When Chinese Development Experience Crosses Borders
Li Haoyue on the translation dilemmas of Chinese enterprises overseas
For today’s episode, I would like to share an article about the “translation” dilemmas Chinese enterprises face overseas. The article is authored by Li Haoyue, Associate Professor and “Hundred Talents Program” Research Fellow at Zhejiang University. Li received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of New York at Albany in 2020; her research interests include cultural sociology, environmental sociology, and globalization studies.
As Chinese enterprises expand worldwide, they have brought abroad an entire body of development experience, such as infrastructure first, close government-business coordination, and long-term patience. But the author observes that when this experience travels, it runs into a Western-dominated framework of development discourse within which Chinese practices must constantly explain themselves. Through three cases, namely Piraeus, Colombo Port City, and South Africa’s Musina-Makhado SEZ, the author traces how experience gets dismantled into fragments that can be integrated into corresponding Western standards, disciplined by compliance, and stripped of the institutional conditions that once sustained it.
Many concepts Chinese enterprises take for granted actually have a whole system behind them, which is usually invisible. In the Chinese context, an “industrial park” 工业园区 means a zone where infrastructure is already completed. Even by the most basic 1990s standard, san tong yi ping 三通一平, “three connections and one leveling” (water, electricity, roads, and a levelled site), and today qi tong yi ping 七通一平, adding drainage, telecommunications, gas, and heating. The quiet presupposition behind this checklist is the presence of a local government providing basic public services, from guaranteeing power supply to negotiating with locals.
The trouble, as the author’s cases make painfully clear, is that many regions lack even this baseline governance capacity. Where the state cannot mediate between enterprise and local society, a company that wants to produce has no choice but to shoulder responsibilities that ought to belong to government, from negotiating land acquisition directly with communities to building infrastructure from scratch. From the outside, this looks like a Chinese company “overreaching.” In structural terms, it is a company forced to perform state functions without state capacity—and then judged, within the prevailing discourse, for doing precisely that.
This is why the author’s reframing of “translation” deserves emphasis. The concept of Translation here is not the same as simple public relations. I would like to understand it as a form of governance capacity: recognizing that one’s own vocabulary encodes institutional conditions that cannot be assumed elsewhere, and learning how different societies define “good development” on their own terms. I present this article because I think it captures well the dilemma Chinese enterprises are facing worldwide.
Thanks to the kind authorisation of the Author Li Haoyue and editor Zheng from Beijing Cultural Review, I can publish the English ver here. Below is the translation I made with the help of AI.
Translational Dilemmas and Practical Knowledge in China’s “Going Out” Era
Over the more than four decades since Reform and Opening-up, the overseas footprint of Chinese enterprises has evolved from tentative positioning to systematic, deep engagement. As of 2023, China’s outward foreign direct investment stock had exceeded USD 2.7 trillion, with Chinese enterprises operating in more than 190 countries and regions worldwide. Accompanying this export of capital and engineering capacity is an entire body of practical experience that gradually took shape over the course of China’s own development: an investment logic that leads with infrastructure, a path that drives regional growth through industrial clusters, a relatively close coordinating relationship between government and enterprises, and a developmental orientation that emphasizes long-term investment and strategic patience. When these enterprises go out into the world, what they confront is a Western-dominated framework of knowledge and system of discourse within the global development arena—one that has been long in the making and is relatively stable. This framework often presupposes an entirely different developmental logic: that the market is superior to government, that short-term returns outweigh long-term strategy, that individual rights take precedence over collective goals, and so on. In their overseas practice, Chinese enterprises are frequently required to explain their own conduct within this framework, with the result that certain institutional arrangements that were originally nested within one another become broken down into more widely current terms such as “efficiency,” “compliance,” and “commercial decision,” while the parts behind them—those involving state coordination, temporal arrangement, and social objectives—find it far harder to obtain an equivalent degree of expressive space. Thus, the more Chinese enterprises try to prove abroad that they are responsible, compliant, and transparent, the more they are forced to abandon precisely those institutional characteristics that genuinely constitute their competitive advantage. And when they attempt to preserve these characteristics, they are often misread as opaque, as exporters of authoritarianism, or as instruments of geopolitics.
As the Belt and Road Initiative shifted from vision to large-scale practice, similar frictions have continually emerged. The labor disputes at Greece’s Port of Piraeus, the compliance restructuring of Sri Lanka’s Colombo Port City, and the stagnation of South Africa’s Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone occurred under different political and legal environments, yet they exhibit a similar structure of problems: the projects were not weak at the level of engineering and financing, yet they repeatedly encountered resistance at the level of explanation and negotiation. This predicament directly affects the actual operation of the projects—from financing structures to labor management, from environmental assessment to community relations—as Chinese enterprises continually face the challenge of “translation.”
The Price of “Being Understood”: The Dismantling of Experience and the Power of Interpretation
When Chinese experience enters the international arena, what it first encounters is often not direct political confrontation, but rather a problem concerning “intelligibility.” Certain practices can be fairly naturally subsumed under categories such as “reform,” “efficiency improvement,” or “market-oriented adjustment,” while others require constant justification of their reasonableness. The difference does not derive entirely from the practices themselves, but is related to the way the existing framework of knowledge classifies them. The experience of Greece’s Port of Piraeus offers a concrete case.
The 2008 global financial crisis dealt a heavy blow to the Greek economy, triggering a severe sovereign debt crisis. As a condition for receiving bailouts from the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, the Greek government was required to implement large-scale privatization and fiscal austerity policies. The Port of Piraeus, as Greece’s largest and one of Europe’s important container ports, was placed on the priority privatization list. Against this backdrop, China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) obtained a 35-year concession for Piers 2 and 3 of the port in 2008. In 2016 it further acquired a 67% stake in the Piraeus Port Authority, for a total transaction value of EUR 368.5 million, and committed to more than EUR 350 million in mandatory investment in the future. This transaction itself took place within a Western-dominated framework of austerity policy, yet this institutional background did not become a focus of discussion in subsequent international reporting. On the contrary, the impact of Chinese capital on European labor standards swiftly dominated the media after the strike protests of 2016. After COSCO took over, it carried out modernization of the port; in the corporate narrative, these measures—introducing automated equipment, optimizing loading and unloading processes, and implementing new labor management systems—were described as necessary steps to enhance competitiveness and achieve internationalized management. However, in the experience of Greek workers, these words triggered an entirely different set of historical memories. In the context of Greek society, terms such as “flexible employment” and “performance management” had appeared repeatedly during the privatization wave of the preceding decade or more, each time accompanied by layoffs, outsourcing, and cuts to benefits. Consequently, these seemingly neutral management terms had already become highly politicized in the local context. In August 2016, some port workers held a protest beneath the newly installed automated cranes, with banners reading in Greek and English: “We are not China’s cheap labor!” and “COSCO = Neo-colonialism!” The protest rapidly escalated into a strike, at one point bringing the port’s operations to a standstill.
The international media quickly seized upon this story, with mainstream outlets such as the Financial Times and the BBC framing it as an erosion of European labor standards by Chinese capital.[1] In these narratives, Piraeus became yet another example demonstrating that Chinese state-owned enterprises were replicating their domestic “authoritarian” labor management abroad, undermining Europe’s hard-won system of social protection. However, before COSCO’s entry, the port had already undergone multiple rounds of institutional change; outsourcing and temporary contract systems did not begin with the Chinese takeover. What is worth noting here is not a defense of any particular mode of management, but rather an observation of the different interpretations that similar practices receive under the names of different actors. The modes of conduct are similar, yet the moral evaluations are not symmetrical. When the Greek government and Western capital pushed for labor flexibilization, it was mostly regarded as a necessary adjustment under economic crisis, and the media naturalized it as “necessary reform and the growing pains of transition”; whereas when Chinese enterprises adopted similar practices, they were labeled “exploitation,” becoming “authoritarian export,” “neo-colonialism,” and “the expansion of the China model.”
Of course, this does not mean that Chinese enterprises should not face criticism. Labor rights issues are in themselves real and legitimate. But the experience of Piraeus suggests that international understanding often depends on established language and historical memory. Whoever is closer to this language is more readily regarded as “the norm.” This double standard reveals a fundamental problem: the modern world is not a cognitively neutral space. Within this space, understanding does not occur naturally, but is continually shaped through institutions, standards, and professional language. More critically, whose experience can be naturalized as “universal” and whose practice must be constantly explained is itself a relation of power.
When union members shouted “We are not China’s cheap labor,” a deeper question was obscured: why is “China’s labor” naturally equated with “cheap” and “exploited”? Yet within the context of Chinese enterprises, these same port workers are the industrial working class, are employees of state-owned enterprises, possessing collective dormitories, staff canteens, and political study groups. The answer perhaps lies in the fact that the operational logic of Chinese port enterprises is deeply embedded within a complete institutional ecology—including the dual role of trade unions and Party organizations, the social responsibility positioning of state-owned enterprises, and the government’s active coordinating mechanisms in labor-capital relations. These elements together constitute the particularity of China’s labor system. When COSCO attempted to operate in Greece, this institutional ecology could not be transplanted in its entirety. It was forced to enter the Greek legal framework, EU labor standards, and the neoliberal management paradigm, with the result that those mechanisms that maintain labor-capital balance within Chinese society were stripped away, leaving only the most superficial logic of “cutting costs and raising efficiency.”
The Piraeus case reveals the first predicament that Chinese experience encounters when “going out”: experience is often dismantled during cross-institutional transfer and incorporated into existing systems of classification. When institutional arrangements that originally supported one another must be broken down into several identifiable parts within the existing Western-dominated conceptual system in order to “be understood,” those institutional linkages that cannot be clearly named—which genuinely constitute their distinctiveness—often cannot be expressed. “Being understood” here is not a bridge toward communication, but rather a screening mechanism—it determines which experiences can be named and which logics must remain silent. It is precisely in such a context that Chinese experience is often forced to appear in the form of “market behavior” or “commercial decision,” while the state role, long-term temporal outlook, and complex governance practices behind it are regarded as untranslatable, undiscussable, and even lacking legitimacy. It must be pointed out that although this screening mechanism at the cognitive level constitutes a structural constraint on Chinese experience “being understood,” it does not necessarily lead to conflict. The formation of the port dispute was also related to the early-stage judgment of social risk in the project. Had the sensitivity of local labor politics been more fully assessed at the launch stage, and had earlier consultation mechanisms been established, some of the tensions might have been eased. The experience of Piraeus both presents the differences among interpretive frameworks and reminds enterprises of the need for more careful social risk identification during the process of institutional transfer.
The Price of Compliance: Experience Domesticated by Standards
If Piraeus presents the structural predicament of “being understood,” then Sri Lanka’s Port City presents another, more complex and more concealed situation: when Chinese experience attempts to proactively integrate into the existing system of discourse and strives to prove its own “progressiveness” and “compliance,” it is instead drawn ever more deeply into the discipline of established standards. The threshold of understanding is no longer manifested as exclusion, but appears in the form of acceptance.
The Colombo Port City project was formally launched in September 2014, with China Communications Construction Company and its subsidiary China Harbour Engineering Company investing USD 1.4 billion to build a new urban district of 269 hectares through land reclamation. The project was positioned as the flagship project of the Belt and Road Initiative in South Asia, promising to make Colombo the “new Dubai of South Asia.” However, from its very inception the project faced multi-sided opposition from fishing communities, environmental organizations, religious leaders, and some civil society groups. The controversies centered on environmental impact, the livelihood problems of fishermen, and the mode of land use. Critics worried that land reclamation would alter marine ecology and affect traditional fishing activities, and questioned whether the project would exacerbate spatial division within the city.
After the Sri Lankan presidential election of January 2015, the new government announced a suspension of the project, demanding a re-examination of the agreement and the environmental impact assessment, and Port City construction thus entered a stagnation period lasting fifteen months. In March 2016, against the dual backdrop of debt pressure and the need for economic development, the Sri Lankan government decided to restart the project, but required comprehensive compliance adjustments. The Chinese enterprises were well aware of the international public-opinion pressure this project faced, and in their publicity placed special emphasis on the project’s sustainability, inclusiveness, and modernity. In terms of environmental compliance, the environmental impact assessment report ran to several thousand pages, and an internationally renowned green building certification body was engaged to apply for LEED Gold certification.[2] In terms of governance structure, the Port City was positioned as the Colombo International Financial City, introducing an English common-law system and an independent arbitration mechanism, emphasizing alignment with global capital markets. In terms of community participation, agreements were reached with the fishing community, promising to move dredging vessels further offshore, providing 500 million Sri Lankan rupees to a fishermen’s income-support program, and organizing multiple rounds of public information sessions. On the surface, this was a process of gradually integrating into the international standards system. But the problem lies precisely in this: while Chinese experience strove so hard to prove its own conformity with international standards, these standards themselves never became an object of discussion.
As the enterprise’s compliance measures accumulated, the developmental logic of the project also quietly changed. The core objective of the Port City gradually crystallized as the construction of an international financial center, benchmarked against existing models such as Singapore and Dubai. This path is already quite mature within the landscape of global urban competition, and the associated social consequences—spatial segregation, class stratification, institutional arbitrage—have long been amply discussed. However, in the compliance narrative of the Port City, these problems were systematically suspended, replaced by repeated emphasis on “international viability,” “investor confidence,” and “rating recognition.” For local residents, the compliance adjustments did not significantly change the social orientation of the project. The high-end residences, financial services, and enclosed governance structure in the Port City plan kept it at a distance from the surrounding low-income communities from the very start. The large number of jobs the project promised were mainly concentrated in low-skill service sectors, while high-value-added financial and professional positions were more likely to be occupied by foreign talent. Surveys show that residents of low-income communities near the Port City were full of ambivalence about the project: on the one hand, they hoped it could bring prosperity to Colombo; on the other hand, they feared they would be further marginalized. A woman living in a neighboring community emphasized in an interview that this future city being built did not belong to them, that at most they would work there as cleaners.[3] The Port City therefore did not alleviate Colombo’s existing social inequality, but instead spatialized and legitimized it through institutional design.
Ironically, when Sri Lankan scholars and activists criticized the Port City, the very language they used was likewise the critical discourse of Western development studies—such as “neoliberal urbanization,” “exclusionary development,” and “spatial segregation.” The enterprise side, for its part, had no choice but to respond by demonstrating higher-standard compliance certifications and more detailed social responsibility assessments. Here both criticism and response fell into the same linguistic system, circulating continuously, yet rarely touching upon whether the developmental path itself could have different choices. No one asked whether there exists a path of urban development that does not rely on the “international financial center” model. Was it possible to build a new city that was both modern and inclusive, rather than replicating Singapore or Dubai? China itself, during the construction of special economic zones in the early period of Reform and Opening-up, had once explored ideas such as “letting some get rich first to bring along the rest” and “coordinated regional development,” but these alternative experiences were not seriously considered in the Port City project. The reason is not complicated: in international capital markets, a “Colombo version of Shenzhen” holds no appeal; only a “Colombo version of Singapore” can secure financing. Investors, rating agencies, and international banks all use the same set of standards to assess a project’s “viability”—and this set of standards is itself the dominant framework that took shape over the long course of neoliberal globalization; if the project wished to obtain financing and rating support, it had to operate within the existing framework.
This process reveals the second predicament that Chinese experience encounters when “going out”: when “proving oneself” becomes the primary task, the imagination of alternative development is dissolved in advance. So-called compliance leaves little room for different developmental imaginations; through the mainstream system of “standards,” it gradually draws the project closer to existing models. The alternative vision of modernization contained in China’s development path—one that emphasizes state coordination, long-term planning, and the priority of social objectives—is difficult to express in international projects. This is not because these experiences are unimportant, but because they cannot be incorporated into the knowledge framework that dominates global capital flows and project assessment. The Colombo Port City project was permitted to exist, but it had to reorganize itself within the mainstream standards system; in this process, the experience acquired legitimacy while at the same time losing its original space of alternative imagination. Therefore, the problem with Colombo Port City lies not in whether it is sufficiently green, smart, or compliant, but in the fact that this entire compliance mechanism itself has already presupposed what counts as “good development.” When Chinese enterprises accept this presupposition, they inevitably relinquish the contest over the power to define development. Compliance here is no longer a bridge toward dialogue, but an absorptive mechanism—it converts potential alternative paths into extensions of the existing order. The Colombo Port City case demonstrates that the price Chinese experience may pay in the international arena can appear not only in the form of exclusion, but also in a particular form of acceptance. The experience is not that it goes unUnderstood or is misunderstood, but that it is understood in a way that has already been written in advance.
In 2017, Shenzhen Hoimor Investment Co., Ltd. proposed building a large industrial complex in South Africa’s Limpopo Province, which was expected to become an important Belt and Road investment project in Africa. Limpopo is one of South Africa’s poorest provinces, with an unemployment rate that has long remained above 30%, bordering Zimbabwe and Botswana. This project, named the Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone Energy-Metallurgical Complex (MMSEZ), was planned to transform this impoverished region into a modern heavy-industry base. The scale of the project plan was enormous, with total investment ranging from USD 10 billion to USD 40 billion. Core facilities included a steel plant with an annual capacity of 5.1 million tons, supporting coking and ferroalloy plants, a cement plant with an annual output of 6 million tons, and copper and iron smelting plants, among other heavy-industry facilities. To support these energy-intensive industries, the project also planned to construct a coal-fired power plant with an installed capacity of 4,600 megawatts. The entire project covered an area of more than 80 square kilometers, was planned to be built in phases, and was expected to create more than 20,000 direct jobs. In theory, this project perfectly embodied the classic logic of China’s “infrastructure first, industrial agglomeration, regional development”—that is, through large-scale infrastructure investment, introducing leading enterprises, forming industrial clusters, driving the development of surrounding areas, and ultimately achieving employment growth and improvement in local finances. The then President of South Africa, Zuma, publicly expressed support, and the Limpopo provincial government designated it as the province’s number-one project, hoping to change the province’s economic outlook through it.
However, after the project was launched, the constraints of basic conditions quickly became apparent. The first was the energy problem. The planned 4,600-megawatt coal-fired power plant is not uncommon in China. For industrial projects of a similar scale, power supply is usually uniformly guaranteed by the state grid, and enterprises need not bear responsibility for systemic power security. But in South Africa, the national electricity company Eskom has long been mired in a supply crisis, and industrial parks must solve their own power-source problems. In 2023, South Africa experienced the most severe power shortage in its history, with more than 300 days of load-shedding nationwide. Against this backdrop, for an energy-intensive heavy-industry park to rely on itself to secure stable power supply was a nearly impossible task. The water-resource problem likewise constituted a structural obstacle. The project plan required 249 million cubic meters of industrial water annually, equivalent to five times the total existing water consumption of the locality. Although the plan proposed the idea of cross-border water diversion, this would mean negotiating water-rights arrangements with Zimbabwe and Botswana, constructing cross-border water-transfer pipelines, and coordinating the environmental regulations and water-use priorities of the three countries. Such cross-regional resource allocation, in China, belongs to the category of national strategic engineering, uniformly coordinated by the central government—for example, major projects such as the South-to-North Water Diversion and the West-to-East Gas Transmission. But the Musina-Makhado SEZ is an enterprise-led investment project, which clearly does not possess the capacity to advance such transnational infrastructure cooperation. As of 2024, the relevant water-diversion plan still had no substantive progress. The third fundamental problem lay in the market. The project planned a steel capacity of 5.1 million tons per year, while South Africa’s domestic annual steel consumption was only about 4 million tons. At the same time, the country’s largest steel enterprise was shutting down production lines and cutting staff due to overcapacity. Under conditions where the supply-demand structure was already imbalanced, adding large-scale new capacity lacked realistic market support.
On the surface, these are three concrete difficulties: energy, water, and market. But at a deeper level, the problem lies in the absence of institutional structure. In Chinese experience, an industrial park of such scale is never an isolated commercial investment, but is usually embedded within national industrial-transfer policies, regional development strategies, and even poverty-alleviation plans. Chinese governments at all levels provide systematic support to enterprises through land allocation, tax incentives, infrastructure provisioning, and industrial coordination mechanisms, and, when necessary, even guarantee the formation of industrial chains and the sales channels for products through administrative means. The industrial park is part of China’s governance system, not a standalone capital project. However, when this model was transplanted to South Africa, the institutional architecture that supports its operation did not exist. Although the South African government expressed support, it lacked both the capacity to provide large-scale fiscal subsidies and the administrative mechanism for nationwide industrial coordination, and it lacked all the more a national mobilization system for concentrating resources to advance strategic engineering. As a result, the project replicated the external form of “building an industrial park,” yet could not replicate the overall institutional coordination behind it. What the Musina-Makhado SEZ presents is precisely a state of institutional disembedding: it has the form of a park, but lacks the foundation of governance. By 2024, facing environmental-assessment controversies, financing difficulties, and continuous legal disputes—especially against a backdrop of markedly weakened support after the change of government—the Musina-Makhado SEZ project had entered a state of de facto freeze.
The problems exposed by this case do not remain merely at the operational level; they touch upon two core dimensions that Chinese experience loses when “going out.” First, the flexibility, ambiguity, and pluralistic strategies within Chinese experience are essentially a recognition and absorption of the complexity of reality. However, within an international system that demands clear classification and definite boundaries, such complexity often has no place to reside. Much of the wisdom of Chinese practice is embodied precisely in its ways of dealing with uncertainty and gray zones. Behind expressions such as “crossing the river by feeling the stones,” “let the bullets fly for a while,” and “analyze specific problems specifically” lies a capacity to adjust strategy within a dynamic process, an art of governance that seeks balance in complex environments. But in the international system of discourse, this ambiguity is often re-coded as “opacity” or “ulterior motives.” When complexity is compressed into a single narrative, when polysemy is required to be converted into standardized formulations, those informal, gray, and multi-layered dimensions that carry real life and local wisdom gradually vanish from view. For example, the local informal economy may manifest as institutional disorder, yet it is also the economic foundation upon which large numbers of people depend for their survival, an indispensable component of the overall system. However, within an imagination of modernization that takes normalization and standardization as its goal, these gray spaces are often regarded as objects to be cleaned up and regularized. As a result, those important factors that originally constituted the institutional advantages of the China model become, under the framework of neoliberal discourse, the hidden parts that are difficult to express openly.
Second, there is the absence of state coordinating capacity. The distinctiveness of China’s development model derives, to a large extent, from a state with powerful coordinating capacity. This state is able not only to mobilize resources, integrate interests, and bear risks, but also to regulate and balance between short-term goals and long-term strategy. However, when Chinese enterprises “go out,” they often, in the capacity of private investors, attempt to advance developmental strategies that originally required the support of state capacity. This role dislocation recurs repeatedly across many Belt and Road projects. Chinese enterprises in fact lack the state-level capacity for resource mobilization and the institutional coordination mechanisms, yet they are expected by the outside world—or to some extent expect of themselves—to shoulder state-like developmental functions. At the same time, Chinese enterprises also face the discursive hegemony of a neoliberal globalization that is difficult to challenge; in this context, “state-led” itself often carries negative connotations, and is easily accused of “market distortion,” “inefficiency,” or “rent-seeking and corruption.” When China introduces its own development experience to the world, it often, whether intentionally or unintentionally, plays down the state role, turning instead to formulations that emphasize marketization, commercialization, and enterprise as the principal actor. Yet it is precisely this strategic playing-down that hollows out the institutional core of Chinese experience. The advantages formed through reliance on state coordinating capacity are compressed into a purely commercial logic, and the development model loses its original institutional support. In a complex new environment, it can neither fully present its own structural advantages nor establish equivalent institutional conditions. The result is that the form can be replicated, while the overall mechanism that sustains the operation of that form cannot be reproduced.
Discussion and Conclusion: “Translation” Is Not Rhetoric, but Governance Capacity
Taking together the three cases spanning Europe, Asia, and Africa, we can see that Chinese experience, in the process of “going out,” does not simply encounter failure or external resistance; rather, it is reinterpreted and reclassified within different institutional contexts, and in this process undergoes unavoidable distortion. The recurring fundamental problem does not lie only in whether the project is profitable or whether the technology is feasible, but in how Chinese experience is understood, and under what framework it is permitted to exist. When experience is simplified and disciplined, when state capacity is obscured and regarded as risk, the true loss of Chinese experience “going out” gradually becomes apparent—just as these projects present not merely setbacks at the commercial level, but a retreat of interpretive capacity and imaginative space.
At the Port of Piraeus, the controversy centered on the labor system and management practices. The conflict did not stem purely from a clash of interests; it was also related to historical memory and the meanings of language. The enterprise was well-prepared at the financial and legal levels, yet underestimated the sensitivity of local labor politics. In Greece, port workers have long occupied a key position within state-society relations, and privatization reform had already become highly politicized, so management reform could very easily be incorporated into a narrative of the continuation of austerity policy. Had a more systematic social-risk assessment been introduced at the early stage of the project—identifying which issues carry symbolic significance, which vocabulary might trigger collective anxiety—and had earlier channels of communication been established, some of the conflict might have been avoided. At Colombo Port City, the problem lay not in exclusion, but in the mode of acceptance. The project obtained legitimacy through a large number of compliance measures, yet in the process of standardization it gradually drew closer to the existing international-financial-center model. The enterprise invested substantial resources in responding to international public opinion and the rating system; environmental assessments and social responsibility reports were continually expanded, and public communication documents advanced layer upon layer. At the same time, the space for discussion about the developmental path itself was relatively limited; criticism and response revolved around the same set of standards, and the project rarely stepped outside this framework to consider whether other directions of urban development might exist. The key here is not merely compliance, but how compliance shapes the developmental imagination. At the Musina-Makhado SEZ, the difference in institutional conditions was even more evident. The project plan followed the developmental logic of Chinese industrial parks, yet lacked the corresponding state coordinating mechanisms and fiscal support system. The problems of energy, water resources, and market were not single technical difficulties, but involved cross-departmental and transnational cooperation. When an enterprise advances abroad, in the capacity of a commercial actor, a strategic vision that is highly dependent on state capacity, institutional dislocation will appear—and this dislocation will not automatically be repaired through market mechanisms. These three cases point respectively to different levels of the mechanism of transformation: experience is dismantled into identifiable elements, the standards system shapes the mode of expression, and institutional conditions are difficult to migrate in step. These mechanisms are not abstract existences, but are embedded throughout the entire process of project decision-making, execution, and adjustment.
It must be pointed out that Chinese experience does indeed occupy a relatively disadvantaged position within the existing system of international rules. The international rating system, the global financial order, and academic discourse have long been dominated by developed economies, and the criteria for evaluating development paths were likewise formed against this historical backdrop. A single project cannot shake this overall structure, nor can it easily change existing rules in the short term. However, structural disadvantage does not mean there is no space at the level of practice. Whether a project can be stably advanced depends to a large extent on the enterprise’s capacity for “translation” within a concrete context; whether experience can obtain expressive space within diverse institutional environments likewise depends on this capacity. From a longer time scale, “going out” is itself a process of continuous negotiation amid differences and constant adjustment amid frictions. Therefore, the success or failure of a project should not be measured solely by throughput, GDP contribution, or the number of international certifications. For the workers of Piraeus, stable employment and labor dignity carry real significance; for the fishermen of Colombo, livelihood security and community continuity are equally important; for the community residents of Limpopo, ecological safety and the right to autonomous development are the core concerns. If these dimensions are ignored, then even if the financial statements perform well, a project will find it difficult to gain long-term social support. These cases remind us that when Chinese enterprises that “go out” are able to proceed from the perspective of the local society, understanding how their own actions are embedded within existing historical and political contexts, “translation” is no longer merely a passive response to risk, but may become a creative institutional practice. Truly effective “translation” is not only about letting the local society understand China’s developmental logic, but even more about letting Chinese enterprises understand how different societies define “the good life” and “good development.”
In the course of implementing the Belt and Road Initiative, China has put forward the important cooperative concept of “consultation, joint construction, and shared benefits.” How this concept is translated into concrete practice ultimately depends on whether the enterprises that “go out” understand the differences in how different societies define “development,” and adjust their own practical paths accordingly. Therefore, “translation” is not merely linguistic conversion, but a governance practice of maintaining flexibility and the capacity for negotiation within complex environments. As uncertainty and conflict in the international political and economic environment intensify, the overseas development of Chinese enterprises will inevitably face more disagreements and disputes. Against such a realistic backdrop, whether enterprises can identify risks within different institutional environments, establish consultation mechanisms, and safeguard their own core logic—while at the same time avoiding the excessive simplification of their experience—will become the key factor determining the sustainability of Chinese enterprises “going out.”
Sources:
[1] See related reports: “Greek Port Workers Protest Against Chinese-Run Piraeus,” BBC News, August 15, 2016; “Piraeus Port Workers Strike Over Chinese Owner’s Plans,” Financial Times, September 26, 2016; “Greek Port Workers Take on China’s Cosco,” Financial Times, October 6, 2016.
[2] LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is a green building certification system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, and is regarded worldwide as the gold standard for building sustainability.
[3] A. Radicati, “The Unstable Coastline: Navigating Dispossession and Belonging in Colombo,” Antipode, Vol. 52, 2020, pp. 542–561.