The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States recently gave the go-ahead to a Chinese acquisition in the U.S.: Citiking International, a Chinese-controlled investment fund, has been approved to acquire Albuquerque, New Mexico-based private jet-maker ONE Aviation. While Citiking's clearance, handled by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, is certainly good news in the M&A space, it's becoming increasingly rare.

In fact, the committee's hostility, despite its repeated denial that it targets Chinese deals, has all but killed off Chinese investment, at least when it comes to large deals. Statistics vary from organization to organization, but the shared overall message is that Chinese direct investment into the United States, once a key driver of global M&A activity, has dropped to its lowest point since the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

Research by Baker McKenzie and research firm Rhodium Group counted $4.5 billion worth of deals completed by Chinese investors in 2019. The largest of those transactions was a $2 billion deal that saw Chinese textile company Shandong Ruyi Group acquire Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries subsidiary Invista's textile unit. That deal was signed in 2017. Koch Industries sought the advice of Covington & Burling partner Mark Plotkin and got CFIUS to clear the deal in 2018. Another one of the larger deals, Chinese wind farm company Envision's $800 million acquisition of Nissan Motor's lithium-ion battery unit, Automotive Energy Supply, which has a plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, was announced in 2018. The sale was previously approved by CFIUS during Nissan's first attempt to sell it to a different Chinese investor. Transactions data compiled by Mergermarket and Refinitiv also showed that all the top China deals in 2019 were domestic deals, instead of outbound.