Explaining various policy responses of Britain and Germany to different Chinese investments in high-tech and critical infrastructure sectors since 2012

Zhang, Haoran (2024) Explaining various policy responses of Britain and Germany to different Chinese investments in high-tech and critical infrastructure sectors since 2012. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

The study provides a new explanation for European recipient countries' varying policy responses towards Chinese investment inflows into high tech and critical infrastructure sector s from a social evolutionary perspective. Focusing on Britain and Germany , the two representative Chinese investment destinations in Europe, the study has explained why they selectively accepted some Chinese investment cases over others. Adopting a set theoretical multi method combining fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and process tracing (PT), the study, to the best of the author's knowledge, has conducted the first mediu m N comparative study with 16 selected cases in the research field on Europe's investment policy on Chinese investment. As a result, this study has identified two distinct causal mechanisms leading to the acceptance of Chinese investments: the mechanism of a highly tolerant social context and the mechanism of economic incentives. These mechanisms are commonly backed by the social evolutionary paradigm (SEP) that highlights the pressure of selection in policymaking. This means that the two mechanisms, acting as two distinct selection pressures resulting from complex interactions between the social system, agents, and other agents in specific social circumstances, can filter the winning coalition(s) to emerge among policy ruling actors, thereby allowing their policy preferences to remain and dictate the final policy outcome. With the identified causal mechanisms that highlight the role of selection pressures in shaping final policy outputs, the study advances the field by broadening the extant views, seeing pol icy results as recipient states' trade offs between security concerns and economic incentives, the two contrasting policy considerations that have puzzled extant studies.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General); H Social Sciences > HG Finance; J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences
• Supervisor's Name: Kaczmarski, Dr. Marcin and Munro, Dr. Neil
• Date of Award: 2024
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2024-84530
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 02 Sep 2024 09:53
• Last Modified: 02 Sep 2024 09:53
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.84530
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/84530