New Releases by Ji Li

An interdisciplinary, mixed-method study examining Chinese companies' interactions with the US legal system.

To a lively cast of international players that shaped Manchuria during the early twentieth century, At the Frontier of God's Empire adds the remarkable story of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948). A French Catholic missionary, Caubrière arrived in Manchuria on the eve of the Boxer Uprising in 1899 and was murdered on the eve of the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1948. Living with ordinary Chinese people for half a century, Caubrière witnessed the collapse of the Qing empire, the warlord's chaos that followed, the rise and fall of Japanese Manchukuo, and the emergence of communist China. Caubrière's incredible personal archive, on which Ji Li draws extensively, opens a unique window into everyday interaction between Manchuria's grassroots society and international players. His gripping accounts personalize the Catholic Church's expansion in East Asia and the interplay of missions and empire in local society. Through Caubrière's experience, At the Frontier of God's Empire examines Chinese people at social and cultural margins during this period. A wealth of primary sources, family letters, and visual depictions of village scenes illuminate vital issues in modern Chinese history, such as the transformation of local society, mass migration and religion, tensions between church and state, and the importance of cross-cultural exchanges in everyday life in Chinese Catholic communities. This intense transformation of Manchurian society embodies the clash of both domestic and international tensions in the making of modern China.

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Chinese foreign direct investment in the United States has generated intense debates. Some welcome it for the immediate benefits such as job creation; others view Chinese investments, especially those controlled by the Chinese government, as a critical threat. The debates have so far missed an important question: how do Chinese companies investing in the US react to the host country's law? Ji Li formulates a novel analytical framework to examine the adaptation of Chinese companies to general US institutions and their compliance with US laws governing tax, employment equality, and national security review of foreign investments. The level of compliance varies, and this variation is examined in relation to company ownership, including state ownership. Li's analysis is based on interviews and a unique and comprehensive dataset about Chinese companies in the United States that has never been systematically explored.

God's Little Daughters examines a set of letters written by Chinese Catholic women from a small village in Manchuria to their French missionary, "Father Lin," or Dominique Maurice Pourquié, who in 1870 had returned to France in poor health after spending twenty-three years at the local mission of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP). The letters were from three sisters of the Du family, who had taken religious vows and committed themselves to a life of contemplation and worship that allowed them rare privacy and the opportunity to learn to read and write. Inspired by a close reading of the letters, Ji Li explores how French Catholic missionaries of the MEP translated and disseminated their Christian message in northeast China from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, and how these converts interpreted and transformed their Catholic faith to articulate an awareness of self. The interplay of religious experience, rhetorical skill, and gender relations revealed in the letters allow us to reconstruct the neglected voices of Catholic women in rural China.

This paper explores two questions: If, in a particular country, people are more inclined to resolve disputes through formal legal mechanisms, is their government more likely to use the WTO DSM to settle disputes with other governments? I contend that the answer is yes. I test my hypothesis using both interviews and statistical analysis. The interview-oriented qualitative approach enables me to learn from trade officials the contexts and details of WTO disputes. This knowledge is essential to discovering the causal relationships among the different factors that determine state behaviors. In addition to the qualitative method, I also use a quantitative approach to explore the relationship between norms and international trade dispute resolution. The statistical analysis provides a systemic result and allows me to isolate the impact of the interested independent variable, "Domestic Litigiousness," from the influence of other possible explanatory variables such as "State Capacity" and "Political Structure." In short, I explore the research question by combining interviews with trade officials and regression analysis of the data from forty-six WTO members. Both the interviews and the regression outputs support my argument that countries with more litigious domestic norms tend to file more complaints at the WTO DSM. This remains true after controlling for the effects of other variables, including power and capacity. The research findings suggest that more attention should be paid to the normative aspect of both international dispute resolution and the design of international legal institutions. The general trend of judicialization of international affairs may impose disproportionate costs on countries with a non-litigious domestic environment. Though the costs may be mitigated in the long run - given the movement towards more litigation even in the traditionally non-litigious societies - incorporating the cultural perspective as a consideration in designing international dispute resolution institutions will make those institutions more effective in settling disputes. In addition, the research findings of the Note suggest that normative theories and rational choice theories are complementary. Scholars in either camp will benefit significantly if they attempt to engage in the debate of the other side more seriously.

This study provides new evidence on the choice of performance measures used in dual-class firms to incentivize CEOs. The choice of performance measures is informative about the extent to which the board of directors focuses CEO efforts on firms' long-term versus short-term objectives. To empirically operationalize performance evaluation horizon, I measure the length of the performance evaluation period in CEO stock awards, the use of stock-based measures, and the use of peer-based measures. I collect data on 419 dual-class firms and match them with a control group of single-class firms. I find that market-based metrics are less likely to be used by dual-class firms relative to single-class firms. In addition, I find that peer-based measures are much less common for dual-class than single-class firms. These findings suggest that dual-class firms shield their executives from short-term market pressures and design stock compensation contracts that deemphasize volatile stock prices.

The rise of state-owned companies and sovereign wealth funds (together SOEs) poses many new questions for the regime of investor-state arbitration. Extant literature treats all SOEs the same and limits its focus to the doctrinal treatment of SOEs. This article, by studying Chinese SOEs, demonstrates the complexity of the structure and management of SOEs and their relations with the State. This paper constructs an analytic framework for properly treating SOEs under the current system. The four factor model (distance from the political centre, characteristics of state ownership, sector, and SOE leadership) may facilitate ICSID tribunals' decision-making with regard to the standing of SOE investors and the application of attribution rules.

The main objective of this research is to fabricate biopolymer platforms for nutraceutical delivery. Comprehensive physical and chemical tools have been utilized, and the engineered biopolymer platforms are promising to fulfill the demand of nutraceutical human transportation. However, single platform is not able to maintain the performance through varying administration routes. Under such circumstance, this work is driven by the premise to satisfy the multiple administrations of nutraceuticals. The work in this dissertation puts emphasis on the development and characterization of biopolymer-based platforms that enable food scientists better the design nutraceutical ingredients. Multiple approaches, small molecule crosslinking, organocatalytic ring-opening polymerization, polymer blending and electrospinning are leveraged to target chitosan-tripolyphosphate nanoparticle, mPEG-b-PVL star polymer, zein/F127 blend film, and zein electrospun fiber mat. The characterization of engineered platforms shed light on the following aspects: (i) molecular self-assembly at nano scale; and (ii) property and functionality at macro scale. And the structure-property relationship is established based on those two aspects. With controllable performance, biopolymer platforms are convenient to be integrated into product matrix as novel ingredients. Through investigation, it is demonstrated that controllable properties such as particulate gel's tightness, particle aggregation, solid composite's flexibility, and fibril organization are achieved by manipulating the nanostructures of biopolymers. The proposed platforms are conventionally extended to a rich variety of disciplines based on the fact that numerous applications in novel food ingredient, medical synthesis, tissue engineering, and product scaling up require the various biopolymer platforms.

My dissertation focuses on interaction-based models in which a given agent's payoff function directly incorporates the expected choices of other agents. Such models are appealing in investigating group behavior evolving from individual interactions and in explaining individual behavior under group influence.