This article evaluates China’s influence on the making and unmaking of economic détente in the 1970s. Utilizing recently declassified documents in Japan, the United States, and China, this article demonstrates that Chinese officials used both diplomatic and commercial means to influence their Japanese and American counterparts to prevent them from developing economic relations with the Soviet Union. During this process, Japanese and American industrialists had to carefully weigh up their participation in governments’ geopolitical schemes when pursuing business opportunities in the two socialist countries. This cautious attitude led to shifting dynamics in economic détente and varying outcomes for development projects. Chinese activism also prompted changes in Japan and the United States when decision-makers sought to benefit from the Sino-Soviet confrontation and maximize their economic and geopolitical gains. This article, therefore, features economic détente as a dynamic, multilateral process and emphasizes that the volatile geopolitics in Northeast Asia played a crucial role in ending détente and redrew the global Cold War to carry stronger economic overtones.

The debate over home state responsibility for human rights has focused on how home states might use accountability mechanisms to promote respect for human rights among their businesses abroad. However, a set of activists and researchers have opened a new front on the question of home state responsibility by focusing on the activities of Canadian diplomats providing advice and consular services to extractive firms abroad. This work documents how home states can be directly implicated in business and human rights controversies and how home state diplomats can put human rights defenders at increased risk. This paper outlines the growing body of research on the hidden influence of Canadian economic diplomacy in human rights controversies, suggesting a troubling disregard for corporate social responsibility and human rights concerns in these contexts, and making the case for robust accountability mechanisms to influence the conduct of both corporate actors and diplomatic officials.

In the wake of the intensifying Sino–Japanese rivalry in Asia, a new third-party market cooperation (TPMC) framework emerged in late 2018. The new mechanism was inaugurated around the time of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to Beijing, displaying new attempts at Sino–Japanese economic diplomacy. Nonetheless, this article highlights the absence of major cooperative outcomes and suggests a pessimistic vision of TPMC's future, as three pairs of politico-economic gaps have led to asymmetries in the approaches adopted by China and Japan. First, a government-to-government policy asymmetry occurred between China's initiatives and Japan's responsiveness, as the latter merely utilized the TPMC as a temporary diplomatic tool to restore bilateral relations in late 2018 and appeared to have lost its policy momentum in the following years. Second, asymmetries in business modes and investment management between the two countries' enterprises have led to technical barriers in materializing the two governments' agreements into specific TPMC business collaboration. This study illustrated a project of Sino–Japanese collaboration in building a high-speed railway in Thailand, and saw this failed case as a warning for existing gaps of commercial modes. Third, both countries are now confronted with domestic underdeveloped public–private partnerships between state and private sectors. This article also aims to provide some policy-oriented implications for steadily implementing the Sino–Japanese TPMC in the future.

This article examines China’s path to joining the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), a private international organization founded in Paris in 1920, of which China was a member from 1931–1949 and from 1994 onwards. The article charts the actors and debates behind two meaningful encounters. The first took place while the Nanjing government was raising funds for economic reconstruction, and the ICC aimed to mediate China’s fundraising efforts through private multilateral channels. The second was in the 1980s, when the People’s Republic was seeking to enter the world trade system. ICC members acted as educators and facilitators of world trade practicalities for the People’s Republic, which eventually rejoined the ICC in 1994. The article draws on Chinese, European, and American source material collected from governments, chambers of commerce, and private businessmen to make a twofold contribution. First, it adds nuance to the narrative of China’s economic internationalization by identifying an important non-governmental diplomatic channel. Second, it questions the ICC’s self-proclaimed identity as a non-political economic organization by showing how the political was indissociable from the economic when it came to China’s membership.

This article examines limitations present in India–Indonesia bilateral trade relations. Since January 2019, India has imposed higher import tariffs on Indonesian refined, bleached, deodorised palm oil (RBDPO) than those imposed on Indonesia's main competitor Malaysia. This tariff policy weakened Indonesia's exports, given that India is Indonesia's third-largest export destination for palm oil. To overcome these tariff disparities, the Indonesian government responded with a trade-off strategy, offering to lower its import tariffs on India's raw sugar in exchange for a reduction in India's import tariffs on Indonesia's RBDPO. However, this strategy has thus far failed to generate a satisfying outcome for Indonesia. This article examines the obstacles in enacting such a strategy from the Indonesian perspective. By mobilising the concept of reluctance in international politics, this article argues that India's reluctance hinders Indonesia's trade-off strategy. This reluctance is evidenced by India's hesitation and recalcitrance, resulting in delays, and reversal of policy as well as ignoring Indonesian requests regarding the trade-off strategy. This could indicate that India does not prioritise Indonesia in its Indo-Pacific vision, particularly in enhancing cooperation with Southeast Asian nations, particularly Indonesia.

This paper analyzes the impact of the presence of foreign missions on trade using Turkey's unique expansion in its foreign embassy network (39 new embassies in 8 years) as the source of variation in a panel data setting. A majority of the existing empirical studies use cross-sectional bilateral trade data due to lack of variation over time (Rose, 2007; Moons and Bergeijk, 2013). Employing a panel data analysis, this paper is able to address the endogeneity issues that are associated with a standard cross-sectional analysis. The dependent variable in the paper is the trade between Turkey and 190 countries for 2006 to 2016. The results indicate that presence of an embassy increases export value by 30% and this increase comes mainly from the volume effect. Categorizing goods by the Rauch (1999) classification shows that the increase in differentiated goods exports is the main driver of the export surge. The number of exporting firms increases by about 8%. There is no statistically significant impact on the exports of homogeneous goods. Replication of the analysis for imports suggests no impact on imports.

Sceptics query China's economic and political ability to realize its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Less attention has been paid to BRI's implications for one of the defining features of China's foreign policy: low engagement in areas beyond its traditional sphere of influence. The Middle East is such a case. Addressing this issue, the article explores the mutual impact of China's low political involvement in the Middle East and BRI's realization. Distinguishing cross-border connectivity projects from other BRI-associated activities, the article examines the challenges to executing BRI-related projects in Israel. It finds that realizing connectivity projects – the essence of the BRI vision – will require China to increase its regional engagement, a shift that it has so far avoided.

This article carries a two-fold argument. First, Beijing's economic sanctions against Vietnam during the period 1975–1978 were mainly motivated by its desire to punish Vietnam for an anti-China policy that smacked of ingratitude for the latter's past assistance, fuelled further by Hanoi's closer relations with Moscow. They were also designed to extract Hanoi's accommodation of China's demand for territorial boundary concessions and to halt the persecution of ethnic Chinese residents in Vietnam. Second, the resultant meltdown of Sino-Vietnamese relations, as well as the making of the Soviet-Vietnamese alliance between 1975 and 1978, was gradual and contentious rather than swift and decisive as most existing studies contend. Hanoi's reluctance to forge a formal military alliance with the faraway Soviet Union against China was largely driven by the importance of China's remaining aid and economic potential to Vietnam's post-war economic reconstruction and the uncertainty of the Soviet commitment to aid Vietnam.

This paper studies the links between the evolution of Spain's balance of payments and Spanish-American economic diplomacy along 1917 and 1918. The development of these relations may be useful to explain a great deal about the downturn in Spanish foreign commerce during the last year of WWI. After their entrance into the conflict, the United States toughened their commercial policies and made the Spaniards work hard to keep both their international trade and the freedom of their merchant marine. Contacts between the two countries dealt also with the repatriation of Spain's foreign debt and the use of its extraordinary profits to make loans to the Allied nations. The negotiations ended up in March and August, 1918 with the signing of two bilateral agreements, whose consequences can be followed using the monthly figures of trade between America and the Iberian Peninsula.