Foreign Investment And Economic Cooperation On The Geopolitical Impact

The opening-up policy creates rapid and sustained economic growth in China, it also significantly influences the international relations thanks to China's rising status in the world. This thesis aims to study the interrelation between China's opening-up and the changes of the regional and global geopolitical structures. It is a great theme actually. The thesis selects the interrelationship between China's outbound investment and the geopolitical changes as a perspective in order to explain this issue, and using China's investment to Central Asia and its political influence as the specific case study. Since the mid 1990s, the focus of China's opening up, to mainly attract foreign investment, has gradually shifted to expanding outbound investment and promoting international cooperation, that is, the "Going out" stage of China's opening-up policy. "Going out" strategy is the achievement of China's opening-up and rapid economic development. Its influence to the international relations not only reflects that China has already had certain substantial influence in global economic affairs, but also reflects it may change the world's geopolitical structure, and have some impact on China's geopolitical environment.However, the current academic research is still inadequate concerning the changes of the global geopolitics and China's geopolitical environment due to China's expansion of outbound investment. After studying the geopolitical impact of China's investment in Central Asia, the thesis reaches a basic point, that is, China's expansion of outbound investment will bring about changes in the geopolitical situation, but whether the changes benefit to the relative stability of the geopolitics or not depends on how China coordinates with the major interests among the great powers in the process of expanding outbound investment. Indeed, we should observe some of the restrictive factors when proving this point. On the one hand, an important consideration of China's expansion of outbound investment is to form a favorable geopolitical environment. But if there is not a correlation between expanding outbound investment and enhancing the local country's economic growth and social development, then there will be a problem to realize the goal. On the other hand, complexity of the geopolitical structure is a significant feature among the Central Asian countries. To develop the relationship with Russia, China and the US is still the main direction of Central Asian countries' diplomacy. The competition among China, the US and Russia in Central Asia is more intensive than that in the past. Therefore, China's investment in Central Asia will inevitably lead to some subtle changes in terms of the relations among the great powers. China should balance the relations between the economic interests and political interests of outbound investment.The main content of this thesis consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, the author establishes a fundamental framework to analyze the interrelation between China's outbound investment and Central Asia's geopolitical structure. This analyzing framework tells us the geopolitical significance arising out of or included in the development of outbound investment is quite clear. The second chapter analyzes the sensitivity and complexity of the geopolitics in Central Asia, and reveals some of the important variables which influence the sensitivity and complexity. Here the author believes that the emerging new game among great powers in Central Asia has increased the geopolitical sensitivity and complexity. The study of China's investment activities in Central Asia should not leave the understanding of this issue. In the next two chapters, the author firstly makes the analysis of the whole China's FDI strategy, which provides a necessary background for the analysis of China's investment in Central Asia, then the author emphases on analyzing the geopolitical implications of China's investment in Central Asian countries.