I'd find that hard to believe. I'd bet a very big hunk is from western companies setting up facilities to outsource production. That's what all the companies I've worked for are doing. Open it up there, Shut it down here. Maybe you do it as you make changes to products, or maybe you do it as you become desperate when your competitors do, or maybe you do it when you go bankrupt trying to make things here and somebody buys your equpment at the auction and ships it to China for their joint venture. Its the world of globalization. Better figure a way to be selling what China buys and make a profit from it.
Hong Kong was the biggest investor in the 1980s. During that time, Hong Kong lost it's manufacturing to China, most companies in the manufacturing industries closed their factories in Hong Kong and moved to China. Same thing happened to Taiwan, but I do not know to what extent. Those factories would have to bring in machineries, build factories and production lines, those are considered as investments. Remember, HK and Taiwan was big in electronics components and OEM assembly, those production lines are very captial intensive. Same for the Printing, Plastic, and Metal Industry. My father and all but one uncle were running business in the watch industry, 3 out of 4 factories moved to China.
You are right, but most of them don't own the factories directly, they buy from factories owned by Hong Kong Chinese, Taiwan Chinese or the local (Mainland Chinese). The siutation is changing in the last few years.
For component parts supplies, I'd agree, but most of the western companies I worked for seemed to get into joint ventures there with local partners to do the assembly, etc. Most of my info is Automotive parts related. At least that was the way it seemed to me. Sounds like your knowledge is more first hand, which generally is more reliable.
I'm pretty sure that the way to verify this, though i'm sure how to look it up, would be to look at FDI (foreign direct investment) numbers and identify where they are coming from. here it is by country. no info on nationality of country where FDI is from though. http://www.fdi.gov.cn/pub/FDI_EN/Statistics/Home News/t20060906_61679.htm
Nonsense. Can not be more than 50%, should be even much lower. It's true a significant number of joint-ventures or foreign investment ventures are founded by overseas Chinese but usually they are small-scale enterprises. Major part of foreign investments are from multinational corporations in Western Countries and Janan (including almost all SP 500 corporations). I suspect Jim Rodgers got this 80% number simply by counting those registered foreign invested companies headed by people with a Chinese name, but he didn't bother to check the amount of investment in each firm. What a dumb ass !