Litigation is a complex matter, calling for more sophisticated inquiries than what can be measured by a binary variable, namely, whether or not a Chinese company had experienced US lawsuits. This dichotomy glosses over crucial aspects of Chinese companies’ interactions with the US adjudicatory system. For instance, while prominent Chinese companies such as Huawei have litigated hundreds of lawsuits in the United States, most others were involved in no more than a few cases. However, the coding in Chapter 4 grouped them together in terms of US litigation experience. In fact, those that litigate infrequently may have more in common with Chinese companies that have managed to avoid US lawsuits altogether than prominent repeat players. To unveil important information lost from collecting and coding the data as a binary variable and to ameliorate possible biases in survey data concerning sensitive topics, this chapter explores a hand-collected objective dataset: federal lawsuits involving Chinese companies. It also presents three detailed case studies to demonstrate how Chinese companies with direct investments in the United States navigate the complex host-state legal system. These case studies (i.e., Lenovo, Huawei, and Fuyao Glass) will revisit the hypotheses and findings of prior chapters.

This chapter examines the scope of federal judicial power. Chapter III of the Australian Constitution sets out a comprehensive regime for the exercise of federal judicial power. This means that federal judicial power can be exercised only in the way prescribed by Chapter III. There is no comprehensive definition of ‘judicial power’, although there are some functions that are always judicial in nature and some functions that are never judicial in nature. Federal jurisdiction – that is, the exercise of federal judicial power – is limited to the subject-matters set out sections 75 and 76 of the Constitution and also limited to ‘matters’ respecting those subject-matters.