As their operations are less visible, it is likely that their outward FDI, and therefore China’s total, is understated. Fears of Chinese overseas investment, as of Japanese and South Korean investment in the 1980s and 1990s – and, before that, of the great post-war U.S. multinationals, which the French writer Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber dubbed “le défi américain” in the 1960s – are misplaced.