Disconnecting European Companies and Countries?

In “Disconnecting European Companies and Countries? Case studies Call for Modulating Worries about China’s Digital Silk Road,” part of a special issue of the top-ranked European Journal of International Management focusing on China’s Digital Silk Road (DSR), Dr. Jean-Marc F. Blanchard, Founding Executive Director of the Mr. & Mrs. S.H. Wong Center for the Study of Multinational Corporations (“Wong MNC Center”), and Dr. Bas Hooijmaaijers, Wong MNC Center Treasurer and Senior Business Research Fellow investigate the implications of DSR, the high-tech oriented component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, for the global order, Europe’s favored digital norms, and European companies. Researching the cases of the DSR in Malaysia, Pakistan, Hungary, and the United Arab Emirates, they find that most worries are unwarranted. European businesses have not been pushed out and there have not been transformations of either the global order or digital norms due to the DSR. In this cutting-edge piece, Blanchard and Hooijmaaijers also identify various domestic and international political and economic factors shaping the DSR’s implementation, configuration, and ultimate consequences. This gives them a basis for putting forth several suggestions about how European companies can remain competitive and what European governments might do to help them remain competitive.

This publication originally appeared as Jean-Marc F. Blanchard and Bas Hooijmaaijers, “Disconnecting European Companies and Countries? Case studies Call for Modulating Worries about China’s Digital Silk Road,” European Journal of International Management, Vol. 23, No. 2-3 (2024), pp. 364-386. Copyright remains with the original holders.