Globalising Chinese Business Firms: Where are They Coming from, Where are They Headed?

farther afield are increasingly becoming part of what I call the Chinese commonwealth (Kao, 1993: 24; original italics). In his widely-read Harvard Business Review article, Professor John Kao (1993) concluded that Chinese business and its "worldwide web " will become a major force in the global economy in the next millennium. Similarly, Joel Kotkin argued in Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy that by the early twenty-first century, "the Chinese global tribe likely will rank with the British-Americans and the Japanese as a driving force in transnational commerce " (Kotkin, 1992: 9). Despite the 1997/1998 Asian economic crisis, it appears that current thinking in global business reveals a serious reappraisal of the economic potential of Chinese business and its associated organisations and institutions. The Weberian thesis on the inherent limits to the growth of Chinese business and societies has been subject to fundamental challenges by recent studies (e.g. Hamilton, 1996a; Whyte, 1996; Olds and Yeung, 1999). Scholars of Chinese business begin to recognise the economic success of the "overseas Chinese"1 and t eir business firms in 1 The term "overseas Chinese " may be contentious to some scholars of ethnic Chinese who ar