This study examines the effects of China's outward foreign direct investment (FDI) on buying its state image abroad. We argue that regime survival has motivated China to use FDI to improve its state image and induce the world to accept China as a "good" country without democracy. Our analysis shows that while world public opinion becomes more favorable to China when its FDI share increases, even democratic countries remain less favorable toward this growing power. However, when China's FDI share crosses a higher threshold, democratic countries' unfavorable view toward China is compromised and the significant difference in favorability between democratic and nondemocratic countries is diminishing. China's FDI share has no significant effect on improving its state image in the Asia Pacific region, in particular-probably due to the memory of past wars with China and China's aggressive geopolitical strategy that focuses more on hard power competition. Our empirical results are robust in terms of their consistency with the governments' UN voting similarity with China.
What effects does participation in peacekeeping operations (PKO) have on the participating countries’ civil–military resource allocation? Answering this question can widen our understanding of state motivations to contribute to the United Nations PKOs by incorporating the civil–military dynamic. We argue that contributing states can substitute part of their domestic military expenditures with external resources. Governments act as brokers between domestic military interests and international sources of rent, a process which we call civil–military resource substitution through international brokerage. By doing so, governments can (i) reduce part of the bottom-up demands for increased military spending (i.e., salaries and allowances) and (ii) outsource critical resources to meet military organizational priorities (i.e., training, weapons, perks for the military elite, and so on). Using cross-national statistical analysis, we find that the UN PKO contributing states allocate fewer resources to the defense sector than the non-contributing states, and higher troop-contributing states are likely to allocate fewer resources to the defense sector than the lower-contributing or non-contributing states. The implications point to a much wider role of the UN peacekeeping missions than what is previously understood and demonstrate their impacts beyond the host countries.
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