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Recent legislation in Europe and North America encourages women’s participation in corporate boards based on the belief that gender-diversified boards contribute positively to firm performance and increased competitiveness. Contrary to the West, the women’s participation rate in business has been traditionally high in China. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether gender-diverse corporate boards of Chinese automotive firms perform better financially than gender-homogeneous boards.

By drawing on data from the Chinese Government and Bloomberg, the authors compare and analyze the differences in financial performance (return on equity, asset growth, sales growth) and risk behavior (debt risk, R&D expenditure) of Chinese automotive firms with and without women on their corporate board.

There is significant evidence that firms with women on the board perform better across all three categories, with the exception of return on equity, for which they found no significant differences among the analyzed firms.

While women’s participation in corporate boards in China is low, the results of this study suggest to policy makers and firms alike to implement measures that support gender-diversified boards in order to take advantage of their potential to increase corporate performance.

So far, the performance of corporate boards of countries with a traditionally high share of female participation in the workforce has rarely been analyzed. Research focusing on the Chinese automotive industry is new and underrepresented, although China is the largest automotive market worldwide and a key industry of the domestic economy. This investigation contributes to the literature stream on board diversity in as well as to industry-related studies. With the example of the Chinese automotive industry, it provides empirical evidence of better performance of firms with gender-diversified boards within the categories tested.

This paper aims to consolidate prior research from policy and management domains to identify stages in China's technological learning within the imitation paradigm during 1949‐2001, focusing on changes in the government's strategic priorities and policies and the nature, mode and sources of technological learning, then to contrast the firm and institutional features that have emerged under the imitation paradigm with those defining the emerging creation paradigm. The analysis leads to clear implications for both policy and management for the Chinese firms to make this transition and compete in higher value‐added global industries.

An overview and conceptual paper based on observations and literature review.

This paper derives a parsimonious set of four dimensions to demarcate five stages in the evolution of China's technological learning: the government's strategic priority, nature of technology, the mode and the source of learning. It identifies six factors acting as significant impediments to Chinese firms' transition from imitation to creation.

In the first place, this paper provides managerial implications which are of great interest to Chinese practicing managers to manage their firms' transition from imitation to creation; second, the policy imperatives highlighted by this paper will help Chinese policymakers to design appropriate incentive mechanisms to enable Chinese firms to build up their competitiveness within the creation paradigm and thereby become global competitors. Meanwhile, this paper provides a systematic analysis on the evolution of China's technology development. This five stage‐based framework will help practicing managers in China understand whether, which and when Chinese firms can make the transition necessary to compete based on the creation of proprietary resources and capabilities.

This paper aims to quest the strategies and paths of Chinese automobile firms for being world class. It analyzes their strengths and potentials in comparison with the development experience of the global examples and provides policy recommendations for cultivating world-class automobile firms.

The authors apply the analytic hierarchy process method to evaluate the competitiveness of automobile firms with multiple indicators.

The evaluation results suggest that Chinese automobile firms still lagged behind their world-class peers. Especially, Chinese domestic firms developed unevenly so that they could not make progress in the core parametric dimensions. Nevertheless, Chinese firms could achieve world class, at least in some niche segments, supported by its accumulated technological capacity and tremendous market size.

This research is the first scholarly work to evaluate the competitiveness of Chinese automobile firms and provides insightful comments on its industrial policies in the automobile industry. This may be valuable for policymaking in the automobile sector of China and other developing economies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the internationalization of Chinese new global players through innovation-oriented Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As).

The paper combines the analysis of East-Asian and Chinese multinationals’ international expansion within international business (IB) and innovation domains, with the “latecomer” perspective. It is a conceptual contribution, based on the role of local institutions and firm’s absorptive capacity. A theoretical framework is developed, and further elucidated with two illustrative cases of Chinese M&As abroad in the automotive sector. Implications for theoretical development and practical application are then drawn.

Chinese firms’ M&As abroad have become one of the preferential modes of developing innovation capabilities. The success of these endeavors is argued to be the result of a combination of a strong push from government industrial policies, along with significant internal knowledge assimilation and transformation capabilities.

The paper extends IB literature integrating the latecomer firms’ perspective within a novel conceptual framework, which adds to the traditional resource-based arguments about incumbent MNEs asset and knowledge-seeking internationalization modes, as well as institutional and multi-dimensional absorptive capacity perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the strategy for latecomers in large developing countries under globalization. The relationship between innovation and learning is deeply studied.

The paper formulates an in‐depth case study on the digital video player industry through consideration of government documents, reports, and research papers; intensive interviews; and questionnaire study.

The firms in developing countries might be able to innovate before they can match the firms in advanced countries in technological capabilities, and innovation is the most effective way of learning. The firms can achieve competitive advantage owing to the effect of the national value network, the nature of architectural technology, and the relationships between them in product development. The national market should be deliberately taken as a strategic asset for the technological learning and latecomers should learn how to exploit the advantage of globalization.

The paper tries to understand how firms in developing countries conduct learning by innovating to build their competitive advantages.

This paper aims to offer insight into how strategies within the accounting profession, which has been becoming more global, might be changed by the recent outbreak of the Second Cold War between the West and the Rest of the World.

We explore the strategies of those who called themselves “Confucian accountants” in China, a country which has recently discouraged its state-owned enterprises from using the services of the Big 4. We do this by employing qualitative research methods, including reflexive photo interviews, in which Big-4 accountants, recognised as the most Westernised accounting actors in China, and Confucian accountants are asked to take and explain photographs representing their professional lives. Bourdieu’s notions of “economy of practices” and “vision-of-division strategy” are drawn upon to understand who the Confucian accountants are and what they do strategically in their pursuit of a higher revenue stream and improved social standing in the Chinese social space.

The homegrown Confucian accountants share cultural-cognitive characteristics with neighbouring social actors, such as their clients and government officials, who have been inculcated with Confucianism and the state’s cultural confidence policy in pursuit of a “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics”. Those accountants try to enhance their social standing and revenue stream by strategically demonstrating their difference from Big-4 accountants. For this purpose, they wear Confucian clothes, have Confucian props in their office, employ Confucian phrases in their everyday conversations, use Confucian business cards and construct and maintain guanxi with government officials and clients.

This paper is the first attempt to explore Confucian accountants’ strategies for increasing their revenue and social standing at the start of the Second Cold War.

From an agency perspective, the authors investigate whether family ownership and control configurations are systematically associated with a firm's choice of auditor and audit fees. Agency theory is an economic theory that purposes the existence of a contract between two parties, principals and agents. Auditor choice and audit fees by family firms provide interesting insights given the unique nature of the agency problems faced by such firms.

The authors employ Big-4 auditors (PWC, KPMG, E&Y and Deloitte) as a proxy for high quality auditor (Big N) for the auditor choice model. For the audit fee model, the dependent variable is the natural logarithm of audit fees (LnAF). The authors use two measures for family firm as explanatory variables: (1) a dummy variable (FAM_Control), which equals one if the firm is classified as a family firm and (2) FAM_Ownership, which is an indicator variable with a value of one if a firm has family members who hold CEO position, occupy board seats, or hold at least 10% of the firm's equity. Data of Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2021 are used. The authors adopt the Heckman (1979) two-stage model to mitigate the potential endogeneity issue involved in the selection of Big-N auditors.

The findings suggest that compared with non-family firms, Chinese family firms have a less tendency to employ Big-4 auditors due to less severe agency problems between owners and managers. Additionally, Chinese family firms sustain higher audit fees than non-family firms. Similar to the prior literature, however, Chinese family firms audited by Big-4 auditors incur lower audit fees than family firms audited by non-Big-4 auditors in this study. In contrast to young-family firms, old-family firms are less likely to pick top-tier auditors and sustain lower audit fees. Consistent and robust results are found from endogeneity tests and sensitivity analyses.

The empirical evidence provides a unique insight, for accounting practitioners, policymakers, family owners and other capital market participants concerning the diverse effects of various family ownership and control features on selecting high-quality auditors and audit fees. This study advances the understanding, showing that a lower demand for audit quality occurs in Chinese family firms as they encounter less severe Type I agency problems. However, the more severe Type II agency problems in Chinese family firms sustain higher audit fees due to higher audit risk and greater audit effort.

Firms in different countries operate in different business environments and prepare financial statements following, by necessity, their own countries' accounting standards. Benchmarks for assessing financial ratios of firms in different countries are likely to be different. In conducting financial ratio analyses, each country's unique cultural, business, financial, and regulatory characteristics have to be taken into consideration, for these external factors may exert significant effects on measurements of financial data. This study aims to investigate challenges in comparing financial ratios between Japanese firms and Chinese firms.

This study compares ten major financial ratios of 75 Chinese firms with financial ratios of 75 matched sample Japanese firms to determine if a common benchmark for each of the financial ratios can be applied to firms in both countries.

The results show significant differences in liquidity, solvency, and activity ratios between firms from these two countries. Further examination of differences in accounting standards, economic, and institutional environments between these two countries suggests that these external factors have significant effects on financial ratios and may have contributed to the observed differences.

This study is among the first to investigate the comparability of ratios between Japanese firms and Chinese firms to uncover potential challenges and warn investors of such challenges.

This study aims to explore the audit quality supplied by the Big 4, large indigenous Chinese (LIC) and five largest second-tier international network (Tier 2) audit firms in China during the second phase of their audit market development.

Ordinary least squares regression is used on an archival sample of firm-year observations. Endogeneity and self-selection bias are addressed by creating a propensity score matched sample and using two-stage regression with the inverse Mills’ ratio.

Strong evidence is found for higher levels of actual audit quality for the Big 4 relative to both LIC and Tier 2 audit firms. Weak evidence is found regarding the audit quality superiority of Tier 2 relative to LIC audit firms. Furthermore, the actual audit quality differential between the Big 4 relative to the LIC and Tier 2 firms widens after adopting International Financial Reporting Standards, which is contrary to the intention of Chinese regulators.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first known empirical study to trisect Big N and non-Big N audit firm proxies into the Big 4, LIC and Tier 2. Currently, only qualitative studies have fully appreciated the unique regulatory roles of these three firm structures in developing China’s audit market, which reflect tensions between reliance on foreign expertise and self-determination. In addition, this study adds to the ongoing global dialogue on Tier 2 as an alternative to the Big 4 and the benefits of international accounting network membership.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and rank supply chain disruption causes for Western buying firms in the Chinese market; to identify supplier-relationship-specific mitigation strategies to avoid and resist such disruptions; and to develop and propose a framework of relational supply chain disruption management with Chinese suppliers.

Two group exercises with 42 representatives from Western manufacturing buying firms and nine in-depth interviews were conducted. The group exercises applied the nominal group technique.

The authors identified and ranked 22 disruption causes in China for Western buying firms. Evaluating the five most urgent causes, 43 mitigation strategies could be identified that build on implementing strategic relationships with Chinese suppliers. A framework of relational supply chain disruption management for Western buying firms was developed with six propositions on primary constructs, mediators, and moderators, highlighting guanxi as a fundamental construct of relations within the Chinese culture.

The findings contribute to theory development at the intersection of risk management and culture. Quantitative testing of the proposed relationships in the framework is needed to derive more reliable conclusions.

The study depicts how cultural differences between Chinese suppliers and Western buyers influence relational supply chain disruption management strategies. Using the study findings, managers of Western buying firms are informed regarding the most pressing disruption causes in the Chinese market and the value and strategic use of Chinese-supplier relationships.

The study provides a valuable contribution to the scant body of literature on disruption management in supply chains with Chinese suppliers. It contributes to our understanding of a successful risk management in the presence of cultural differences.