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This article studies the relationship between the changing political economy of labor in China and its potential influence over the US market economy through the production and financial connections between the two jurisdictions across the Pacific. At the macro level from the aspect of international political economy, it is argued that globalization has aroused further social changes in China by encouraging internal labor migration, foreign investment and the rule of law, while retrenchment of the party-state faces development from the entrenchment of a globalized civil society movement, along with the internationalized corporate governance and its production structure, which introduces international social and production norms to China, while also delivering the Chinese labor reality to the external world. Meantime, at the enterprise level, widely ignorance of the Chinese labor law and the coalition between the capital and local governments sustain the labor rights violation activities, ranging from employment discrimination against labor migrants, gender inequity at workplace, to deliberate neglects on occupational safety and health. Bad labor treatments partly sponsor the cost subsidies on the global production chain and keep the US inflation at a low level. However, the evolution of the rule of law in China bears the potential to raise the rights consciousness among workers and initiate more industrial actions against the employers. Moreover, joint efforts from the Sino-US civil society and legal practitioners tend to bring the information of law and rights violation in China to the US through shareholder litigation, which targets at MNCs by working with union-controlled pension funds, the media and other stakeholders, so that the US shareholders and consumer movement can realize the labor practices of MNCs and their subcontractors in China and add downward pressure to the stock prices of the listed companies in the US. Therefore, a positive linkage among labor rights in China, union practices and the financial market performance of the MNCs is about to be established, and it can not only influence bad labor treatments under the global production chain, but also contain the power of a decentralized Chinese predatory state over its working population by holding the state behaviors responsible economically, through international financial and product markets. As globalization creates new channels of exploitation, it also offers innovative leverage power over such practices. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. policy of encouraging China to become a “responsible stakeholder” is the newest manifestation of a policy that seeks to persuade China not only to participate in international affairs, but to share the burden of maintaining the existing internati ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world in which the United States holds a preponderance of power, how does China design a grand strategy to advance its security interests? In this article, I make two sets of argument. First, I argue that the logic of balancing still holds in international politics. Critics of balance of power theory have missed the other piece of the puzzle—internal balancing. Although states have not resorted to external balancing by forming a counterbalancing alliance, they can still undertake internal efforts to mitigate the power gap with the dominant state. Second, to balance American power, China is pursuing a grand strategy that combines elements of internal balancing and external “soft balancing.” The strategy of internal balancing aims to increase China’s relative power through economic development and military modernization with an emphasis on asymmetric warfare, whereas the strategy of external soft balancing is designed to limit or frustrate U.S. policy initiatives deemed detrimental to Chinese interests through diplomatic efforts in multilateral institutions and bilateral partnerships. The logic of such a grand strategy is to maintain a stable external environment for China to concentrate on economic growth and accumulate relative power, without provoking a vigorous U.S. response. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]