Elly Rostoum
Follow the Money: Uncovering the Incorporation and the CCP’s Ownership of Chinese Firms Investing in the USA
Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) enabled the technology revolution in China and set China as a strategic competitor to the United States. It opened new global markets, redrew trade routes, tapped into intellectual property, allowed for opportunities in industrial espionage, reshaped supply chains, and allowed for technological breakthroughs in genomics, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and other critical and emerging technologies that are quite simply re-imagining the world. But who exactly owns the Chinese firms undertaking this FDI? The research presented in this keynote address tracks the incorporation structures and ownership of the 672 Chinese firms undertaking FDI globally. It uncovers how the Chinese government has been able to evade American national security reviews by instrumentalizing investment through 3rd & 4th+ level subsidiaries, private equity, and holding companies.
Elly Rostoum is a former U.S. Intelligence Analyst and National Security Council staffer at the White House. She is the Managing Director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches courses on national security vulnerabilities of critical and emerging technologies, intelligence, public policy, strategic studies, and energy markets; with a regional expertise covering China and the Middle East.
Elly’s research examines American national security vulnerabilities of foreign direct investment, with a focus on foundational and critical and emerging technologies in the AI, finance, biotech, and IoT sectors. Elly is an expert on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States’ (CFIUS) governance. Her current book project, CFIUS in the 21st Century The Guardian of the Technology Revolution, examines the American and the Chinese conceptualizations of national security, and their implications on how each nation defines their grand strategies vis-à-vis one another. She is also the author of the upcoming book, Al-Hogra: an Anthology.
