Chinese Economic Statecraft: Commercial Actors, Grand Strategy, and State Control

Description

In Chinese Economic Statecraft, William J. Norris introduces an innovative theory that pinpoints how states employ economic tools of national power to pursue their strategic objectives. Norris shows what Chinese economic statecraft is, how it works, and why it is more or less effective. Norris provides an accessible tool kit to help us better understand important economic developments in the People's Republic of China. He links domestic Chinese political economy with the international ramifications of China's economic power as a tool for realizing China's strategic foreign policy interests. He presents a novel approach to studying economic statecraft that calls attention to the central challenge of how the state is (or is not) able to control and direct the behavior of economic actors. Norris identifies key causes of Chinese state control through tightly structured, substate and crossnational comparisons of business-government relations. These cases range across three important arenas of China's grand strategy that prominently feature a strategic role for economics: China's efforts to secure access to vital raw materials located abroad, Mainland relations toward Taiwan, and China's sovereign wealth funds. Norris spent more than two years conducting field research in China and Taiwan during which he interviewed current and former government officials, academics, bankers, journalists, advisors, lawyers, and businesspeople. The ideas in this book are applicable beyond China and help us to understand how states exercise international economic power in the twenty-first century. CHINESE ECONOMIC STATECRAFT Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Oil, Iron, Mangoes, and Cash Part I. On Economic Statecraft 1. What Is Economic Statecraft? 2. The Challenge of State Control 3. Economics and China’s Grand Strategy Part II. Securing Strategic Raw Materials 4. “Going Out” and China’s Search for Energy Security 5. Rio Tinto and the (In)visible Hand of the State Part III. Cross-Strait Economic Statecraft 6. Coercive Leverage across the Taiwan Strait 7. Interest Transformation across the Taiwan Strait Part IV. China's Sovereign Wealth Funds 8. State Administration of Foreign Exchange 9. What Right Looks Like: The National Social Security Fund 10. The China Investment Corporation Concluding Implications Appendix 1. Coding of the Independent Variables Appendix 2. China Investment Corporation’s Direct Investments in the Aftermath of the Financial Crisis Notes Index