Term

Definition

Corporate Bad Actors

Corporations known to be engaged in malign activity, generally in connection with their core business operations. This generally includes sanctioned corporate human rights and national security abusers, those likely to be sanctioned as well as those companies non-compliant with Western securities laws and investor protection standards. 

Capital Markets

Capital markets are public platforms for coordinating trading in various assets, primarily stocks (equity shares in corporations) and bonds (the rights to collect fixed debt income from a corporation or other entity over a period of time). Most medium and large economies have some form of domestic capital market infrastructure, although the largest share (roughly 50% of global market capitalization) resides in the United States. 

Economic Threat

In a security context, an economic threat is a potential or actual circumstance, originating either domestically or externally, that threatens to materially harm a nation's economic welfare or stability. Examples include industry capture, corporate espionage, or the exploitation of economic dependencies for political purposes. 

Financial Threat

In a security context, a financial threat is either a potential or actual situation in which a state's capacity to maintain a stable money supply, support conditions for economic growth, collect taxes, and use state revenues to fulfil public needs becomes jeopardized (e.g. cyberattacks by a rogue actor on a major bank), or a situation in which a malign actor (e.g. an adversarial state or a terrorist group) is able to use some mechanism to finance its security-threatening or other problematic activity (e.g. a terrorist organization financing its activities through the sale of illicit drugs). 

Investor Protection

Investor protection is a country's legal and normative framework protecting investors from facing unjustified and/or undisclosed business risk. Investor protection principles ensure that the interests of investors are respected and promoted by their fiduciaries. An example of an investor protection violation could include an investment firm failing to disclose its exposure to sanctioned foreign entities or those facing imminent government sanctions.

Capital Market Sanctions

Capital market sanctions are investment bans that limit or prevent foreign companies from raising funds through the sanctioning nation's capital market(s). Generally, such measures have been put in place when such companies, and/or the states they originate from, represent an economic and/or financial threat to the host country of the capital markets in question. 

PLA Affiliates List

The U.S. Department of Defense first published a list of companies known to be owned, controlled, or affiliated with the Chinese “People’s Liberation Army” in 2019, and has continued to add to it. Many of the companies listed are involved in developing technologies and equipment for the militaries and surveillance efforts of China and other repressive regimes.

Economic Warfare

Economic warfare is the use, or threat of use, of policy instruments, technologies, and other state capacities to weaken or destabilize an adversary's economy. It can occur in conjunction with, or as an alternative to, conventional military strategy. Economic warfare strategy and military strategy are the two primary components of a state's grand strategy towards its adversaries.

Executive Order 13959

Executive Order 13959 is a Presidential Order implemented by the Trump Administration that prohibits all U.S. investors (institutional and retail investors alike) from holding the securities of companies identified by the U.S. government as "Communist Chinese military companies". It was upheld and strengthened by the Biden Administration with the issuance of Executive Order 14032 on June 3, 2021. 

Foreign Investment Screening

Foreign investment screening is the process of a foreign investment recipient’s government's identification, review, and if necessary, rejection of investments emanating from abroad. Foreign investment screening mechanisms have recently been created or expanded by a number of Western countries in order to give their governments greater control over national security-threatening and other potentially problematic foreign investments. 

Chapter 5 of the CCP Constitution (law on CCP presence in private companies)

Chapter V of the Chinese Communist Party's constitution states that "Primary Party organizations are formed in enterprises, rural areas, government departments, schools, scientific research institutes, communities, mass organizations, intermediaries, companies of the People's Liberation Army and other basic units, where there are at least three full Party members" and that "the primary Party organizations are militant bastions of the Party in the basic units of society, where all the Party's work proceeds and they serve as the foundation of its fighting capacity". In practice, this means that all larger enterprises have established internal Communist Party cells to ensure their legal and ideological compliance with the Chinese Communist Party, which holds veto power over the activities of all host companies. 

Civil-military Fusion

Civil-military fusion is a Chinese official policy promoting interaction between China's military and law enforcement and its research and development and commercial enterprise sectors. In effect, civil-military fusion is a mechanism ensuring Chinese state access to, and control over, all technological advancements and other innovations in the country for the purposes of defense procurement, whether they originate from public or private enterprises. 

Debt-trap Diplomacy

Debt-trap diplomacy refers to the Chinese practice of intentionally saddling foreign governments with excessive debt that cannot be repaid in order to gain political and economic leverage over these governments in the ensuing loan default negotiations and take ownership of a country's assets that served as collateral for the loan. The practice is particularly common in connection with Belt and Road Initiative-related infrastructure projects in developing countries.