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This dissertation elucidates the domestic politics of China's outward direct investments and its international implications. A current puzzle in CPE/IPE research is whether international investors from autocracies, particularly state-owned enterprises (SOEs), are profit- maximizing firms or agents of the state. Using formal analysis and two sets of original firm-level data on Chinese investments, I demonstrate that the behaviors of China's SOEs reflect both state preferences and firms' profit incentives and that the interaction of the two can lead to perverse outcomes unintended by the state : China's political elites depend on SOEs to carry out certain state objectives (e.g. energy security) and devise preferential policies (e.g. subsidies, insurance, bailouts) that enable firms to accomplish these objectives. SOEs, however, take advantage of these policy perquisites to seek rents. Knowing that the state will bail them out when investments fail, they take excessive risks when choosing host countries to earn high returns, ultimately passing on the cost of failed investments to the disenfranchised public. I apply this core insight to evaluate three aspects of China's approach to outbound investments: investment decisions by Chinese firms; the effect of Chinese investment on host country development and governance; and China's foreign policy toward economies that are the sites of its foreign investment

AbstractWe demonstrate material origin of strategic preference expression in authoritarian systems, where firms express dissent against or conform to the government's position based on what they seek to obtain from the government: politically powerful firms are more likely to dissent to negotiate policy concessions while politically weak firms are more likely to conform to the government's position to obtain side payments or to avoid punishment. We test this argument using survey experiments with firm executives in China. A treatment that signals the government's commitment to liberalize inward foreign direct investment increases the percentage of firms that report to "benefit" from the policy between 14 and 36 percentage points. Powerful firms (state- and foreign-owned) conform the least to the government and politically vulnerable firms and the recipients of government contracts conform the most. Our results suggest that political standing is a key driver of business position-taking in China.

Zhubajie/Witmart and other online crowdsourcing platforms have proliferated in China, and researchers have increasingly used them for subject recruitment. One critical question remains, however: what is the generalizability of the findings based on these online samples? In this study, we benchmark the demography of an online sample from Zhubajie to nationally representative samples and replicate commonly asked attitudinal questions in national surveys. We find that online respondents differ from the general population in many respects. Yet, the differences become smaller when comparison is made with the internet users in benchmark surveys. Importantly, when predicting attitudes, our online sample with post-stratification weights is able to produce similar coefficients in most cases as these internet-active subsamples. Our study suggests that online crowdsourcing platforms can be a useful tool for subject recruitment, especially when researchers are interested in making inferences about Chinese netizens. We further analyze the political and social desirability issues of online subjects. Finally, we discuss caveats of using crowdsourcing samples in China.