Waking from Mao’s Dream: Communist Ideological Imprinting and the Internationalization of Entrepreneurial Ventures in China

Abstract

We theorize how an ideological imprint—ideology formed through past events—serves as an information filter that persistently affects individuals’ decision making and how subsequent behaviors of the imprinter—the entity that established the imprint—may alter it. We test our model with a longitudinal dataset of Chinese private entrepreneurs from 1993 to 2012, investigating the influence of a founder’s communist ideological imprint, which characterizes foreign capitalism as evil, and subsequent dynamics introduced by the imprinter—the Communist Party–led government of China—on two internationalization strategies that deal with foreign investors and markets: firms’ efforts to attract foreign capital and to expand globally. Our findings show that Chinese entrepreneurs’ communist ideological imprint negatively affects the internationalization of their ventures, while available and credible information contradicting communism—coming from the government directly, government-created industry social networks for entrepreneurs, or observing governmental support of internationalization—weakens the influence of the imprint. Our study contributes to a better understanding of imprinting and its decay, the effects of corporate decision makers’ political ideology, and the internationalization of firms.