The conscious and unconscious facilitating role of the Chinese government in shaping the internationalization of Chinese MNCs

•We explore the role of Chinese government in the internationalization.•Chinese governmental promotion of SOEs and the institutional escapism on POEs.•This contributes to a new understanding of the internationalization process.•This study identifies the limits and fills a gap of the Uppsala model.

The main focus of this study is the contrasting mechanisms through which the Chinese government influences the internationalization of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and of privately owned enterprises (POEs). The different circumstances created by the Chinese government at the outset of internationalization are found to affect the speed of internationalization and the network positions of the internationalizing firms. The research design is an in-depth multiple-case study comprising two SOEs and two POEs in the process of entering into both developed and developing host countries. The value of this study lies in its identification, theorization and analysis of, on the one hand, the Chinese governmental promotion of SOEs and, on the other hand, the institutional escapism on the part of the POEs. This contributes to a new understanding of the process through which the government takes on the role of ecological management, to which is applied self-theory. This study also identifies the limits of the Uppsala model with regard to the paths to internationalization and proposes a mechanism to explain why these limits exist. The four network positions identified in the study indicate how firms are embedded in the network of the foreign markets and in so doing contributes to filling a gap in the research on the concept of network position as outlined in the revised Uppsala model (of 2009).