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The recent emergence of Chinese digital platform firms, whose size rivals that of the US platform giants, has attracted much popular interest. Given the size and increasing technical sophistication of these firms, there has been increasing interest in whether they have developed sufficient capacities and resources to become global-class competitors for the reigning US platform giants. The authors assembled a database of all overseas operations of the Chinese platform firms. Nine of them have foreign operations, with Tencent and Alibaba being the most important offshore investors. The authors describe the globalization patterns of these firms and analyze the strengths and obstacles to their globalization. Their globalization has proceeded on a number of vectors: first, these firms, with a few exceptions, when they have global strategies, have largely invested in firms with useful technology or content. One common strategy has been to follow Chinese customers abroad. Second, Chinese firms have made equity investments in a number of foreign Internet firms. And yet, in nearly all foreign markets, Chinese websites and apps still trail the US firms in market share and salience. Finally, Chinese investments are concentrated in proximate countries. Chinese platform firms, while having some state-of-the-art technologies, have a far smaller foreign presence than their US competitors do. Finally, the authors consider the implications of their research for discussions of whether emerging nation multinational firms require new theories for explaining their globalization.

This chapter critically evaluates whether football can attain recognition as a national sport in China. Article No. 11, released by the Chinese government in 2015, aimed to develop a new national strategy centralised on the sport of football to foster consumption and enhance national soft power. Consequently, this also means encouraging Chinese football fans to support the national football team. Comparing the significance of local football clubs and the national football team to Chinese football fans is deemed meaningless and unable to generate useful information to comprehend Chinese people's attitudes towards local and national communities. Through literature comparisons with established Chinese national sports such as Chinese martial arts, badminton and table tennis, the discussion reveals that football currently falls short of meeting the general criteria of invention and popularity to be considered a Chinese national sport. In the specific Chinese context, it also proves that football fails to meet the criterion of politics, hindering its identification as a national sport. Consequently, the chapter rebuts the assumption and advocates for the validity of comparing how fans assess their fandom for local and national football teams.

Socially responsible investing (SRI) funds depart from mainstream finance by incorporating environmental, social, and governance considerations, but their success varies across regions. By using a historical comparative case design, we identify an empirically puzzling phenomenon in China: despite an initially favorable resource environment and the presence of socially skilled institutional entrepreneurs, SRI wanes over time in Hong Kong but survives in Mainland China where initial resource endowments and actors’ social skills were inferior. By comparing four periods of SRI development, we reveal how state sustainable development policies, a change in the institutional context, led unintentionally to a shared orientation and a public pool of resources, which sustained the SRI niche. Our paper contributes to research on market emergence, institutional change, and cultural entrepreneurship.