Understanding Chinese entrepreneurship from a historical perspective: What can we Learn from our Entrepreneurship heritage and How? [Editorial]

In this special issue, we have gathered a collection of a rather diverse, some may also argue, “unconventional”, set of articles utilising both knowledge from disciplines as well as utilising very different methodological approaches. The idea of this special issue was initially discussed with Dr Victor Zheng from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Dr Caleb Kwong from the University of Essex, back in 2013. Two more colleagues, Professor Wong Siu-lun from the University of Hong Kong and Cherry Cheung from the London South Bank University, soon came on board. We took the idea to Dr Jun Li, then the General Editor of the Journal of Chinese Entrepreneurship, and were encouraged to submit a draft proposal. The guest co-editors of this issue drafted several versions of the call-for-papers in consultation with the editors and other entrepreneurship researchers. We decided to focus on the following themes: “stay within the family”, “Chinese aboard”, “entrepreneurship under special conditions”, “law and order”, “culture and Chinese entrepreneurialism” and “studying Chinese entrepreneurship in history”. As the proposal for the special issue developed, we submitted it to the renamed Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies. We announced the call-for-papers in Summer 2014 and attracted a good number of interests. All the articles in this issue have gone through rounds of revision and resubmission. Our reviewers have also played a major part in shaping the contribution and direction of the articles. All the reviews are blinded, and we would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback. For quality control, the allocations of reviewers for each of the research papers were conducted by an editor, including the General Editor, who was not involved in the paper. We would also like to thank Dr Jun Li, the General Editor, for the opportunity and his guidance. Finally, we thank our authors for their stimulating and engaging manuscripts. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2016 Published by Emerald Group Publishing Limited