Previous studies have found that media coverage of a firm's corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) often delays or blocks the completion of a cross-border acquisition when the acquiror is a multinational enterprise (MNE) from an emerging market. Drawing from the attention-based view, we argue that the effects of Chinese MNEs’ CSiR on deal completion vary depending on several contextual factors, as these factors garner more attention by making the deals more salient to stakeholders. Using a sample of cross-border acquisitions by Chinese MNEs from 2013 to 2020, we find that CSiR media coverage per se does not decrease the likelihood of a deal's completion. However, consistent with attention-based arguments, we find that CSiR media coverage negatively affects the deal's completion when the acquirors are state-owned enterprises and when the target country has high institutional quality. Our findings enhance our understanding of the effects of CSiR on cross-border acquisitions by highlighting the moderating roles of contextual factors related to stakeholder attention. Thus, it is important for MNEs to recognize the boundary conditions that may influence the potential sanctions from local stakeholders. Based on these findings, this study contributes to the literature on CSiR, cross-border acquisitions, and stakeholder attention.

The Digital Silk Road (DSR) is usually described as the digital component of the Belt and Road Initiative that is reshaping the digital world order. Most existing research is concerned with the possible long-term consequences of the DSR rather than on what the DSR encompasses, how it developed and how it has changed since it was announced in 2015. We address this gap by reconstructing the origins of the DSR within China, with a focus on both rhetoric and concrete plans as they developed between central and provincial actors. We collected and analysed a corpus of 31 national and 130 provincial DSR-related plans. In contrast to prevailing views of the DSR as a unified, outward-facing strategy, we show that after an initial surge of related documents, the central government ceased to discuss the DSR in a meaningful way. Provincial governments then appropriated its rhetoric to legitimize their own digitization agendas, including upgrading infrastructure in poorer provinces and remaining plugged into export markets for those with an IT industry. Rather than reshaping the digital world order, the DSR has been appropriated by some provincial governments to attempt, mostly unsuccessfully, to shore up their own digital ambitions.

This article highlights CSR disclosure as a strategic response of Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs) to the social risk they face in host countries. Deviating from prior research that aims to directly measure social risk, we offer a new approach to isolate the effect of social risk by leveraging China's Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) as the research context, under which Chinese MNEs are largely protected from political risk in membership countries but are exposed to substantial social risk from local nongovernment stakeholders. Results from difference-in-differences analyses show that after the enactment of the BRI, Chinese MNEs investing in BRI countries significantly increases their likelihood of CSR disclosure than that of their counterparts investing in non-BRI countries. Further, such effects are more pronounced for state-owned MNEs and MNEs in natural resource industries. This research enriches the international business literature on the relationship between political risk and social risk, and that between corporate political actions and corporate social responsibility.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) mobilizes Chinese construction and investment in developing countries. Ethiopia is Africa's “model” BRI country, due to China's elaborate infrastructure financing and building and its many manufacturing enterprises. Based on field and documentary research, we examine the BRI's meaning, as understood from the perspective of Ethiopia, in comparison to many China-oriented studies. We find that it is an informal Chinese state promise that even when capital flows from China to non-BRI states are curbed, flows to BRI states will be encouraged, and that Ethiopia exercises agency in leveraging the BRI for its development agenda. Using a comprehensive data set, we show that Chinese investment has become even more important in Ethiopia with the BRI and that neither COVID-19 nor Ethiopia's civil war has reversed that trend. We also discuss local criticisms of Chinese activities, which challenge the wholly positive view of the BRI, but do not affirm the US-generated negative narrative.

This article concentrates on four Chinese blockbuster movies, Wolf Warrior (2015), Operation Mekong (2016), Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) and Operation Red Sea (2018), referring to them collectively as the “wolf warrior cycle” on the basis of their shared themes of China's overseas military actions. To understand why films addressing this topic have emerged since the mid-2010s, the article employs a critical political economy approach and situates the wolf warrior cycle in China's transforming foreign policies. It argues that the Belt and Road Initiative, one of the state's prominent foreign policies and global strategies in this period, played a crucial role in shaping the production of the wolf warrior cycle films under a trend of the politicization of commercial blockbusters in the Chinese film industry. In turn, these films contributed to the formation of the “wolf warrior diplomacy” image by reinforcing the proactiveness of China's diplomacy and nationalistic stereotypes in Chinese society towards international relations.

In recent years, domestic tourism into the Xinjiang region of China has grown rapidly. Government officials view tourism as a source of both economic capital and social stability, presenting a normalcy that makes it attractive for investment. There are two paradoxes to Xinjiang tourism. According to most literature, a massive military presence should deter tourists, but numbers have continued to grow in the militarized Xinjiang region. Second, the cultural “otherness” of Xinjiang is a big draw to the region, yet this culture is being suppressed by state policies to contain Islam. Using a dataset of Han Chinese travel diaries, I look at how narrated tourist experiences of Xinjiang justify policing, how ethnic boundaries are reinforced by practices in both transportation and personal interaction, and how state policies influence Chinese travellers’ views on the authenticity of their experience. While bodily assurances of security substantiate political legitimacy, tourists resist the bureaucratic management of sites, allowing for critiques focused almost exclusively on aesthetic taste.

The nexus between China's human and economic presence abroad and its security policy is increasingly important. Within this nexus, this study statistically explores whether and to what extent Chinese contractors reduce the number of Chinese nationals they send to work in North Africa, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa when the security situation in host states worsens. We find no significant evidence that either warnings from Chinese embassies and consulates to leave host countries or expert perceptions of host stability influence the number of Chinese workers. Worker numbers appear to decrease significantly only in the aftermath of large-scale violent events. These findings suggest that Chinese companies are relatively acceptant of security risks and uncertainties, despite the decade-long regulatory efforts of the Chinese government to make them more security-conscious overseas and, thus, to reduce pressure to use diplomatically and economically expensive military means for their protection.

Philosemitism – the idealization of Jews and Israel – and Chinese-Jewish history function as a platform of soft power for growing China–Israel relations and as a means to bolster Chinese nationalism. Given the Chinese Communist Party's current positioning of China as a globally dominant power as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, this article re-examines the contemporary incarnation of philosemitism in China as part of a civilizationist narrative designed to position China as globally central and superior. This not only places heavy emphasis upon Jewish racial stereotypes and erases genuine historical Jewish voices but it also ignores evidence of anti-Semitic beliefs in China.