ABSTRACT
Announced in 2013, President Xi Jinping’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative is China’s roadmap toward primary economic influence status in the Eurasia region (Koleski, 2017). OBOR aims to boost economic development in China’s less prosperous western provinces (Koleski, 2017). According to Koleski, the 13th Five-Year Plan identifies the western provinces as economically disadvantaged. These provinces lack resources to develop economic ecosystems, opening the door for social innovations.
This paper introduces social entrepreneurship and explores if it can thrive and flourish in China (Martin & Osberg, 2007) within its existing policies and government infrastructure (Shambaugh, 2016). Furthermore, this paper explores if existing social entrepreneurship efforts (Shokay, 2017; Brickyard, 2017) can be scaled to support China’s 13th Five-Year plan (Koleski, 2017), specifically improvements on economic prosperity for the people of China. For future study this paper also proposes specific social entrepreneurship models, such as social business (Yunus, 2010) for exploring how such practices can further reduce poverty (United Nations, 2015) and thus raising the Chinese citizens’ standard of living (Koleski, 2017) towards 2030.
