This Special Issue aims to advance theoretical and empirical discussions on Chinese family businesses and entrepreneurial families by diving deep into them as contexts that challenge prevailing Western theories and as generative contexts for indigenous theorizing in family entrepreneurship. Scholarship has increasingly highlighted the importance of context in shaping entrepreneurial phenomena and emphasized entrepreneurship as a socially constructed process. Yet dominant frameworks in family business and family entrepreneurship—such as socioemotional wealth (SEW), agency theory, stewardship, and the resource-based view (RBV)—were largely developed in Western institutional and cultural environments characterized by individualism, contractual governance, and relatively liberal market economies. When these frameworks are applied to Chinese family enterprises, their underlying assumptions about self-interest, agency costs, governance logics, and resource valuation often prove misaligned, producing puzzling or contradictory findings.
Given Chinese firms' global importance, their distinctive development patterns are particularly salient in the current geopolitical context, where family enterprises sit at the center of international business while simultaneously adapting to uncertainties, trade frictions, and institutional turbulence. These dynamics underscore a critical theoretical challenge: do the concepts, relationships, and models embedded in Western theories hold when applied to Chinese family firms, or do they require reformulation?
This gap presents an opportunity for indigenous theorizing that takes the cultural, institutional, demographic, and geopolitical specificities of Chinese family enterprises as central explanatory mechanisms. Addressing this challenge is essential not only for advancing understanding of Chinese family enterprises, but also for broadening entrepreneurship and family business scholarship at individual, organizational, and institutional levels.
Chinese culture exerts profound yet often underexplored influence on entrepreneurial and organizational behaviors, shaping not only decision-making processes but also long-term strategic trajectories. Understanding Chinese culture amongst Chinese family entrepreneurship can lead to an understanding of counterintuitive business decisions. A refocus on families and practices provides opportunities to study cultural influence in-depth and provides more opportunities for indigenous theorization. Such contributions need to go beyond surface-level correlations to uncover the causal mechanisms through which cultural values, norms, and practices influence familial and business decisions.
Studies of family business succession often assume families select heirs to optimize competence, legitimacy, or continuity, aligning family goals with firm performance. In China, however, Confucian patriarchy redirects goals toward filial obligation and patrilineal continuity. The 'Fu Er Dai' stigma, commonly associating successors with overreliance on family wealth and a tendency to squander resources, undermines legitimacy irrespective of competence. The One-Child Policy eliminates sibling competition, making succession inevitable rather than strategic. These features reveal that family goals may be culturally prescribed and demographically constrained, rather than universally linked to specific dimensions.
Tradition is a central yet less focused concept in family business and entrepreneurship research, where family orientations interplay with business practices. Tradition, intertwined with Chinese culture, strongly impacts and leads to unique business behaviors and strategies. Chinese family firms frequently mobilize traditions, rituals, narratives, and historical legacies as resources, practicing 'innovation through tradition.' These resources derive value not from novelty but from cultural continuity, identity reinforcement, tradition, and legitimacy, expanding RBV assumptions about what constitutes valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources.
In Chinese family firms, Confucian role ethics and guanxi obligations often suppress overt opportunism while simultaneously creating new relational hazards—nepotism, reciprocal obligations, and political entanglement. However, such networks are complicated in their own right, combining several at times competing institutional logics, including familial, social, market, regional, national, and international. Decisions and strategies made by these family enterprises thus emerge not from contract enforcement but from navigating culturally-defined relational obligations.
Chinese family enterprises are entering a critical historical juncture. Legacies of privatization and the One-Child Policy have created unique generational dynamics, with many firms now navigating first-to-second generation transitions under conditions of social stigma and low succession success rates. At the same time, these enterprises operate amid escalating geopolitical tensions, rapid technological shifts, and intensifying institutional turbulence. These challenges make Chinese family firms not only economically significant but also theoretically generative, providing a natural laboratory for advancing new insights into entrepreneurial continuity, resilience, and adaptation.
This Special Issue calls for research that goes beyond descriptive accounts to theorize the causal processes shaping Chinese family enterprises. By foregrounding their distinctive institutional, cultural, demographic, and geopolitical conditions, we aim to generate contributions that not only deepen understanding of Chinese family entrepreneurship but also broaden the theoretical scope of family business research globally. We encourage multi-level, longitudinal, and mechanism-focused studies—empirical or conceptual—that can inform comparative theorizing across contexts. We welcome empirical papers (both qualitative and quantitative), conceptual papers, and literature review papers that shed light on family firms, entrepreneurial families, and family offices in the Chinese context.