Yana was helped in finding the truth by Karlagash Mynzhassarova<\/strong> \u2014 a negotiator for whom China is both a profession and a part of her life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Karlagash’s first degree is in Chinese studies. She studied Chinese and English philology at the Abylai Khan Kazakh University of International Relations and World Languages. She spent one year studying on a grant in China, in Changchun \u2014 it was her first trip abroad. After university, Karlagash was invited into the oil and gas industry, where she worked for nine years in Aktau, after which the company sent her to Calgary to study project management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is where Mynzhassarova’s path into China began in the professional sense. Karlagash was invited to Shenzhen, where for several years she was secretary-general of an association tied to the Belt and Road Initiative, worked for a Chinese investment fund, and took part as an expert in mining and other international projects. In total she lived in Shenzhen for five years before the pandemic, and she describes this time as life inside the Chinese industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today Karlagash heads the Asian development division at one of Kazakhstan’s financial groups. Yet her role is not limited to knowing the language or interpreting: she is an international negotiator and adviser on working with Chinese investors. Karlagash helps the parties understand each other’s interests, vets potential partners, prepares negotiating teams for meetings, and eases the path to a decision \u2014 whatever that decision turns out to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to China’s Ministry of Commerce, in 2025 China’s outbound foreign direct investment reached<\/a> $174.38 billion, up 7.1% year on year, while Chinese companies channeled capital into 11,048 enterprises across 153 countries. Behind these figures lies a logic that Karlagash Mynzhassarova states outright: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe competitive environment inside the country has become so dense that companies are left with virtually no choice but to move beyond China’s borders.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n She puts it succinctly: if a company does not go overseas, it has no future. Since 2000, China has had an officially enshrined state strategy, \u00ab\u8d70\u51fa\u53bb\u00bb \u2014 \u201cGoing Out,\u201d which encourages the investment activity of Chinese companies. What Mynzhassarova describes as a practitioner’s personal observation is, quite literally, the country’s official economic policy<\/p>\n\n\n\n This same logic has a flip side \u2014 competition that becomes so excessive it turns from an incentive into a threat. A company that stays exclusively on the domestic market puts its own long-term strategy at risk. In China’s economic policy this phenomenon is called neijuan, or \u201cinvolution\u201d (\u5185\u5377) \u2014 excessive internal competition in which companies in a single sector simultaneously expand capacity, cut prices, and gradually erode their own profitability. In July 2025, the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee named the fight against involutionary competition one of its economic priorities, and Chinese officials and state media began speaking of it as a structural problem requiring state intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n China is often perceived as an economy where the state decides everything. State corporations are indeed prominent \u2014 in strategic industries and large international projects. But a significant share of the country’s employment, tax revenue, innovation, and GDP is provided by the private sector: 80% of urban employment, 50% of tax revenue, 70% of innovation, and 60% of China’s GDP. These proportions are well known to scholars of the Chinese economy: a similar formula, denoted \u201c56789,\u201d has featured<\/a> in the speeches of Chinese officials since 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is why today it is not only large state companies but private investors as well that are increasingly going abroad \u2014 largely because decisions in private structures are made faster and more flexibly. From Karlagash Mynzhassarova’s observations in her practice, this capital most often flows into a few areas:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not an exhaustive list of every sphere Chinese investment goes into, but rather what Mynzhassarova most often encounters in her own work. In Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, Chinese capital behaves in a similar way. In Ghana, for example, in May 2026 the company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt closed<\/a> a $210 million deal, fully acquiring Atlantic Lithium and gaining control of the Ewoyaa lithium project \u2014 and this is no longer a state corporation but a private company, one of those becoming ever more active in foreign markets. One region where this same logic is clearly visible is Central Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the Eurasian Development Bank, China’s accumulated foreign investment in the countries of Central Asia reached<\/a> $35.9 billion by mid-2025, growing one and a half times since 2020. At the same time, a shift has emerged from simply exporting raw materials toward processing them on site: in Kazakhstan this takes the form of building a copper smelter, in Kyrgyzstan \u2014 negotiations over lithium mining, and in Tajikistan \u2014 the construction of the first large iron-ore processing plant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These three projects illustrate a common shift: Chinese companies are increasingly interested not only in access to raw materials but also in processing them and building the accompanying infrastructure. The character of the negotiations that local partners will have to conduct is changing noticeably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chinese companies have the money, their interest in foreign markets is growing, and private business is playing an ever more visible role in this process. But the very phrase \u201cChinese investor\u201d lumps together very different structures: it may be a state corporation, a private industrial company, an investment fund, a bank, or an intermediary, and each has its own goals, its own authority, its own decision-making speed, and its own attitude toward risk. Who exactly will end up on the other side of the table, and why does the entire negotiating strategy depend on it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until recently it was mainly national companies<\/strong> that were visible in foreign markets, but in recent years private conglomerates <\/strong>have become noticeably more active \u2014 not out of cultural preference, but because decisions in private structures are made more flexibly and quickly. Researchers who have studied Chinese investment explain<\/a> this difference not by the nature of the business but by specific institutional mechanics: managers of state companies are more constrained by political accountability and by how a failed decision will affect their standing within the system, whereas a private company’s manager answers directly to the owners and can afford to act more boldly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Karlagash Mynzhassarova names two more types of investors \u2014 funds and financial institutions<\/strong>. They are set up differently. The largest state funds, such as China Investment Corporation, operate as a tool for long-term capital allocation with the task of maximizing risk-adjusted returns, and their sector preferences are built around the objectives of national strategy. In certain sectors \u2014 energy and metals, for example \u2014 such investments can also work as a way to hedge against risk, though that is not the only, nor necessarily the main, logic of the fund overall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Banks are more complex. When assessing individual projects, they may take into account not only the borrower’s commercial indicators but also the country’s strategic or foreign-policy objectives. Since 2017, Chinese investors on the whole have on average become noticeably more cautious and have shifted toward more modestly scaled projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trading and intermediary structures <\/strong>are simpler, but they cannot be reduced to a single pattern. Among them are professional intermediaries with real connections and authority, capable of carrying a deal through to a result. The risk arises from opacity: when it is unclear exactly how the intermediary is compensated, to whom they actually answer, and whether their interests align with those of the ultimate investor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Fig.](\"https:\/\/geoconversation.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ris.-1.-kadr-iz-podkasta-scaled.webp\")
<\/a>Karlagash Mynzhassarova: from China scholar to international negotiator<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Why Chinese capital is increasingly going abroad<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a>The Chinese investor \u2014 who exactly is across the table<\/h2>\n\n\n\n