This talk is part of the Princeton Univerisity Press-Yale Center Beijing Ideas Series.

Event Time

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Registration
6:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Presentation, Discussion and Q&A
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Location

Yale Center Beijing 
36th Floor Tower B of IFC Building 8 Jianguomenwai Avenue Chaoyang District, Beijing (Yong'anli Subway Station, Exit C) 

Registration and Fees

Registration
Please click “HERE” further below to register.

Please send an email to yalecenterbeijing@yale.edu if there are any problems. If you encounter any payment issues, please attach a screenshot that identifies the issue.

Ticket: Free for students and faculty (subject to approval); RMB 30 for regular admission. 

The language of the event will be Chinese. 

The Event

In just two decades, China has transformed into a massive e-commerce market with 800 million users, accounting for nearly half of global online retail sales. This is especially remarkable since e-commerce—typically marked by small sellers and impersonal, stranger-to-stranger transactions—relies on robust market institutions for contract enforcement and fraud prevention. Yet, China has achieved explosive growth in this sector despite its underdeveloped legal and institutional frameworks.

In From Click to Boom, Lizhi Liu, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, argues that China pioneered a model of “institutional outsourcing” between the state and digital platforms. By delegating parts of its governance responsibilities to platforms, the government enables them to set rules and enforce regulations, spurring innovation of platforms while maintaining oversight. Based on over a decade of field research, tens of millions of platform data points, and a randomized controlled trial across three provinces, the book examines how developing countries with weak institutional foundations can collaborate with platforms to build new governance models—and the implications of this state-platform partnership for global institutional development.

On April 23, Lizhi Liu will discuss her new book with Tianguang Meng, Professor in the Department of Politics Science at Tsinghua University, and explore the development of China’s e-commerce under this collaborative governance model.

The Speaker

Lizhi Liu
Assistant Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University

Lizhi Liu is an Assistant Professor in the McDonough School of Business and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government at Georgetown University. Her research specializes in the politics of trade, technology and innovation, and the political economy of China. Her work has been published by American Economic Review: Insights, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Minnesota Law Review. She received the 2019 Best Dissertation Award in the area of Information Technology and Politics by the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the 2020 Ronald H. Coase Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE). In 2021, she was listed as a Poets & Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors.

The Discussant

Tianguang Meng
Professor, Department of Political Science, Tsinghua University

Tianguang Meng is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, and an Adjunct Professor at Schwarzman Scholars. He also serves as the Vice Chair of the Special Committee of Youth Political Scholars at the Chinese Association of Political Science, and the Vice Director of the Tsinghua Lab on Computational Social Science and State Governance. His research interests include Chinese politics, politics of information, and computational social science.

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