Geoeconomic embeddedness and transnational migrant entrepreneurship: Chinese–Australian wine exporters in a decade of volatility

This article critically examines the entrepreneurial trajectories of Chinese–Australian wine exporters between 2015 and 2025, a decade marked by volatility in Australia–China relations. Drawing on four in-depth qualitative case studies, it explores how transnational migrant entrepreneurs navigated shifting geoeconomic conditions shaped by trade liberalization, diplomatic rupture, and partial recovery. The study introduces geoeconomic embeddedness and its specific form, bilateral embeddedness, to capture how interstate relations condition migrant entrepreneurial opportunity and risk. These cases show that while favorable bilateral conditions initially supported proactive market embedding and commercial success, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted established operating channels, and the 2020 tariff rupture created a distinct condition of dis-embedding by restricting previously viable China-facing market access and prompting divergent responses. Focusing on this bounded sectoral niche, this article complicates prevailing accounts of Chinese diasporic advantage within sectors organised around home-country market access. The cases suggest that these migrant entrepreneurs’ perceived entrepreneurial advantage is a contingent resource, which can both facilitate market access and amplify vulnerability as its value and associated exposure vary with the political-economic conditions of the bilateral corridor. By extending the mixed embeddedness framework to incorporate macro-relational dynamics, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of transnational migrant entrepreneurship as it emerges, evolves, and contracts within the context of shifting geoeconomic and bilateral tensions.