Career management of business expatriates from China

Chinese mainland business managers assigned to Hong Kong responded to a mail survey exploring issues on career management. The group of mainland managers was compared with a sample of Western expatriates, mostly from the US, France, and Britain. It was found that the Chinese expatriates had a significantly lower score than their Western counterparts on all the studied individual level career management variables: expatriate career preferences, meeting career goals within the corporation, career development fit, and right career move. Of the corporate level policy variables, corporate expatriate pool and separate expatriate careers also had lower scores for the Chinese than the Western managers. These findings support the behavioral process model of internationalization claiming that internationalization is a matter of learning. Implications of these results for internationalizing Chinese corporations are discussed.