Beyond a Revisionist Turn: Networks, State and the Changing Dynamics of Diasporic Chinese Entrepreneurship

This article identifies and critically assesses the revisionist literature on diasporic Chinese business and entrepreneurship that has emerged over the past decade. Apart from analysing key themes in this literature (including the deconstruction and demystification of a romance of ethnic Chinese business, construction of the internal structures of Chinese businesses, integration of broader theoretical conceptualisations and micro-level empirical analyses and more systematic incorporation of China into diasporic Chinese entrepreneurship studies), it pinpoints some of the pitfalls associated with revisionist approaches. This article also considers the possibilities of going beyond the revisionist arguments and future research agendas by using some small empirical cases from Singapore and Japan to underscore the multi-layered interplay between transnational Chinese networks and the state. It can be argued that this interaction has been significantly shaped by the dynamic rise of China and the rapid economic regionalisation in the Asia Pacific, which reinforce the transnationalising of embedded networks and facilitate the emergence of a new breed of transnational Chinese entrepreneurship.