Globalization, geopolitics, and social networks: Overseas Chinese and overseas non-Chinese investments in China

China has been the biggest recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI) among all the developing countries since the 1990s. FDI in China comes from two main sources due to its special geopolitics in East Asia. The first is from overseas Chinese investors in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. The second is from overseas non-Chinese investors (non-Hong Kong-Macao-Taiwan investors). This dissertation focuses on an ethnic and cultural dimension of Chinese FDI and non-Chinese FDI. Non-Chinese FDI is a global phenomenon, while Chinese FDI is merely a regional phenomenon. Overseas Chinese investment and overseas non-Chinese investment exhibit different sectoral and spatial patterns, and have different spatial outcomes and impacts on China's development.This research argues two different development patterns. One special development pattern, regional integration, is driven by overseas Chinese investors. The other, globalization, is driven by non-Chinese investors. Under CEPA (closer economic partnership arrangement), a new regionalism between China and Hong Kong and Macao has formally come into being. More interestingly, overseas Chinese investment in China is different from the simple cross-border investment (e.g. the U.S. and Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, Germany and France, Belgium and France) because the overseas Chinese have social network advantage (mainly in the form of guanxi networks) in mainland China. Questionnaire surveys conducted in southern China are used to verify the expected significance of guanxi networks for overseas Chinese investors from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. Guanxi or social networks are a key to understanding Chinese transnationalism, new regionalism, and Chinese capitalism. In addition, based on detailed micro-level firm data (industrial census data), I construct sectoral and spatial models on overseas Chinese and non-Chinese investments in order to figure out what factors have influenced the distribution of the two types of investors. The statistical analysis results support the central argument, that is, overseas Chinese investment is spatially as well as sectorally uneven from non-Chinese investment. Sectorally, it finds that Chinese FDI focuses more on labor-intensive, low-cost, low-skill manufacturing activities, and non-Chinese FDI focuses more on capital-, knowledge-, and skill-intensive industries. Spatially, it points out that a majority of overseas Chinese enterprises are more dispersed to medium- and small-sized cities, whereas a majority of non-Chinese enterprises are more concentrated in super-large and mega-cities. Furthermore, I challenge the eclectic paradigm as it applies to China by pointing out a significant blind spot of it---the neglect of the social network factor. This research is also one of the important FDI studies from a social-network approach.The analysis results from quantitative approach (statistics and modeling, spatial analysis techniques) and qualitative approach challenge the conventional FDI theories and fill a significant gap in the theoretical realm of FDI studies.