This book studied under which conditions the EU and its Member States influence the accountability of transnational corporations that are based in developing and emerging states for their involvement in human rights violations. Five conclusions are drawn. First, there are identifiable corporate concerns about the competitive threat of such corporations. They form a barrier to strengthening the accountability of EU-based corporations. Second, regulation has been adopted only when the ‘perceived interests’ in the EU and its Member States outweigh these concerns. Such interests are vastly different at the EU level and Member State level. Third, regulators have tried to minimise the impact on the competitiveness of their corporations by ‘extending’ their human rights regulations internationally. Fourth, bilateral agreements contain obligations relating to human rights and can serve to contribute to the creation of a ‘thick’ transnational stakeholder consensus. Local litigation is an important element in this process. Finally, there are valuable options to bring cases against corporations from developing and emerging states in EU Member States courts.

This chapter moves beyond individual corporations and corporate types to examine the broader sociopolitical system in China. It focuses on the "fragmented authoritarianism" of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), outlining the main causes of fragmentation, including corruption, factionalism, autonomy of state-owned enterprises, local government self-interest, private firm co-optation of government actors, and internal contradictions within the CCP's own ideology. This fragmentation prevents the CCP from exercising consistent control over corporations and the broader society, leading to a much more complex and diverse corporate-political ecosystem than imagined by many Western commentators.