China's Chance to Lead

Richard W. Carney has lived and worked in China since 2017. He has extensive experience teaching both Chinese and global executives, as well as policymakers from across the Asia Pacific. An advisor to the World Bank for its flagship project Businesses of the State, Carney is the author of Authoritarian Capitalism (Cambridge, 2018) which won the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize.

'Why do some countries receive Chinese investments directed towards infrastructure while others do not? In this informative, well-argued and richly documented book, Richard Carney moves beyond stale, outdated explanations that ignore the nuances associated with both infrastructure investment and autocratic rule. Carney argues that China seeks to own and control infrastructure projects in electoral autocracies such as Malaysia due to basic incentive compatibility: their rulers must compete in frequent, albeit rigged, elections, and thus welcome clientelistic spending because of, not despite, its inefficiencies and opaqueness. Perhaps the most important contribution is Carney's ample documentation of China's efforts to dominate standard setting around digital technologies associated with the unfolding Fourth Industrial Revolution. The stakes could not be higher.' Victor Menaldo, Professor, University of Washington and Co-founder and co-director of the UW Political Economy Forum

• 1. Introduction; 2. Market failures and China's chance to lead; 3. Measuring infrastructure needs and foreign infrastructure investment; 4. Theory: why countries vary in their participation in the belt and road initiative; 5. Measuring clientelism and the corporate sector across political regimes; 6. Political regimes and BRI country level patterns; 7. Political regimes and BRI project characteristics; 8. Case studies of political regimes and the BRI; 9. Chinese exports of digital technologies and standards; 10. Conclusions and implications .