Date of Award

Spring 5-22-2025

Document Type

Campus Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Global Governance and Human Security

First Advisor

Jeffrey Pugh

Second Advisor

Adugna Lemi

Third Advisor

Ling Chen

Abstract

Since 2005, China has spent nearly $2.4 trillion in foreign direct investment (FDI), in addition to another trillion dollars, since 2013, through the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These capital flows have helped open new global markets for Chinese companies, redrew trade routes, tapped into intellectual property, allowed for opportunities in industrial espionage, reshaped supply chains, and combined with significant investment in human capital by the Chinese government, allowed for technological breakthroughs in genomics, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence that are re-imagining the world. China’s emergence as a global technological powerhouse has, in turn, set it not only as a strategic competitor to the United States, but also, increasingly, as a challenger to US unipolarity. This dissertation project explores how, and to what extent, is Chinese FDI triggering American national security anxieties. More specifically, this research project examines (if and) how the Chinese state instrumentalizes Chinese firms, through FDI, to advance its foreign policy and national security goals. By understanding the means of state control, its extent, and the sites of linkages between firms and the state, we gain clearer understanding of the magnitude of Beijing’s influence over the decision making, operations, and behavior of Chinese firms in the international market; and by extension, the reach of China’s economic statecraft. Academic literature on the role of commercial actions in relation of FDI and state power takes an explicitly state-centric approach, that uses the state as the unit of analysis, not the firm. This dissertation has been a distinct departure from that tradition in the scholarship, by centering commercial actors as the unit of analysis of the extent of state power. This dissertation uncovers and examines these relationships in two ways: firstly, by analyzing legal and legislative provisions compelling Chinese firms to abide by state interests and/or directives; and secondly, by analyzing the nature of incorporation and ownership of Chinese firms undertaking FDI. Based on these findings, this dissertation developed and proposes a national security codebook comprising 25 concrete decision rules for what criteria and parameters represent national security red flags from FDI threatening American interests and competitiveness. Effectively, this national security rules codebook aims to bolster the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States’ (CFIUS) ability to flag national security concerns, in an astute, precise, strategic, and especially, pre-emptive manner. While the theoretical grounding and empirical evidence weaned from this dissertation’s research and analysis underscore the structuralist viewpoint of inherent security competition, it does, however, challenge the paradigm of a zero-sum game in the context of a rising China.

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