It is with great excitement that we publish this Special Issue on ‘Understanding Contemporary Chinese Multinational Enterprises (CMNEs)’. Situating CMNEs’ growth and global expansion in the business environment of the mid-2020s against the backdrop of the surge of technological innovation, intense geopolitical tension, and trade wars, this special issue discusses the growth of CMNEs to derive implications for international business (IB) theory. In the introductory piece, the guest editors review key theoretical perspectives that inform prior research on CMNEs and outline the key challenges confronting CMNEs’ international expansion, as gauged against prior research.

I would like to thank the guest editors – Fang Lee Cooke, Maoliang Bu, Jeoung Yul Lee, Byung Il Park, and Andrew Delios – for their dedication to the special issue. They made significant efforts to ensure the quality of the special issue and identify emerging business models that are distinctive to CMNEs, which have notable implications for theory development. They also summarize the major findings that emerged from the eight articles included in the special issue and discuss how these findings may help us derive implications for IB theory in general.