Paper short abstract:

Our paper unsettles Eurocentric narratives in development studies that assume transfers from Global North to Global South. Through a focus on Chinese investments in Europe, we investigate the political implications of a “developing country” intervening in the heart of the “developed world”.

Paper long abstract:

Our paper unsettles Eurocentric narratives in development studies that assume policy and ideational transfers from Global North to Global South. Through a focus on Chinese investments in Europe, we investigate the political implications of a “developing country” intervening economically in the heart of the “developed world”.

We synthesise findings from a collaborative research program (https://www.york.ac.uk/politics/research/current-projects/globaldevelopmentfutures/china/#tab-1) to reflect on the ways in which growing Chinese investments in Europe shape the liberal internationalism that provide the institutional scaffolding for international development. Staging a conversation between scholarship in global development (Horner and Hume, 2019; Roy and Hickey, forthcoming) with international relations (Jones and Zeng 2019; de Graaff, ten Brink, and Parmar 2020), we argue that Chinese investments do not necessarily undermine liberal internationalism. Rather, the political implications of Chinese investments in Europe are shaped by state-society relations within China and the European countries receiving Chinese investments.

The paper elaborates four themes, viz: (i) The interface between actors in states and societies that shape overseas investments in China; (ii) The relations between the Chinese state and businesses and their counterparts in select European countries; (iii) The interactions between the Chinese state and regional groupings in Europe; and (iv) The impact of Chinese investments in third countries on its relations with European states.

The synthesis of findings presented in our paper will also introduce workshop participants to an edited volume (in progress) on the implications of Chinese investments in Europe for the Liberal International Order.