Regulation & Governance Special Issue, 3 September 2025.
Available here.
Abstract
Much of scholarly writing on compliance is derived from the experiences of Western multi-national corporations operating in developed economies. This introduction to the special issue “China in Compliance” departs from such convention by asking how compliance works in China. By broadening the scope of compliance studies to include non-Western contexts, including China and its relationship to the “Global South” and nondemocratic settings, the special issue breaks new ground in the empirical analysis of compliance industries, practices, and professionals. The special issue is comprised of seven articles that illustrate specific compliance problems for compliance in Chinese overseas direct investment. This introduction first provides a detailed overview of the growth of domestic corporate compliance in China over the last several years and then puts this growth in the context of Chinese companies engaging in overseas projects. It subsequently gives a roadmap of the articles and highlights their key themes and findings. The broader goal is to provide a conceptual foundation for the comparative study of compliance.
- Compliance in China (Introduction), Matthew S. Erie
- Legal Brokers of Chinese Investment in Cambodia: Compliance Between Contract and Culture, Matthew S. Erie, Molly Bodurtha, Sokphea Young
- Mining for Norms: International Extractivism, Chinese Business, and the Indeterminacy of Compliance in Kyrgyzstan, Asel Doolotkeldieva, Till Mostowlansky
- Which and Whose Rules Rule? Chinese Agribusinesses and the Challenge of Compliance in Rural Tajikistan, Irna Hofman
- Inducing Compliance: Shaping Audiences' Perceptions in China's Cyber Crime Enforcement, Graeme Smith
- Beyond Security: The Compliance Dimension of National Security Reviews in Singapore and Taiwan, Weitseng Chen
- From Multicultural Experiment to Performing “China's Story”: Complying With Shifting Norms at a Chinese–Hungarian Bilingual School, Fanni Beck, Pál Nyíri
- Coaxing Compliance: Ethiopian Lawyers, Chinese Companies, and the Cultivation of Respect, Miriam Driessen
