Outgoing China: Domestic Politics and International Implications

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

China’s rapid outward movement on the global stage, in particular since its launch of the Belt and Road initiative in late 2013, has generated alarming concerns about China's difference in international affairs as well as the challenges those differences might pose for democracy and stability in both developed and developing countries. Being a communist regime, yet with extensive global commercial interests, China’s outward behaviors also present a unique intellectual opportunity to observe the interplay between domestic politics, capital movement, and technology in the home and host nations.

The proposed panel brings together a diverse group of scholars that is almost perfectly balanced in terms gender (a rarity at APSA panels), includes participants from members at every stage of his/her career, and institutional affiliations/locations ranging from the U.S, to UK, China and other Asian regions. Intellectually, our panel is unified by theoretically-informed empirical findings on domestic politics and international impacts related to China’s outbound investment and diplomacy. The first paper, by Kerby Davis and William Norris, applies an explicitly theoretical lens to focus on China's foreign foreign policy entrepreneurs and examines how nationalism and international competition drive China’s behavior in the South and East China Seas. The second paper, by Min Ye and Yun Wang, researches and compares China’s state motivations of outbound investment and results from correlational and causal tests of actual investment flows from China to nations in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe. Paper #3, by Ja Ian Chong and Angela Poh, adds important insights to the coercive diplomacy literature by pointing out the third-party effects and unintended domestic politics consequences in the target nations. Paper #4, by Todd Hall and Alanna Krolikowski, investigates China’s 5G technology promotion in the U.S, UK, and Japan and discovers that the psychological attitudes in the target nations constitutes the key variable determining the ability of China’s technology expansion.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security

Individual Presentations

• Classical Realism in the Case of China - William J. Norris, Texas A&M University; Kerby Davis, University of Notre Dame

• Commerce or Alliance: China's Outbound Investment - Min Ye, Boston University

• The Demonstration Effects of China’s Economic Coercion and Their Limits - Ja Ian Chong, National University of Singapore

• Technology, Trade, and Security – Making Sense of the Huawei Controversy - Todd H. Hall, University of Oxford; Alanna Krolikowski, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Chair

• Jiakun Zhang University of Kansas

Discussants

• Songying Fang Rice University

• Enze Han The University of Hong Kong