In this presentation ("The Imperative of Paying Attention to the Politics of Chinese Outward Investment"), which was a keynote address given at the 8th China Goes Global conference in Shanghai in August 2014 , Dr. Jean-Marc F. Blanchard, founder and Executive Director of the Mr. & Mrs. S.H. Wong Center for the Study of Multinational Corporations, stresses the importance of paying attention to politics when studying Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI).
China acceded to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, but the past five years or so has witnessed analysts devoting greater attention to probing China’s fulfillment of its WTO obligations given the increasing availability of data and the end of China's phase-in periods for meetings some of its WTO commitments.
This article probes China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO). China’s WTO accession deserves further analysis because much of the extant literature is divorced from the international relations (IR) literature. Moreover, while past analyses have considered external and internal factors shaping China’s stance towards joining the WTO, they have rarely gone beyond this to probing when particular variables mattered more.
China has earned a reputation for lax environmental standards that allegedly attract corporations more interested in profit than in moral responsibility and, consequently, further negate incentives to raise environmental standards. Surprisingly, Ka Zeng and Joshua Eastin find that international economic integration with nation-states that have stringent environmental regulations facilitates the diffusion of corporate environmental norms and standards to Chinese provinces.
