5. Concluding Remarks

China’s rise as a global economic power has transformed the legal treatment of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in trade and investment agreements. This book demonstrates how the United States, the European Union, and Japan shifted from defining SOEs under a governmental authority framework to a stricter ownership and control model. This shift is presented as a strategic recalibration of international economic governance, motivated by concerns over Chinese SOEs’ global expansion, market distortions, and national security risks. The analysis highlights that traditional criteria proved inadequate for Chinese firms, which often operate under indirect state influence. As a result, major economies institutionalized new legal rules aimed at constraining China’s state-capitalist model. This book makes a key contribution by mapping SOE definitions into three legal approaches — governmental authority, ownership and control, and functional — providing the first systematic foundation for future scholarship. It shows that the ownership and control framework gained dominance not because of inherent superiority but because of its effectiveness in targeting Chinese SOEs, particularly after China’s WTO accession. This book also indicates that this framework might disproportionately affect the Global South by limiting long-standing industrialization tools. It also exposes a paradox: while constraining foreign SOEs, advanced economies simultaneously expand state intervention domestically. This reveals SOE regulation as deeply geopolitical, shaping sovereignty, economic governance, and multilateralism. Finally, this book opens new avenues of research on state capitalism, inequality, and the domestic application of these rules.