Legal Brokers of Chinese Investment in Cambodia: Compliance Between Contract and Culture

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Erie, Matthew S.; Bodurtha, Molly; Young, Sokphea
• 署名单位: University of Oxford; Columbia University; University of London; Queen Mary University London
• 刊物名称: REGULATION & GOVERNANCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1748-5983
• DOI: 10.1111/rego.70021
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: corporate lawyers; LAW; strategies; guanxi

摘要

In conventional understandings of compliance, lawyers and compliance officers internalize compliance within corporations. Complicating this model, this article argues that compliance professionals may occupy a Janus-faced role between informality and formality. We use the case of legal brokers of Chinese investment in Cambodia as our empirical testing ground. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Cambodia from 2019 to 2022, we find that legal brokers between Chinese investors and Cambodian counterparties are a vital feature of the market converting illicit into lawful capital. Our findings have implications for not just compliance professionals but also market entry, sustainable development, anti-bribery, and rule of law. By drawing on theoretical literature including relational contract and guanxixue (the study of guanxi or social ties), we scale up our findings to conclude that a focus on legal brokers reveals a social reality that may be more emblematic for most of the world than the existing model.