Mapping Corporate Investments Between China and Europe in an Era of Geoeconomic Competition

Abstract

The consolidation of geoeconomic competition puts core aspects of global economic interdependence, such as the mutual China-EU investment relationship, under increased pressure. Headlines about ‘derisking’, ‘decoupling’ or ‘deglobalization’ dominate current debates but tend to be overly simplistic. To push the debate on China-EU economic relations forward, we provide an empirically driven account of the first phase of the global geoeconomic turn between 2009 and 2021. By triangulating country-level FDI data, firm-level ownership information and firm-level surveys, we find indications of geopolitical hedging by European and Chinese firms, but no clear move towards decoupling or deglobalization. Based on our findings, we advocate for an approach that takes the complexity of state-firm interactions in global economic relations seriously and integrates different data sources and levels of analysis. With this, we hope to contribute to a more realistic and fine-grained approach to the important question of China-EU relations in the 21st century.