ABSTRACT

China’s opening to the outside world has been multidimensional. Its foreign trade has skyrocketed. China tops the world as a target of FDI. It holds more in US Treasury bills than any other country, and China has become an active purchaser of overseas resources. Many of these sectors are interconnected, such as the growth of foreign trade and the development of port facilities. In fact early in the 1980s, even before China’s trade boomed, state leaders had begun to invest heavily developing new ports, as if they realized that one day, China would need all the shipping capacity it could handle. They were not wrong.