Lobbying by Proxy: A Study of China’s Lobbying Practices in the United States 1979-2010 and the Implications for FARA

Abstract

his thesis is a study of the People’s Republic of China’s lobbying activity during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, with a focus on both the advocacy methods used by the Chinese to lobby the U.S. government, and the corporate interests that have continually weighed in on China’s behalf. Its primary purpose is to clarify the significant role that both U.S. multinational corporations and Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have played in China’s lobbying efforts in order to demonstrate the extent to which the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) database—the main foreign lobbying transparency system—has failed to adequately capture the wealth and institutional resources that these interests have put into backing pro-Chinese trade legislation. 1 This work seeks to demonstrate this failure by collecting and parsing data taken from reports issued to Congress by the FARA Unit—the wing of the Department of Justice that serves as the main watchdog of foreign lobbying efforts—and contrasting it with corporate lobbying disclosures mandated by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, interviews with lobbyists that command high positions within some of Washington’s most powerful firms, previous scholarly works, congressional reports, and C.I.A. declassifications. 2 This aggregated data elucidates the drawbacks of the FARA system and brings to light a political landscape in which U.S. multinational corporations are pressured to lobby on China’s behalf for fear of economic T