Abstract
After a review of the formation and development of Chinese commerces in France over the last century, this article analyses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their commercial practices and their willingness to achieve the transformation of enterprises and business patterns, under the unprecedented situations such as “deconfinement” and “back to work”. The authors conducted an empirical study combining qualitative and quantitative methods with Chinese entrepreneurs in France coming from five different sectors (import and export, retail, catering, hotel, and tobacco). Research findings and case studies show that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the transition of Chinese entrepreneurs in France from tradition to modernity, from the marginal economy to integration into the mainstream economy. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, some Chinese entrepreneurs had already made or partially made the transition to “integrating online and offline businesses”, “hiring beyond Chinese ethnic networks” and “paying attention to and skillfully capturing the local country’s policy directions”, which helped them reduce the impact of the epidemic to a large extent. At the same time, the sanitary crisis has opened up to two unprecedented opportunities : “fostering local production” and “seeking low-risk sector” may be the new trends for the Chinese commerces in France in the future.In the epidemic and post-epidemic era, the entrepreneurial model transition of oversea Chinese entrepreneurs needs to be examined beyond the framework of pure economic rationality, within a wider consideration the new dynamics of Chinese migration in the host countries, and the cross-cultural, cross-institutional, cross-thinking, and cross-border social engagement of these oversea Chinese entrepreneurs themselves.