Who Meets the Secretary? Mapping State–Business Networks Across China’s Provinces (2005–2024)

Who meets the Secretary? Mapping State–Business Networks across China’s Provinces (2005–2024) How do businesses gain political access and benefits in authoritarian governments? This question is critical for developing countries, especially in large economies like China, where traditionally domestic business-state relations have been concealed under broad institutional arrangements or policy-coalitions showing firms support to the government agenda based on distributional and institutional incentives. Yet, critical transactions underlying these arrangements are mediated by a more fundamental political currency: high-level access to provincial gatekeepers. Who meets the provincial Party secretary - and under what conditions - influences information networks, credible commitments and the composition of business-state coalitions and exchanges in the country; yet it remains difficult to observe systematically. This paper introduces a network-based approach to measuring business political access in China. Specifically, it shows who receives access and how it differs by ownership and sector; how concentrated or diversified provincial “access portfolios” are; and how these patterns evolve as political discipline and policy priorities change. Drawing on Social Network Analysis based on an original dataset recording meetings between provincial Party secretaries and business leaders in the 31 mainland provinces from 2005 to 2024, we build a business-state network identifying political leaders and corporate counterparts attending politically sanctioned encounters. To strengthen comparability and enable methodological learning, we report results under alternative network constructions, including unweighted versus frequency-weighted ties, and “all meetings” versus higher-intensity encounters signaled by (1) explicit references to signing agreements or memoranda and (2) reported governor participation. Firms are coded by ownership category and sector, which allows systematic comparisons across provinces and over time. We track how access portfolios are structured year by year, and we use finer time summaries as a descriptive check when needed. The analysis reveals three main findings. It shows that access is uneven, with state-linked firms appearing more often, but the degree of inclusion of private and foreign-invested firms varies across provinces. It also reveals that Provinces differ in how concentrated access is among actors: some will repeatedly engage a small set of organizations, while others disclose spread meetings more widely. Signing-linked encounters are likely to be more selective. Finally, changes over time may show shifts rather than a complete turnover. Periods of tighter discipline and stronger industrial steering coincide with narrower portfolios focused on state-linked and priority-sector actors, while more permissive periods may broaden access at the margins. The paper offers empirical and conceptual contributions. Empirically, it offers a transparent “text-to-network” measurement strategy for political access in settings where conventional lobbying or administrative interaction data are unavailable. It also provides a comparative design for studying how bipartite access networks vary across space and evolve over time, and it makes explicit how key measurement choices (tie weighting and intensity thresholds) affect substantive conclusions. Conceptually, it corresponds with a wider research agenda intersecting business power, political access and preferences in authoritarian regimes.