Edward Steinfeld is associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the director of the MIT-China Program, and the co-director (with Prof. Richard Lester) of the China Energy Group at the MIT Industrial Performance Center. Steinfeld, a specialist on Chinese economic reform and industrial competitiveness, focuses broadly on the political economy of development and industrialization. He received his B.A and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.
Steinfeld’s current research, focusing primarily on China’s energy sector, examines the institutional and political context for infrastructure decision making and energy-related innovation in the People’s Republic. China’s impact on global energy-related issues – climate change and resource competition, in particular – is driven by decisions made within China regarding fuel choice, technology choice, regulatory strictures, and pricing. Steinfeld’s research examines these decision making processes and the organizations and individuals that participate in them. Preliminary results have recently been published in the MIT study The Future of Coal: Options for a Carbon-Constrained World, as well as in the Harvard Asia Pacific Review (Winter 2007). Results were also presented in testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in March, 2007.
Steinfeld’s previous projects have examined a number of issues surrounding China’s economic emergence. During the 1990s, Steinfeld’s research focused primarily on the process of market transition for Chinese state-owned industry. This work resulted in the 1998 book Forging Reform in China: The Fate of State-Owned Industry (Cambridge University Press). Subsequent work on Chinese enterprise competitiveness has been published as a series of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, including “China’s Shallow Integration: Networked Production and the New Challenges for Late Industrialization,” World Development 32(11), 2004: 1971-1987. Additional research on Chinese enterprise-bank relationships appeared in Comparative Politics and the volume Financial Sector Reform in China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), co-edited with Tony Saich and Yasheng Huang.
In addition to his academic work, Steinfeld has served as a consultant to The World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and The United States Department of Treasury. From 2001 through the present, Steinfeld has served on the International Advisory Board of the China National Offshore Oil Company.
Energy Policy, in Shahid Yusuf and Tony Saich, eds., China Urbanizes: Consequences, Strategies, and Policies, Washington: The World Bank, 2008
"China's Real Energy Crisis (co-written with Richard Lester)," Harvard Asia Pacific Review, v. 9, no. 1, Winter 2007
"The Rogue that Plays by the Rules," The Washington Post, Sept. 2, 2007
MIT Study on the Future of Coal, Ch. 5, "Coal Consumption in China and India" (co-written with Richard Lester), 2007
"The Capitalist Embrace: China Ten Years after the Asian Financial Crisis,"Paper prepared for presentation at the conference on the Asian Financial Crisis, Ten Years After, University of California, Berkeley, November 3-4, 2006. Forthcoming in Andrew MacIntyre, T.J. Pempel, and John Ravenhill, eds., East Asia: Ten Years After the Crisis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
"China's Shallow Integration: Networked Production and the New Challenges for Late Industrialization," World Development, v. 32, no. 11, 2004.
