leadership’s ideological commitment to a large role for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in
the economy, despite the various challenges these companies face, has made them a recurrent reform
priority. The Xi Jinping administration’s SOE reform agenda combines greater CCP control and non-
market objectives with limited steps toward market liberalization. Intensified Party building efforts under
Xi have focused on specifying and institutionalizing the CCP’s “leadership role” in SOE corporate
governance. Expansion of mixed ownership in SOEs and promotion of state capital management are also
core reform objectives, despite slow and mixed results. State-directed mergers among SOEs aim to
create global industry leaders while simultaneously restructuring surplus capacity industries at home.
Despite Chinese leaders’ enduring pursuit of reform, they are willing to sacrifice a degree of market
performance so that SOEs can serve non-market objectives under tighter CCP control.
2. Wendy Leutert. “Reimagining the Chinese Economy Through Sino-Japanese Engagement in the 1980s.” Chinese Economic Statecraft from 1978 to 1989: The First Decade of Deng Xiaoping’s Reforms, edited by Priscilla Roberts (Springer, 2022).
Although Japan’s material assistance to China during the 1980s is widely recognized, the impact of Sino-
Japanese engagement on Chinese policymaking remain underappreciated. This chapter examines three
mechanisms of Sino-Japanese engagement—advisers, exchanges, and examples—and assesses their
effects on China’s economic policymaking. Japan’s experience showed it was possible to use industrial
policy to promote basic and export industries while also using indirect forms of guidance and state
enterprise coordination to steer but not control economic activity. In addition, Japan provided both a
justification and a source for the import of foreign technology crucial to modernizing Chinese industry and
accelerating domestic economic development. Finally, Chinese policymakers saw Japanese management
practices as the "software" requisite to achieving greater productivity.
1. Wendy Leutert. “State-Owned Enterprises in Contemporary China.” Routledge Handbook of State-Owned Enterprises, 1st edition, edited by Luc Bernier, Massimo Florio, and Philippe Bance (Routledge, 2020).
This chapter provides an overview of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in contemporary China. It examines
the corporate organization of Chinese SOEs, their political embeddedness in the bureaucratic hierarchies
of the state and Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the political mobility of SOE leaders. The chapter
scrutinizes the CCP’s role in SOE governance through Party committees and the interactions between
SOEs and higher-level Party organs, and it assesses the rationale and real-world costs of strengthening
Party influence. It further examines Chinese SOEs’ growing global activities in contracting, greenfield
investments, M&A, and the development and export of new technologies.
(* For more information or a copy of any of the publications listed above, please contact me)