In early 2022, I finally met a leading representative of a Chinese information and communication technology (ICT) company’s Swiss research centre. After signing my name and receiving a badge, I was admitted to his office. Offering me tea, his first words were: ‘This is not an interview. I’m only meeting you because [of Mrs Wang].’ Mrs Wang, a management-level employee at the same company whom I had known for some time, had helped arrange the meeting, which was sensitive amid rising geopolitical tensions, including the US Government’s blacklisting of several Chinese companies’ technology research centres under the first Trump administration (Li and Cheng 2019). His second statement was even more telling: ‘I cannot tell you much’, due to confidentiality. Still, we spoke for two hours about his career, family, and the challenges of establishing the centre—adapting without skills in German and even taking computer science classes at a local university, despite his advanced expertise, to better understand his surroundings.

This centre is an extreme case of restricted access. Its collaborations with Swiss universities, hiring of university staff, and project funding and donations to universities amid geopolitical tensions and fears of espionage and unwanted technology outflows make it highly sensitive. Its opening was largely shielded from media coverage and it has no public website. Access to other company sections in Switzerland, such as offices and showrooms designed for business and public relations purposes, was easier but still limited. While management allowed some interviews and site visits, long-term research was off-limits.

Against this backdrop, I ask: how can Global China scholars qualitatively study contested Chinese firms abroad when geopolitical sensitivities and technological competition make long-term ethnographic fieldwork impossible? I argue that we should not shy away from this type of research. On the contrary, it is even more important to contribute empirical ethnographic analyses to broader geopolitical and media debates that go beyond policy and discourse analysis, offering a more nuanced understanding of the complexities, contradictions, and lived realities that shape these dynamics.

In this essay, I reflect on navigating this sensitive terrain based on my research trajectory. I first outline the research context of the still-understudied phenomenon of China in the so-called Global North; then methodologically advance ‘polymorphous engagement’ (Gusterson 1997, 2021) with Global China by focusing on the history, transnationality, and materiality of digital infrastructures; then finally address the ethical challenges, before concluding.

Researching Chinese ICT Companies in Switzerland

Researching Chinese ICT firms is challenging. Trained as an anthropologist and Sinologist, I examined these firms in Switzerland through anthropological and historical lenses as part of an interdisciplinary project on Swiss-Chinese entanglements (2019–25).

Companies including Huawei, China Unicom, China Telecom, China Mobile, Xiaomi, Alibaba Cloud, and TikTok established Swiss branches between 2008 and 2025, but especially after 2016 (SOGC 2025). This was facilitated by the 2014 Swiss-Chinese Free Trade Agreement, Switzerland’s neutral stance amid rising tensions between the United States and China, low taxes, business and foreign investment-friendly regulations, and strength in science, technology, and innovation. The partially state-owned ZTE opened an office in 2018 but closed it a year later (SOGC 2025). While competitors whom I interviewed claimed that the company had done a ‘bad job’ in Switzerland, the closure was largely linked to a 2018 US export ban on ZTE (Li 2018). Much of this unfolded during my project, allowing me to attend opening ceremonies and observe events and media controversies at first hand.

Huawei, the pioneering and most iconic corporate entity in media coverage and debate, well represents the broader challenges faced by Chinese firms in this sector. Ren Zhengfei founded Huawei Technologies in 1987 in Shenzhen as a nominally private company. The firm then expanded into Western Europe in the 2000s through joint ventures and tender wins, opening its Swiss office in 2008 (Kaufmann 2020). Since the Sino-American trade war began in 2019, coinciding with the start of my project, Huawei has faced increasing scrutiny in the United States, Western Europe, and Australia. Governments and media often portray the company as a vehicle for Chinese state influence, citing allegations of ties to the Chinese military, espionage concerns related to 5G networks, and potential security vulnerabilities, fuelling suspicion and controversy. In May 2019, the United States placed Huawei on its Entity List, followed by other Chinese entities later that year (Federal Register 2019), effectively banning its products from US networks. The US authorities also lobbied European countries, including Switzerland, to follow suit, according to ICT professionals I interviewed.

So far, Switzerland has embraced ‘economic pragmatism’ (Grano and Weber 2023), including in telecommunications. Unlike many Western European countries, Swiss telecom providers, universities, health insurers, and public institutions continue to rely on Chinese components, albeit alongside other foreign suppliers. Debates have been less heated than in many Anglophone countries, as well as in neighbouring Germany, which plans to phase out Huawei components from its 5G network by 2029 (Ziady 2024).

Even in Switzerland, however, access remains challenging due to geopolitical tensions and other factors. Chinese companies face a unique ‘liability of origin’ in Europe (Nyiri et al. 2022), balancing domestic expectations and party control while dispelling suspicions and adapting to Western capitalist practices (de Graaff and Valeeva 2021). The high-tech sector’s competitiveness further reinforces secrecy (Kaufmann 2025). My positionality as a Western European woman in a male-dominated technical field added another layer of difficulty, requiring me to gradually build trust—especially with Chinese interlocutors who initially viewed me as much like the sceptical journalists they encountered.

This creates a morally and politically charged research environment, which may explain why studies of Chinese ICT firms in Europe—spanning business, economics, security, international relations, and media—focus on corporate strategies, global expansion, innovation, governance, and geopolitical implications. Relying mostly on written sources, online content, and interviews (for instance, Schaefer 2020; Rühlig and ten Brink 2021; Negro 2024), these works provide insights into economic, political, and media dimensions, but rarely use qualitative ethnographic fieldwork as the primary method. This is also notable beyond Western Europe (but for exceptions see Fei 2021; Liu and Pertierra 2024), despite the so-called Global South being a longstanding focus of Global China research (see Lee 2022). This calls for a reconsideration of methodological strategies to engage with these hard-to-access firms while maintaining a qualitative ethnographic approach that foregrounds actors and complexities.

‘Polymorphous Engagement’

Given the limited access to Chinese ICT companies in Switzerland, my methodological approach advocates for and extends anthropologist Hugh Gusterson’s (1997, 2021) concept of ‘polymorphous engagement’ for accessing extremely restricted field sites through qualitative ethnographic research. Developed during his research of nuclear weapons scientists in California at the end of the Cold War, amid secrecy and political sensitivity, this approach draws on Nader’s (1972) call for ‘studying up’—shifting anthropology’s focus to powerful institutions and elites. To overcome the challenges of access and studying up, Gusterson (1997: 116) proposed polymorphous engagement that involves ‘interacting with informants across a number of dispersed sites … sometimes in virtual form; and … collecting data eclectically from a disparate array of sources’, including interviews, newspapers, official documents, and popular culture.

Studying Chinese high-tech companies in Western Europe shares similarities with Gusterson’s field in its restricted access, necessitating diverse methods and sensitivity to power dynamics between researchers and institutions. However, the geopolitical context differs, as global technological competition, European data protection laws, and media narratives on Chinese influence shape the research.

Expanding on Gusterson’s notion and drawing from ethnographic, historical, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches, I propose a polymorphous framework for researching Global China in Western Europe and beyond. Communication scholar Angela Ke Li (2024) makes a similar case for studying Chinese internet companies in China (see also Seaver 2017 on digital fields). My transnational, historical, and socio-technical focus on digital infrastructures distinguishes my approach from Li’s, combining: 1) analysis of written sources, 2) qualitative interviews with a historical lens, and 3) multi-sited participant observation of human and nonhuman actors, as outlined below.

1) Analysis of written sources: When access is restricted, analogue and digital written sources can complement and triangulate fieldwork data. In my case, these included Swiss and Chinese government communiqués on Sino-Swiss relations, citizen initiatives against 5G networks, and parliamentary documents on Switzerland’s participation in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and phasing out the official China Strategy (FDFA 2021). I examined company websites, reports, and marketing materials promoting narratives of transparency and security, and social media posts revealing job openings and local expansion strategies. Swiss-Chinese Chamber of Commerce and investment promotion reports, commercial registers, and data from the stock exchange and Swiss National Bank provided glimpses into under-monitored Chinese investments. Meanwhile, Swiss, Chinese, and international media reports both reflect and shape narratives on Chinese companies, highlighting either geopolitical concerns or the economic value of cooperation.

While these written sources offer valuable insights into various stakeholders’ discourses, they are shaped by specific agendas, audiences, and power dynamics. Critical engagement and contextualisation of these sources are essential to enhance understanding of the complexities surrounding Chinese businesses in Western Europe.

2) Qualitative interviews with a historical lens: Qualitative interviews offer rich insights into individual perspectives (Bernard 2018). I conducted semi-structured narrative interviews alongside informal in-person and phone conversations, and written email and WeChat correspondence. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I adapted to online interactions, which added further challenges to networking and access. I initiated interviews by emailing the companies’ management. Most of the managers or senior executives to whom I was referred agreed to be interviewed, usually in their offices. Through snowball sampling, I included participants across social and professional backgrounds. To deepen the temporal dimension, I used narrative interviews with a historical focus, exploring oral histories of my interviewees and their companies’ Swiss operations. This enriched my understanding of these companies in the Swiss context, proving an effective interview strategy. Interviewees were often more comfortable discussing past actions than current tensions. Framing our research as a history of digital Switzerland resonated with many, who expressed interest in contributing to the broader digital history my project colleagues and I were documenting.

3) Multi-sited participant observation of human and nonhuman actors: Participant observation (DeWalt and DeWalt 2010) obtains immersive, everyday insider perspectives on social practices, relationships, and material realities to understand and contrast what people write or say with what they do. Unsurprisingly, management rejected my requests for long-term observation; too much was at stake. When the pandemic prevented fieldwork in China—I had already arranged a visit to one company’s headquarters—I conducted multi-sited research in Switzerland. I observed various Chinese ICT firms, their partners, and competitors, visiting offices, online and onsite events, industry fairs, Swiss-Chinese business events, trade and investment conferences, company openings, innovation labs, and a corporate research centre.

I broadened my focus beyond human actors and corporations to include nonhuman actors, drawing on STS’s attention to human/nonhuman assemblages and the notion of socio-technical systems (outlined in anthropology by Pfaffenberger 1992). I paid particular attention to the internet technologies and cable networks that ICT companies produce, build, and maintain (Figure 1).

Before visiting companies, I asked to see the technologies they marketed and their network sites. My interlocutors usually agreed, offering insights into the materiality of digital infrastructures and their embeddedness in physical spaces. I observed factory workers handling fibre-optic cables, construction workers laying them underneath the Swiss countryside, and technicians connecting colourful fibre strands to large data-storage systems in highly secured data centres—accessible only after rigorous security checks, with no photos or phone calls allowed.

My site visits often took me underground—removing manhole covers, descending ladders into dark, humid spaces to observe maintenance (Figure 2) on network components such as a Chinese device called MicroCAN that connects Switzerland’s older copper and newer fibre-optic networks. I traced cables through basements and tunnels beneath Bern and explored Zurich’s Milchbuck Tunnel, where telecom and energy infrastructure run deep below the traffic—startling a lone toad. I also spent a week training with apprentices, installing Chinese equipment for Swiss telecom companies (Figure 3).

These experiences allowed me to literally get a feel for my interlocutors’ work, grasp the basics of fibre optic networks, and develop sensory awareness of the tacit knowledge and embodied skills involved. A wrong touch or mismatched cable colours could disrupt data transmission (Figure 4). Observing these processes also revealed how technical expertise is distributed among technicians, engineers, and managers, highlighting the labour behind digital infrastructure.

Beyond the technical, I saw how environmental factors—rainwater in manholes, rodents chewing cables, or unexplained equipment failure—affect network functionality beyond political debates about the vulnerabilities of using Chinese technology. This also revealed gaps between public narratives and on-the-ground practices. While Swiss firms publicly distanced themselves from Chinese ICT companies, their operations often showed close collaboration. For instance, one Swiss company sold Huawei equipment under its own name, concealing its origin—something I observed in the company’s showroom and which was informally confirmed by the manager. While rebranding itself may not be illegal, it could have legal implications if it constitutes deception under the Swiss Unfair Competition Act or violates the US Export Administration Regulations on components of US origin.

I learned how companies strategically navigated regulatory and political concerns through social and material practices. For example, one Chinese ICT company created images and narratives of Swiss-ness: its offices featured a plastic cow and a Matterhorn mural, and its innovation centre a snowy Swiss chalet backdrop. Strategic hiring of Swiss and European employees who speak up for the company in public reinforced this (see Kaufmann and Remund forthcoming).

Exploring the material aspects of digital infrastructures also revealed additional insights into the human actors behind them, beyond formal interviews. Often hidden underground, undersea, or in remote data centres, such infrastructure may seem devoid of people, yet it is shaped by individuals balancing corporate pressures, careers, health, and transnational family life. For example, Mrs Wang, raised with socialist ideals of gender equality, found the male-dominated Swiss telecommunications industry ‘the biggest shock in my professional life’ (Kaufmann 2020). Long working hours and a colleague’s sudden death later led her to retire early. Another employee, prioritising his son’s Swiss education over a company-mandated return to China, secured a job at a local partner firm. Others, expecting reassignment to headquarters, left their children in China with grandparents (Kaufmann and Remund forthcoming).

Thus, Chinese corporate expansion is not just about state and business interests, but also shaped by individuals making strategic life choices affecting how ‘Chinese capital’ (Lee 2017) unfolds abroad. Studying these dynamics requires a polymorphous research approach that navigates access limitations and ethical complexities.

Ethical Challenges

Studying corporations (Figure 5) presents unique ethical challenges. Focusing primarily on Western contexts, especially Silicon Valley, business anthropologists have emphasised balancing stakeholder interests, informed consent, transparency, confidentiality, censorship, and conflicts of interest (see Baba 2006). Research often involves ‘studying up’ (Nader 1972; Gusterson 2021), shaped by power asymmetries, as scholars work under corporations’ legal and informational control, which affects access and narrative framing.

Some of the challenges I faced are common to corporate research; others are specific to Global China. Management usually has expectations about how companies should be portrayed. This places researchers in a difficult position between corporate efforts to influence presentations of findings and external demands for critical distance (from media, policymakers, and academia).

For instance, the research centre representative asked me to submit drafts to his public relations department. I did not comply after a contentious encounter with his colleague, who wanted to alter my manuscript (see below). While he sought to ensure a favourable portrayal of the company, others privately criticised the Chinese Government and workplace practices, especially regarding overwork. To protect these individuals from professional risk, I sometimes refrained from publishing their criticisms.

Anonymisation also proved difficult, particularly when using written sources and studying highly visible multinationals. While anthropological ethics require the protection of interlocutor identities, anonymising entire companies is sometimes impossible. Moreover, corporations have legal teams to shield them from scrutiny, and unfavourable publications can carry legal risks (McCabe and Mickle 2025).

A senior executive—European rather than Chinese—insisted on reviewing my draft publication, attempting to ‘correct’ the text, such as removing my mention of the founder’s former connection to the military. When I initially refused, he became increasingly insistent. I noted:

I am having trouble with [a manager]. He made a lot of corrections to his quotes … The anthropological ideal of … seeing research partners not just as informants but also as collaborators … takes on a completely different dimension in the politicised context of [Chinese ICT companies] when it comes to their attempts to influence the content of publications in their favour. (Fieldnotes, January 2020)

This experience echoes anthropologists’ recent critiques of the ideal of collaboration in studying management (Stein 2025). In 2020, ‘studying up’ was new to me. Writing about powerful managers felt more difficult than writing about marginalised peasants and migrants during my PhD. I struggled with limited access and what I sensed was a lack of support for my interlocutors’ business concerns—although in retrospect these new perspectives proved valuable. At that moment, I sought legal advice from my university lawyer, who posed a pragmatic rather than legal question: should I let my interlocutor withdraw his interview, which was his right, or were the quotes essential enough to justify allowing the minor changes he requested, although I wasn’t legally obliged and it could raise ethical concerns? Since the requested edits were minor and the quotes essential, I accepted the changes. However, this made me reconsider anonymity. While I had initially named interviewees—with their consent and in line with historical research norms where I was employed—I have since returned to anthropological anonymisation practices. Nevertheless, company names remain difficult to obscure because they appear in written sources.

While such ethical challenges are common in business research, Chinese ICT companies in Europe pose additional dilemmas. The blurred line between state and private ownership and the political debate surrounding Chinese multinationals, beginning with the ‘Going Global’ strategy and intensifying with the BRI (Lee 2022), have made engagement with Chinese multinationals highly politicised. Studying Chinese companies means grappling with the heightened scrutiny they face in global media and political arenas. As security concerns and geopolitical tensions dominate public narratives, engagement with Chinese companies—and China more generally (see, for instance, Schubert and Alpermann 2022)—risks being subsumed into broader debates. To protect my interlocutors, collaborators, and project members and maintain access, I largely avoided public political commentary—an approach my history colleagues, who rarely face the complexities of fieldwork, found overly cautious. There are no easy answers: qualitative empirical China research involves complex trade-offs (Alpermann 2022), both within China and in the study of Global China.

Conclusion

Hugh Gusterson’s (1997, 2021) assertion remains pertinent: sensitive sites such as Chinese ICT firms are precisely the kinds of contexts we should be studying, despite methodological and ethical challenges. The specificity of Chinese firms—characterised by intertwined state–corporate dynamics, global ambitions, and public debates—adds complexity. But it also makes them crucial for understanding the intersections of power, technology, and society. Grounded empirical ethnographic perspectives on hard-to-access field sites help to nuance dominant geopolitical narratives.

Applying a polymorphous approach to Global China, I have extended it into a socio-technical framework that incorporates historical, transnational, and digital-material dimensions. This allows, first, for attention to the temporalities of Chinese digital infrastructures—extending beyond the BRI and even the era of China’s Reform and Opening (see Kaufmann 2025).

Second, as Global China scholars have shown, Chinese engagements abroad are heterogeneous and fragmented, operating through complex state, corporate, and individual logics (Lee 2017; Driessen 2019; Franceschini and Loubere 2022). A polymorphous socio-technical lens reveals Chinese corporate expansion as a dynamic process shaped by multiple actors, infrastructure, and local conditions—rather than a monolithic state-led effort. This includes the agency of local actors. Business-friendly policies, neutrality, and broader economic interests related to Swiss businesses in China have allowed Chinese technology firms to thrive in Switzerland. Swiss partner companies also play a key role, collaborating while protecting their reputations by downplaying or concealing these partnerships.

Third, centring not only political and corporate actors but also individuals, my interlocutors’ personal trajectories illustrate how globalisation is shaped as much by career aspirations, family considerations, health, and workplace cultures as by state directives.

Finally, considering the material dimensions of digital infrastructure—fibre-optic cables, data centres, and network equipment—underscores how Global China materialises not just in financial flows or transport networks, but also in the sensory, socio-material entanglements that structure the everyday lives of those whose labour is behind it.

By foregrounding these socio-technical assemblages, a polymorphous approach enables a more grounded and relational understanding of digital Global China—moving beyond binary narratives of dominance or dependence. It instead captures the situated, contingent, and evolving nature of Chinese engagements in the digital infrastructure of Europe—a region that has only recently received attention in Global China scholarship.

This research was funded in whole or in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), grant numbers 183016, 192205, and 216361. I would like to thank the Digital Entanglements project team at the University of Zurich, especially Monika Dommann and Max Stadler, for inspiring me to explore this topic, and the rest of the project, particularly Olivier Keller, Jenny Furter, and Leandra Sommaruga, for assisting with this research. Madlen Kobi and Elena Sischarenco inspired the first version of this paper at the Swiss Anthropological Association Conference 2022. Sandra Bärnreuther, Esther Horat, Esther Leemann, Han Tao, and Ruishi Zhen, as well as the organisers and participants of the Researching Global China Conference 2025 at the Open University, provided valuable comments. Helen Rana copyedited the article. I am indebted to my interviewees for sharing their time and insights with me.