China’s Outward Investment under “Hierarchical Steering” and “Grassroots Internationalisation”

The debate on China’s outward investment largely focuses on its determinants: enterprises’ interests and the role of the Chinese state. However, what these approaches often tend to ignore is that China is not a unitary outward-investing country. Instead, some Chinese provinces have been able to become the major drivers of China’s outward investment and the investment outflows of these provinces emerge out of locality-unique contexts. This research looks at path-dependencies and encapsulates different provincial internationalisation trajectories to advance our understanding of China’s overseas engagement. In investigating two “success stories” of provinces with high investment outflows, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, two different forms of provincial internationalisation based on locality-unique political, economic, and social conditions are detailed. While investment outflows from both provinces were facilitated by cultures of local manufacturing industries, their internationalisation paths are conceptualised as either “hierarchical steering” or “grassroots internationalisation.”