Stepping Stone or Stumbling Block: The Impact of Chinese OFDI’s Compressed Development on the State

Date: Tuesday, 15 July

Venue: Room 204, 18 Kelburn Parade

Speaker: Dongkun Li

Abstract

The Chinese government has played an important role starting, promoting and facilitating Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) through direct and indirect interventions. In recent years however, this role has changed significantly as Chinese OFDI has experienced both a time-compressed growth and a coexistence of different growth phenomena that had previously occurred stage by stage, and yet this phenomenon has not been well-explained by the existing literature. This paper, hoping to narrow the gap, introduces “compressed development” as a framework for analysing new features of Chinese OFDI in the 21^st century and examining the challenges for the state of compressed development in Chinese OFDI. It argues that compressed development of Chinese OFDI has not only brought the Chinese government many challenges from domestic and abroad, but has also intensified the strength of these challenges. In response to these challenges, the state is changing the role it plays promoting investment. Specifically, compressed development in OFDI has condensed the space for the Chinese government to initiate direct interventions and put a higher requirement on the state’s ability to institutionalize the system of Chinese OFDI, perfect its service framework and build up a multi-dimensional web to further facilitate Chinese OFDI in a timely, well-planned and ex-ante manner.

About the speaker

Dongkun Li is a Visiting Fellow of the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre and PhD Candidate at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. Her research focuses on Chinese outward direct investment, especially the motivations, patterns, determinants, and the interactions of Chinese OFDI growth and the domestic investment policy. She has already published several journal articles and is the recipient of numerous scholarships, such as the “National Scholarship”, the “National Encouragement Scholarship” and the “Sun Yefang Economics scholarship”, a prestigious scholarship to commemorate the famous Chinese economist Sun Yefang.