The Belt and Road Initiative as a Path for Chinese Tech Company Expansion

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a rising global economic and technological power. Many scholars argue that the PRC increasingly projects its influence abroad through vehicles such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While the direct economic, political, and cultural impacts of the BRI have been explored extensively -and even demonstrated causally by some authors -prior work has not focused on the impacts of BRI investment on the expansion strategies of Chinese technology companies. In this study, we seek to determine whether Chinese technology companies are disproportionately embedded in countries that receive more BRI investment from China. We measured the embeddedness for seven major Chinese technology companies in ten randomly selected BRI beneficiary countries, as well as the United States. We hypothesized that countries which receive more BRI investment from China are more likely to have a higher score for Chinese tech company embeddedness. Surprisingly, we found no correlation between a country’s index of debt to China and average embeddedness score. This finding suggests that Chinese tech companies may not use BRI investment in a country as a signal to embed in that country. Future work should expand this analysis to a greater selection of countries and utilize year-disaggregated data.

Read the full paper in Studies in Chinese Learning and Teaching Issue 6.