UCLA

The topic of Chinese overseas investment will only garner more attention as China’s Belt and Road Initiative unpacks itself and more Chinese firms expand elsewhere globally. The literature on outward investment from China seems to be dominated by two prevalent analytical frameworks: a flexible and a focused paradigm. At its core, the focused camp utilizes a cost-benefit framework as its starting assumption to investigate Chinese overseas investment and transnational corporations whereas the flexible camp does not. While this Geography dissertation takes root in the flexible side, it nonetheless utilizes contributions from both sides to construct, what is referred here as, a geographic framework toward examining Chinese overseas investment. Designed as three stand-alone papers, it represents three case studies with analytical generalization on important aspects of investment from China, analyzing Hong Kong, Pakistan, and California through the geographic concepts place, connectivity, and scale, respectively. Hong Kong, by one measure, is the largest destination for Chinese outward foreign direct investment flows and stock. Analyzing Hong Kong in terms of place flushes out the historic, economic, and cultural configurations that interact to make it such an important destination. To date, Pakistan is the flagship destination for the Belt and Road Initiative. Examining Pakistan through the concept of connectivity highlights the uneven power relations in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. California is the most important destination for Chinese firms in the U.S. Utilizing the scale concept uncovers how Chinese firms navigate challenges at the state and the municipal scale in California, generalizing lessons for investment in the U.S. at the national scale. Drawing from a year of fieldwork in Beijing and two additional years of research in Los Angeles from 2015 to 2018, this work not only tackles three central destinations for Chinese transnational corporations, but also serves as a launching pad for future possibilities to examine Chinese investment in other parts of the world and to use a geographic framework when doing so.