The continuous growth of China’s economy in the past decades has drawn the world’s
attention. In the meanwhile, Chinese firms, also supported by the government policy,
are seeking international markets by going abroad. However, due to the special characteristic
of China economy, e.g., transiting from planned to market economy, Chinese
firms have experienced a different path (to most of western countries) in their internationalization.
In this thesis, we investigate how Chinese firms, as latecomers from an
emerging market, to integrate into the global market during the transitional period, explore
the entry modes that Chinese firms have applied to, and look into the fundamental
reasons for the phenomena.

In this thesis, we discuss two different paths of internationalization for Chinese firms.
The first one is the internationalization of staying at home market, which was the initial
stage of internationalization. The other is going the global, which has taken place after
many years’ experience accumulation through the internalization at home market. We
have investigated the entry modes: the firms’ staying at home market is mainly through
contract mode and investment mode, e.g., by contracting productions with foreign partners,
by acquiring the advanced technologies, and by attracting inflow foreign direct
investments; the firms’ going global is mainly through export and investment, such as
product export, merging & acquisition, and Greenfield investment.

In this thesis, we further investigate the reasons of the special internationalization paths
using the qualitative data. We discuss it from macro-, meso-, and micro-perspective,
and make the following conclusions: 1) the transition and governance of a planned
economy to a market economy is the foundation of Chinese firms’ internationalization;
2) institutional and governmental policy is another other important factors that affects
the firms’ internationalization; 3) As the latecomers, applying the catch up stratigies
drives Chinese firms’ internalization at both domestic and global markets.