NETWORK CAPITALISM. Chinese business linkages traced through website analysis.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the prominence of ethnic Chinese business success all over the world, and in particular in Southeast Asian economies where the Chinese contributed essentially to the emergence and growth of the Tiger economies. It is argued that this success has to be explained in terms of the networking strategies of the ethnic Chinese, in particular the maintenance of close-knit and, at the same time, far- ung network relations within the worldwide ethnic Chinese `community'. While the argument about the Chinese networking virtuosity has come to be widely accepted, it has never empirically been tested empirically. In this research, the aim is to establish this empirical evidence by mapping Chinese network relations through linkages between ethnic Chinese business Web pages and Web page content, indicating network relationships between ethnic Chinese businesses. The expected outcome is a network picture of Chinese businesses.