Lobbying Without Lobbyists: Business Access Networks in Provincial China (2005–2024)

How do firms pursue political access in authoritarian systems, and how does that access shift across arenas and over time? Research on interest representation increasingly emphasizes venue selection, multilevel governance, and the strategic adaptation of organized interests under turbulence. Yet in many non-democratic settings, lobbying is difficult to observe systematically, even when governments remain deeply involved in investment promotion and industrial policy. China is a critical case: authority is dispersed across levels and institutions, and provinces continue to act as pivotal intermediaries between the state and economic actors while operating under shifting central priorities, regulatory campaigns, and episodes of heightened political discipline. This paper uses publicly reported meetings between provincial Party secretaries (the top political leaders in China’s provinces) and enterprise leaders to study high-level meeting access as an observable layer of state–business interaction. The meetings are politically sanctioned encounters showing which firms are brought into direct contact with provincial leaders and which firms are publicly presented as partners in local development agendas. We ask three questions central to lobbying research in turbulent environments: 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. A new dataset was compiled from official provincial Party newspapers and government-affiliated outlets, encompassing all 31 mainland provinces from 2005 to 2024. Each record identifies the host leader, the visiting organization, and, when available, the named representative and title. Two report-based markers are coded to capture higher-stakes coordination: explicit references to signing agreements or memoranda, and the governor’s reported participation. Firms are categorized by ownership and sector, enabling systematic comparisons across provinces and over time. The structure of access portfolios is tracked annually, with finer time summaries used as descriptive checks when necessary. The analysis yields three principal findings. First, access is uneven, with state-linked firms appearing more frequently, while the inclusion of private and foreign-invested firms varies across provinces. Second, provinces differ in the concentration of access among actors: some repeatedly engage a small set of organizations, whereas others distribute meetings more broadly. Encounters linked to signing agreements are typically more selective. Third, temporal changes tend to reflect shifts rather than complete turnovers. Periods characterized by tighter discipline and stronger industrial steering are associated with narrower portfolios focused on state-linked and priority-sector actors, whereas more permissive periods tend to broaden access at the margins. This research makes both empirical and conceptual contributions. Empirically, it provides a comparable measure of how subnational governments distribute high-level access to firms across provinces and over time. Conceptually, it demonstrates how provincial leaders manage recognition and partnership under conditions of scarcity, offering insight into how multilevel priorities are operationalized through selective recognition and translated into local coalitions within authoritarian settings.