China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, and since then America has experienced a debilitating consequence of unfair trade, and that is unfair trade with the People's Republic of China. And it has been a relationship since that time that has sometimes been dubbed as an economic blood transfusion from West to East-a vast transfer of wealth that has financed the Chinese security state at home and a coercive military foreign policy abroad. Yet, America has not been the only target. China, likewise, seeks economic and political advantage over Europe. According to an open source data, which is likely to underestimate such true figures, direct investment from China into Europe now stands at $95 billion a year and China has bought or invested well over $300 billion in European assets in the last decade. But those figures do not do justice to the scale and breadth of influence that China has thus achieved. Chinese investment, much of it directed by the state-owned enterprises of China, reflects and serves the political goals of Beijing. China has a global strategy to control the extraction of raw resources, to control transportation corridors, to dominate the innovation and production cycles of others, and then to sell the products it has abroad to enrich the corrupt elite that rule over China today. For China, Europe represents a large market with few economic defenses like we have in the United States. So Europe is relatively vulnerable compared to our country to this type of economic challenge. For example, while the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States-better known as CFIUS-has blunted some of China's attempts to buy key companies in the United States, only 12 of the 28 European Union member states have a comparable mechanism to screen for an investment and also screen the efforts to create and an EU-wide system has proven unsuccessful.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. China's resurgence has spawned anxieties about an impending revision of the Liberal International Order. Drawing on case studies of Chinese investments across Europe, the contributors to this volume investigate the ways in which China translates its growing resources into effective influence, with varying degrees of success. They find that influence is most effectively achieved by harnessing the agency of states and societies in Europe towards China's preferences. Fragmented and messy rather than unified and coherent, these preferences comprise an amalgam of domestic, regional, and international considerations rather than aimed at revising world order. Nevertheless, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the interaction of European agency and Chinese preferences could have a variety of unintended consequences that range from straining the Liberal International Order to strengthening it. Against narratives that foreground inevitable conflict or assured cooperation, Rising Power, Limited Influence innovates a dynamic framework to understand the granular ways in which states and societies in Europe interact with state and society in China to (re-)shape the Liberal International Order. Its contribution is three-fold. Conceptually, it offers a relational definition of power that pinpoints attention to the ways in which China translates its growing investments in Europe towards influencing the preferences of host countries. Empirically, it outlines the different modalities through which China harnesses the agency of European countries towards its own (fragmented) preferences. Theoretically, the book introduces a dynamic framework to understand the interaction between state-society relations in China with state-society relations in European countries to comprehensively appreciate the extent, limits, and modalities of resurgent China's global influence.

China's immersion in the world economy and trading system is a continued source of great interest throughout the globe.The book is divided into three parts, the first being an overview of the Chinese investment environment and the development of foreign direct investment (FDI) over the last twenty years. The second part then goes on to focus specif

This book merges macro- and micro-level analysis of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to dissect China’s aim in creating an integrated Eurasian continent through this single mega-project. BRI has been the source of much interest and confusion, as established frameworks of analysis seek to understand China’s intentions behind the policy. China’s international activity in the early 21st century has not yet been successfully theorised by IR scholars because of a failure to satisfactorily encompass its complexity. In addition, the mix-and-match syncretism of the Chinese approach to foreign policy has been under-emphasised or omitted in many analyses. Bringing together complexity thinking and analytic eclecticism to assess the degree to which this scheme can transform international relations, Garlick critically examines this large-scale interconnectivity project and its potential impacts. The book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in the field of international relations and China studies including academics, policy-makers and diplomats around the world.