This introductory chapter defines the term "corporate ecosystem," explaining why an ecosystem approach is the most suitable way to understand the behavior of Chinese corporations and their interactions with the broader political system in China. The chapter contrasts "corporate ecosystems" with "business ecosystems" and with the narrower, yet more common, corporate governance concerns of many previous accounts discussing Chinese business firms.

This chapter traces the incredibly rapid expansion of the platform e-commerce and financial conglomerates Alibaba and Ant Group. It shows how they took advantage of government fragmentation and dependence on the private economy to attract huge foreign investment, using the variable interest entity (VIE) legal loophole, and then to diversify into payment services (Alipay) and finance in conjunction with state financial institutions, attracting hundreds of millions of customers and tens of millions of SME merchants. The chapter analyzes the key struggles between this Alibaba/Ant "corporate ecosystem" and government regulators seeking to protect consumers, finding that reports of a reining in of Chinese private firms by the Chinese Communist Party are premature.