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Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China’s Banking Explosion
Event Date: November 23, 2026 - 11:30am to 1:00pm
Location: FSS 4004, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa
Presented by CIPS and the International Political Economy Network (IPEN)
Conventional wisdom holds that banking markets flourish where property rights are secure, the rule of law is strong, and the state keeps its hands off. China has none of these. Yet over the past three decades, the number of Chinese banks grew exponentially, and competition became fierce. Why?
In Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China’s Banking Explosion (Cornell University Press, 2026), Adam Y. Liu argues that China’s banking market grew not despite authoritarian rule but because of it. The banking sector, he argues, is a market of the state, by the state, and for the state.
Drawing on a decade of fieldwork and an extensive array of original data, Liu uncovers the political logic of banking market development in China and authoritarian states more broadly, and explores what this means for the future of China’s economy.
Speaker:
Adam Y. Liu is an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His research focuses on Chinese politics and political economy. He earned his PhD from Stanford University, where his dissertation on the politics of China’s banking development won the 2020 BRICS Economic Research Award.
Chair:
Pascale Massot is an associate professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is also non-resident Honorary Fellow, Political Economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis in New York, and a Senior Fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada in Vancouver. She is the author of China’s Vulnerability Paradox: How the World’s Largest Consumer Transformed Global Commodity Markets (Oxford University Press, 2024) – Winner of the 2025 Best Book Award in International Political Economy from the International Studies Association and the 2025 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize.