Ed Steinfeld, Associate Professor of Political Science, MIT

“Playing Our (Energy) Game: Why China’s Rise Doesn’t Threaten the West”

Co?convened by Prof. Gilbert Metcalf, Economics Department and Prof. Kelly Sims Gallagher, The Fletcher School

Professor Steinfeld directs the MIT China Program (MISTI), and co-directs the MIT Industrial Performance Center’s China Energy Group.  His research focuses on the political economy of development, with a particular emphasis on contemporary China and focusing on the growth, regulation, and performance of China’s energy sector.  Decisions being reached in that sector today exert tremendous influence over a variety of global environmental concerns, everything from climate change to natural resource depletion.  Such decisions, however, are exceedingly complicated, often involving multiple actors and dense interactions between new technologies, burgeoning markets, diverse commercial strategies, and new regulations. 

Steinfeld’s most recent book, Playing Our Game, explores the monumental economic and political ramifications of China’s integration into global production.  By examining how contemporary Chinese enterprises actually engage the global economy and participate in a global division of labor, the book challenges the idea that Chinese firms are rising at their Western counterparts’ expense.  The book argues that the Chinese growth story is fundamentally about China’s internalization of the rules and practices of advanced industrial nations.  China has grown not by conjuring up its own unique political-economic institutions, but instead by increasingly harmonizing with our own. The results within China – on not just the economic front, but also the political – have been nothing short of revolutionary.