Flexible embeddedness: how Chinese lead firms internationalise in Africa

The ‘rise of the South’, and particularly that of China, has promoted lively debates around the centrality of Southern firms in shaping the contours of twenty first century economic globalisation. This paper contributes to these debates by examining the internationalisation of Chinese lead firms. It extends and develops the concept of embeddedness within the Global Production Network (GPN) approach and economic anthropology to highlight how localised expressions of state support, corporate strategy, and individual action contribute to shaping lead firm internationalisation. Empirically, it examines the case of Africa’s largest international contractor China Communication Construction Company (CCCC) and is based on extensive qualitative research fieldwork in China, Kenya, and Ghana (2018-2022). The paper argues that firms strategically move across and/or combine different forms of embeddedness to sustain internationalisation – a practice which we term ‘flexible embeddedness’. We thus contribute a framework that repositions embeddedness not as a static outcome or precondition of internationalisation, but instead as a dynamic and strategic process. Flexible embeddedness thinking thus allows for a more nuanced analysis of the ways in which Southern firms are contributing to reframing the ‘rules of the game’ of internationalisation against the background of unequal power relations in South-South engagement.