Jingwen Jiang

The Dual Logic of Chinese Transnationalism

This thesis is concerned with the global human resources strategy of multi-national corporations and how that strategy reflects the governmental context of their country of origin. It therefore seeks to link the disciplines of human resource management and government. Specifically, the research focuses on China, where, over the past decade, the political leadership has gradually expanded its influence and control over China corporate sector.  The subject is addressed via and in-depth study of the case of Lenovo, once the symbol of China’s embrace of globalisation, now adapting to a different political to that in which it was founded and expanded. 

The research starts from the notion of hybridity, that competing values underly the development of Chinese multinationals such as Lenovo, between the global market and the national hierarchy and proposes a theoretical framework in which a hybrid culture emerges through the competing pressures of the horizontal global market, the transnational principle and the national, the vertical hierarchy of state power.  transnational image of Lenovo, deriving from its high-profile acquisition of the IBM PCs business, was only one side of the Lenovo culture, the other being its role as a key supplier to the Chinese public sector.