Emerging Dragons: How Do Chinese Companies Expand Overseas?

Abstract

The global presence of Chinese companies has strengthened since China initiated the “Going Global” strategy in 1999, joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 (Agarwal & Wu, 2004), and began to promote the “Belt and Road Initiate” (BRI) in 2013. The overseas expansion of Chinese companies has become a note- worthy dimension to China’s integration into the global economy. The rapid inter- nationalization of such companies has also elicited high levels of interest among managers and academics (Hoskisson et al., 2000; Child & Rodrigues, 2005; Alon et al., 2018). The term “dragon” and “dragon multinationals” are often used as met- aphors for internationalizing Chinese companies because of their rapid growth and great potential in the future as latecomers from an emerging economy in the Asia- Pacific region (Tran et al., 2013; Mathews, 2017). For instance, Haier Group, a home appliance company that has gained global leadership, is described as a “hid- den dragon” (Zeng & Williamson, 2003). Similarly, low-cost companies in cluster markets that have achieved global dominance, such as the Yiwu Commodity Market are referred to as “manufacturing dragons” or “exporting dragons” (Zeng &