This commentary reviews Chinese management research since its beginning more than thirty years ago and considers the emerging paths that contemporary scholars may follow. Following Barney and Zhang's (2009) article as well as Whetten's article (2009) in this issue, we first clarify what the two paths (a theory of Chinese management and a Chinese theory of management) would mean for the Chinese scholar. We then discuss the possible interplay between these two paths and suggest it is time to take the road less travelled rather than to over-travel the more popular road. We conclude that practice will prove the final judge on the paths pursued and that the insights from the Barney and Zhang and Whetten articles help sharpen our understanding of the challenges.

Two approaches to the evolution of Chinese scholarship are possible. The first – developing a theory of Chinese management – focuses on applying and refining theories developed elsewhere in a Chinese context. In this sense, the emergence of the Chinese economy represents an important natural experiment for the test and refinement of general management theories. The second – developing a Chinese theory of management – focuses on creating explanations for the existence of Chinese management phenomena that are uniquely Chinese. This approach rejects a research agenda created by Western scholars in favour of a research agenda created by Chinese scholars in order to understand Chinese phenomena. The implications of choosing either of these approaches for the future of Chinese management research and possible relationships between them are discussed.

To complement Barney and Zhang's as well as Whetten's articles in this issue of Management and Organization Review, we offer ways to develop indigenous management theory to explain unique Chinese management phenomena. We first briefly review the imbalance of developing theories of Chinese management versus developing Chinese theories of management in Chinese research societies. We then describe a five-step research process that uses an indigenous research approach to theory development: discovery of interesting phenomena, field observations, construction of the theoretical framework, empirical examination, and theory refinement. This process may be useful not only in the Chinese context, but also in any other context. We identify several challenges in both Chinese and international academic societies that must be overcome to facilitate learning across the two approaches proposed by Barney and Zhang: the need for high quality journals in the Chinese language, international journals' efforts to ease the imbalance between the two approaches, and collaboration between Chinese and Western management schools.