Speaker: Jazmin Sierra, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Kellogg Institute Faculty Fellow, University of Notre Dame

China’s rise is often told as a story of opening to foreign capital and becoming the workshop of the world. But opening up also set in motion a less familiar transformation: China began to globalize state-led development itself. Rather than confining industrial policy to investments within its national borders, the Chinese state increasingly encouraged domestic firms to invest, produce, and acquire companies abroad in pursuit of development at home.

Globalized State-led Development: How States Support Firms at Home and Abroad (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics) traces the ideational and institutional foundations of this outward turn. Through experimentation and learning, Chinese policymakers came to treat the internationalization of national firms as an instrument of structural transformation and repurposed state control over finance to support it. China unleashed capital abroad not only to secure commodities and expand geopolitical influence, but also to gain market access in the United States and Europe and accelerate technological catch-up. Foreign acquisitions were especially important because they gave Chinese firms access to advanced technologies, skills, brands, and distribution networks that were difficult to develop at home.

Comparing China and Brazil, the book situates China’s strategy within a common developmental logic among late developers, while showing how its distinctive legacies of state planning and authoritarian rule shaped the form and scale that strategy took. The comparison shows that late developers have changed the strategies for, but not renounced the ambition of, the structural transformation of their economies. In doing so, the book brings the Chinese case into broader comparative debates about industrial policy, state capacity, and the changing nature of state-led development in an open global economy.

Jazmin Sierra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her book, Globalized State-led Development: How States Support Firms at Home and Abroad, is published by Cambridge University Press. Her research has appeared in Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, and Estudios Sociológicos, and has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Smith Richardson Foundation.