Rent-seeking at Home, Capturing Market Share Abroad: The Domestic Determinants of the Transnationalization of China State Construction Engineering Corporation

How do the Chinese central state and central state-owned construction enterprises interact with one another as China's overseas contracting unfolds in the post-corporatization period? Building upon a neo-institutional analysis of the principal-agent relationship, this article finds that contrary to most of the accusations leveled against the global outreach of Chinese SOEs, state-backed transnationalization is by no means state-dominated. SOE managers' continuous bureaucratic ties enable the firm to navigate through China's gigantic but fragmented bureaucracy in favor of corporate commercial interests, which reflects the negotiated nature of the state-SOE relationship in the course of transnationalization.