Corporate Diplomacy as Political Epistemology: A Comparative Discursive Analysis of Haier and Siemens in the Context of Sino- European Relations

Abstract

Geopolitical tensions and regulatory fragmentation require multinational enterprises to justify their conduct to audiences with different assumptions about authority, risk, and legitimate governance. Yet corporate diplomacy (CD) research treats such communication as an instrumental response and underexplains how home-country political traditions shape firms’ claims to legitimacy. This study asks how and through what mechanisms home-country political epistemology (PE)—historically rooted assumptions about authority and governance—shapes corporate diplomatic discourse, and how its expression varies across audiences. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of ESG reports, annual reports and leadership speeches published by Haier Group and Siemens AG between 2020 and 2025, the study identifies three empirical patterns. First, despite divergence in the object of delegation—Haier to the party-state apparatus, Siemens to the capital market—both enterprises share a structurally identical mode of delegated legitimacy production. Second, both engage in strategic discursive decoupling, selectively suppressing or amplifying discursive dimensions in response to the institutional logic of their target audience. Third, Haier employs knowledge performance as a meta-level legitimacy strategy, repositioning Chinese corporate leadership as producers rather than recipients of global management knowledge. Collectively, these findings reframe Sino-European corporate diplomatic divergence as a structural difference in the nature of the delegate within a functionally equivalent mode of legitimacy production, with implications for CD theory and Sino-European economic dialogue.