This paper critically analyses the role of accounting in China's new phase of politically driven economic reforms, which is the international expansion of Chinese enterprises. In particular, the paper examines how China's multinational state-owned enterprise (SOE) and its managers conceive of, and use, accounting and control practices in response to the state's international political and economic objectives. Drawing upon neo-Gramscian concepts of hegemony, this study contends that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has sought to create and maintain its hegemony by turning its political ideologies into initiatives of "economic development", articulated through intensive ideological and political work exercised from the national to the organisational level. The study highlights the role of SOE managers in accommodating accounting and control practices in line with the state's hegemonic and ideological demands. Crucially, it reveals the ability of managers to coordinate and balance the state's political ends and the enterprise's economic interests, where there is a selective use of accounting and control practices deployed for reasons beyond their economic functionality. This paper argues that it is necessary to include the superstructure and economic base of the Chinese state in a hegemonic analysis, and to investigate how the managerial cadre engages with ideology building at the organisational level. By focusing on the Chinese state's new political dynamism regarding the expansion of multinational business operations, this paper provides new insights into the complexity of the motivations underlying the use of accounting and control practices in a globalised context.

Regional state‐owned multinational corporations (SOMNCs) are a major constituent of the ‘going out’ strategy of the Chinese state. Although SOMNCs are nominally infused with political rationalities, they also have explicit contractual economic targets. We therefore explore the underlying rationalities of regional SOMNCs and the roles of expatriate managers in relation to their international expansion strategies. We mobilize Foucault's conception of ‘governmentality’ in providing a holistic understanding of the case of a regional SOMNC (and its subsidiary in Ghana), notably how its managers rationalize their decisions in terms of reconciling political vision with local contexts, tackling domestic competition via foreign market exploration, mobilizing local engagement, improving expatriate managers’ morale, and reinterpreting an interdependent government–business relationship. Our study suggests that coexisting economic and political considerations between the regional government and SOMNCs are instrumentalized with a view to ‘governmentalizing’ overseas operations via business strategies and localization management practices in the Ghanaian subsidiary. In such an interdependent relationship, political appeals and market imperatives are mutually beneficial and complementary, with expatriate managers skilfully using their affiliation with their government. Our theoretical contribution lies in adapting a governmentality driven framework to forge an alliance between liberal forms of management and non‐liberal forms of governing and control.