An Analysis of Southeast Asian Firms＇ Investment in China

Economic cooperation between China and Southeast Asian economies is increasingly attracting the attention of policy-makers, scholars, and practitioners. Firms from Southeast Asia have been playing an important role in China‘s utilization of foreign direct investment, though most of these firms have been viewed as small, labor-intensive, and ordinary in technology. This paper reveals one important dimension of economic cooperation between China and Southeast Asia. It investigates the factors that influence Southeast Asian firms‘ investments in Guangdong, which is one of the largest provinces in China in terms of utilization of foreign direct investment, and it tries to answer the question of what make Southeast Asian firms invest in China in a large scale and in the way of advancing waves.T he research outcomes contribute to the knowledge of the changing economic relations between China and Southeast Asia.