Deconstructing the myth of Alipay Drama—Repoliticizing foreign investment in the telecommunications sector in China

Wei Shen

Telecommunications Policy, 2012, vol. 36, issue 10, 929-942

Abstract: Alibaba’s dispute with Yahoo and Softbank over Alipay’s ownership in 2011 again brought China’s telecoms law and foreign investment policies into the spotlight. Although China has officially opened up its telecoms services sector to foreign investors according to its WTO Agreement, foreign investors are still experiencing various difficulties when they enter the Chinese market. Recent years have witnessed some new regulatory movements tackling the variable interest entity structure (or the VIE structure) adopted by foreign investors in investing into China’s telecoms industry. This article reviews the VIE structure and Chinese regulatory counter measures, and offers a political economy insight to Chinese telecoms policy changes. In addition, the article attempts to review the struggles between regulators and regulatees in the business community through the lens of economic regulatory/development model with Chinese characteristics.

Keywords: Foreign investment; Alipay dispute; VIE structure; Regulations; Political economy analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308596112001589
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:telpol:v:36:y:2012:i:10:p:929-942

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/30471/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... /30471/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.telpol.2012.08.008

Access Statistics for this article

Telecommunications Policy is currently edited by Erik Bohlin

More articles in Telecommunications Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().