Balancing the ‘Yin’ and the ‘Yang’ – the transformation and diversification of Chinese family businesses in Britain

The majority of Chinese owned enterprises in Britain today are typically family run catering businesses, set up by first generation migrants to overcome the limited socio-economic opportunities in their country of origin. These small-scale or micro businesses are composed of Chinese takeaways [CTA] and Chinese restaurants [CR] established during the 1960s and 1990s. Despite the presence of CTA and CR in every town and city in Britain today, very little is known about the nature of these businesses and the families themselves.

This paper investigates the extent to which Chinese family businesses in Britain have influenced entrepreneurship in second generation Chinese adults, and whether entrepreneurship is hindered or fostered as a result of their experiences in Chinese catering. The popular notion is that ethnic entrepreneurs turned to entrepreneurship as a response to the discrimination prevalent in mainstream society, and that the Chinese were able to draw on their elaborate networks, access to community resources, and their relative ‘invisibility’ for their business success. The paper argues that additional factors, such as, cliques and fall outs within the first generation and the acculturation concerns of the second generation affect the life cycle of the Chinese family business.

The ‘Family Business Life Cycle Model’ offers useful insights about generational differences in the patterns of business proprietorship between the ‘sojourning’ first generation and ‘acculturated’ second generation. Past studies have tended to concentrate exclusively on the experiences of the first generation or failed to account for the heterogeneity of Chinese entrepreneurs. Case studies, drawn from in-depth interviews with British Chinese entrepreneurs and professionals, have been used to shed light on the different challenges that the first and second generation Chinese face as a result of their acculturation, and the consequences of these for the future of Chinese entrepreneurship in Britain.