China’s rise as a major capital exporter in the past decade has reshaped global development patterns and geopolitics. Through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese firms have financed large-scale infrastructure, energy and digital projects across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe and Latin America. How were these investments made? What are the Chinese firms and what is their relationship with the party-state? What are the effects of the Chinese investment on host countries and the global environment? Matthew S. Erie’s Casebook on Chinese Outbound Investment attempts to answer these questions by presenting 15 case studies across different industries in 13 countries. The volume is a substantial and timely contribution to a field where empirically grounded materials have been largely absent.
The Casebook is intended primarily for teaching in law schools, business schools and policy schools, but it is also a valuable source for policymakers and researchers. It begins with Erie’s substantive introduction that sets out a general framework for understanding how China’s domestic system works with respect to its overseas investment. Reading the introduction is essential for the users of the Casebook, especially for those who are less familiar with the Chinese system.
The 15 case studies contained in the volume are organized along six thematic sections – corporations, compliance, infrastructure, labour, finance and disputing. This structure essentially maps the lifecycle of Chinese outbound investment, from corporate formation and market entry, through compliance and other issues arising during the investment, and ultimately to dispute resolution. The Chinese firms covered in the studies include large private firms, such as Alibaba and TikTok, central state-owned enterprises (SOEs), like the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) and the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), provincial SOEs, such as that under the Ningxia Autonomous Region, and various companies with mixed ownership. The geographic scope of the collection spans four continents, including five countries in Africa, five in Asia, two in Latin America, and the United States. The projects studied range from a massive electric grid in Brazil, special economic zones and ports in Oman and Sri Lanka, gold mines in Kyrgyzstan, to a hydropower dam in Cambodia, a bauxite mine in Guinea, a casino in Saipan, to a corporate social responsibility program in Kenya, a merger and acquisition in Chile, sovereign debt restructuring in Zambia, banking joint ventures in South Africa, and investment dispute resolution in Nigeria. Also included in the volume are studies on TikTok’s survival strategies in the US and the resolution of Micron’s trade secret disputes with UMC/Fujian Jinhua in Taiwan as compared to that in the US.
The Casebook’s greatest strength lies in its commitment to primary source materials and empirical grounding. The cases are authored by transaction lawyers, litigators, scholars or independent researchers from China, host countries and other jurisdictions, all with first-hand knowledge of their subjects. The authors draw on transactional documents, stakeholder interviews, internal company reports, regulatory documents, and arbitration and court records, instead of relying on secondary analysis and commentaries on China’s outbound investment. This firm grounding in verifiable evidence ensures the enduring value of the book.
Collectively, the case studies present China’s outbound investment in a balanced light. For example, readers will find great BRI success stories in SGCC’s construction of the world’s largest electrical grid in Brazil, even though the long-term impact of the project remains to be seen, and in AVIC’s Africa Tech Challenge programme in Kenya, which has sponsored technical training of participants from multiple African nations. On the other hand, readers will find negative accounts of the port project in Sri Lanka, the hydropower dam in Cambodia and the bauxite mine in Guinea, which highlight their adverse effects on human rights and the environment. And the inclusion of two labour cases in Saipan and Kyrgyzstan shows how the same types of labour abuse by Chinese investors could lead to completely different results under different rule-of-law conditions in the host countries.
Pedagogically, the case studies are modelled after the case study methods developed by Harvard Business School. Each study contains an overview, an introduction, case details, and a conclusion, followed by a section of discussion questions and comments designed for law school, policy school and business school audiences, respectively. Many studies also contain maps, charts and images. This design makes the Casebook user-friendly. Another advantage is its accessibility: as an Open-Access book, the entire volume can be downloaded for free from the publisher’s website.
The Casebook, however, is not without limitations. First, although the geographic coverage is impressive, there are notable absences. Europe, for one, is entirely absent from the case studies, even though China’s investment in, for instance, the United Kingdom and Germany, has given rise to much controversy in recent years. Second, the depth of the case studies is uneven. While some studies are quite detailed, others leave much to be desired. Hence, as Erie explains, the Casebook is more suitable as a supplemental resource, to be used where relevant, rather than being the sole textbook for designing a course.
A final observation concerns the volume’s claim to neutrality. Erie presents the studies as providing a balanced account of China’s outbound investment, free from ideological priors. Yet, just as foreign policy is the extension of domestic policy, China’s overseas investment can best be understood as an extension of its domestic investment. Indeed, all the positives and negatives of Chinese overseas projects discussed in the Casebook can be readily identified in China’s domestic setting. Thus, rather than claiming neutrality, it would have been more enlightening to point out the systemic roots of China’s overseas investment.
These reservations, however, do not diminish the significance of the volume. A Casebook on Chinese Outbound Investment provides the most comprehensive, empirically grounded and pedagogically structured collection of teaching materials on Chinese outbound investment currently available. For educators, policymakers, practitioners and scholars seeking to understand the complexities of Chinese overseas investment, it is a valuable and highly authoritative resource.
