Variable Interest Entity, Offshore Domesticated Foreign Finance, and the Political Economy of China’s Internet Firms: The Case of Alibaba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article aims to show how the globalized securities market in general and a transnational legal business structure named variable interest entity (VIE) in particular has challenged our conventional understanding of “foreignness” as a geographical concept in cross-border capital flow and ushers in a new type of foreign investment which I call “offshore domesticated foreign finance” (ODFF). By performing a case study on Alibaba—one of the world’s leading VIE-structured Internet companies—and mapping out the company’s fund-raising history and personnel appointment mechanism with the help of company releases and news reports, this article shows how ODFF makes a company de jure foreign-incorporated and -owned but de facto China-based and Chinese-controlled. This article also demonstrates that ODFF’s primary function is to allow China-based Internet firms to tap into international financial markets while helping Chinese entrepreneurs and managers—despite their minority shareholdings—to control the company. These findings shed light on how financial globalization has transformed the cross-border capital movement and corporate governance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".