The coping strategies that small Chinese firms operating in North Korea have chosen involve insinuating themselves into North Korean political and social networks, and structuring their investments so as to minimize their exposure to North Korean infrastructure, workers, and institutions. As a result, it is unlikely that Chinese firms will be the main drivers of market transformation in North Korea.

The Chinese government inspects villages to encourage economic development and foster income equality. It is thus more likely to inspect model villages, villages hosting investments, and poorer villages. Empirical tests with data from 961 Chinese villages confirm these propositions. Villages with investments and villages with poverty attract the most inspections.

This article focuses on China’s Maritime Silk Road initiative, paying particular attention to Southeast Asia, the initiative’s key focus. It examines the political and economic costs and benefits of participation in the initiative for Southeast Asian countries, and identifies the rationales that may enhance or diminish the initiative’s success.

While India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party lost elections in Delhi and Bihar, and its government failed to implement any significant reform in 2015, the economy was slowly recovering and Prime Minister Narendra Modi conducted an active foreign policy.

This article explores the burgeoning of Chinese investment in North Korea. By drawing on various materials including press reports and official data from both China and South Korea, the paper suggests that this rapid growth serves China's general policy goals toward North Korea, propping up the Pyongyang regime by leading it to embrace sustainable economic reforms. At the same time, Chinese investment has increasingly taken on commercial attributes.

Analysis of data on flows and stocks refutes the argument that China and Southeast Asia are engaged in a zero-sum competition for foreign investment. Although Southeast Asia appears to have lost out to Chinese-manufactured exports in global markets, this has been balanced by substantial increases in exports of components to China itself.