Ning Leng, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, joins Dr. Monika Prusinowska —Ramon y Cajal Fellow at the University of Barcelona's Public International Law Department, who serves as guest host for this episode— to discuss how the Chinese state structures its relationship with Chinese companies, and what that means when those companies expand into Latin America. Drawing on the findings of her first book Politicizing Business (Cambridge University Press, 2025), they examine the mechanisms through which the Chinese government deploys both state-owned and private enterprises for political ends —from visibility projects to protest management— and how those patterns play out, with uneven results, in Latin American markets. The conversation also addresses the legal debate over whether Chinese SOEs should be treated as a single economic group in public procurement —using the Bogotá Metro bid as a recent case— and the findings of a survey of 20,000 respondents across 10 Global South countries on perceptions of foreign direct investment, where Chinese projects generate far less resistance than commonly assumed.

Recording date: June 20, 2025

This episode is the result of a collaboration between Fundación Andrés Bello, the Public International Law Department of the University of Barcelona, and the Cologne International Forum