Flexible Collaboration: State‑Embedded Brokerage by Chinese Transnational Elites in the China–U.S. Nexus

• In Event: Commodity Frontiers, Land, and Global Production

Abstract

How does economic exchange persist when U.S.–China rivalry hardens but interdependence endures? Drawing on 25 interviews and over 100 hours of participant observation with ultra‑wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs in California’s Bay Area, I show that deterioration in bilateral relations often reconfigures—rather than reduces—cross‑border exchange. As official channels become politically fraught, projects are rerouted into export‑licensing regimes, subnational development authorities, and elite‑mediated “private” pathways. I theorize this pattern as flexible collaboration: a mode of state‑embedded brokerage through which bi‑positional actors translate compliance, connections, and credibility across rival jurisdictions to reproduce economic, social, and symbolic capital. I treat “flexible collaborator” and “inflexible loyalist” as relational labels produced by shifting state, market, and diasporic audiences. Geopolitical friction thus generates niche space for brokers while narrowing opportunity for others, revealing how global rivalry reshapes domestic bureaucracies and stratification.

Author

• Pengfei Liu, University of California-Davis