Chinese state firms are expected not only to profit but also to serve state interests. But the Chinese state is fragmented: border provinces are taking on an expanded role in China's global expansion and a broad range of firm activities could be defined as patriotic contributions. Through the case of Yunnan State Farms (YSF), a province-level state-owned enterprise, this article explores how state firms interpret and navigate multiple state interests while also pursuing profit. The firm's ability to profit depends on balancing the demands and support of different Chinese state actors while depicting itself as a development partner to the Lao state and a contributor to Sino-Lao diplomatic relations and border region stability. This case thus shows that, instead of YSF's behaviour being directed by the state, the firm exercises considerable latitude in defining its contributions to state interests through the expansion of rubber production as a driver of development.

This article highlights the centrality of family and gender in Chinese factories in Africa through a case study of Chinese garment production in Newcastle, South Africa. The data used in the article were collected through field research in 2015 and 2016 and several follow-up interviews in 2020 and 2021. The study presents a twofold argument. First, Chinese garment firms in Newcastle can be characterized as “translocal” family firms. Unlike Chinese state enterprises and large transnational companies, these translocal family firms represent a particular kind of private capital that prioritizes a diversified source of income and that is economically embedded but less concessionary to labour pressures. Second, the racial and class encounters between Chinese employers and African women workers are constructed and contested through gender. While Chinese employers attempt to impose racial hierarchy and increase production, Zulu women workers respond to managerial control and demands in creative and gendered ways.

The recent two-decade-long march of “global China” – manifested as outward flows of investment, loans, infrastructure, migrants, media, cultural programmes and international and civil society engagement – has left sweeping but variegated footprints in many parts of the world. From “going out,” officially announced in the year 2000, to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Made in China 2025, and from the developing world to advanced industrialized democracies, state-endorsed campaigns are but tips of a much more momentous iceberg. Numerous Chinese citizens and private corporations have also participated in a global search for employment, business, investment and educational and emigration opportunities. International reactions to the increasingly ubiquitous presence of China and the Chinese people in almost every corner of the world have evolved from a mixture of anxiety and hope to a more explicitly critical backlash. Terms such as “sharp power,” “debt-trap diplomacy” and the “new Cold War” bespeak the West's dominant perception today of China as a threat to be contained.

Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has intensified efforts to control the political life of the diaspora by recruiting proxies, or qiaoling 侨领, from the extraterritorial population for community-based governance. This paper examines the efficacy of this co-optive strategy by investigating its ramifications in Lao Chinese business communities. Following a group of qiaoling in Vientiane through qualitative fieldwork, I reveal how these individuals are self-motivated to perform patriotism by the desire to earn symbolic recognition. Their fame and prestige as qiaoling are critical for their material accumulation in the often-fraudulent business of intermediation for Chinese bureaucrats and investors. As such, while contributing to realigning the political allegiance of the diaspora, qiaoling simultaneously reshape the ongoing expansion of Chinese capitalism in ways that diverge from Beijing's developmental agenda. This finding complicates the long-held imaginary of an autonomous state–diaspora synergy in post-socialist China.