TITLE:
From Entrepreneur to Transnational Corporate Worker: BYD Investments and Changes in the Profile of Chinese Economic Migration to Brazil
AUTHORS:
Walter Barbieri Junior
KEYWORDS:
Chinese Migration, Corporate Mobility, Foreign Direct Investment, BYD, Technology Transfer
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.10,
October
29,
2026
ABSTRACT: This article examines recent changes in the profile of Chinese economic migration to Brazil, taking the establishment of BYD’s industrial complex in Camaçari, Bahia, as its main reference. For decades, the Chinese economic presence in Brazil was associated primarily with family networks, trade in imported goods, and small-scale entrepreneurship. The internationalization of Chinese companies has added another dimension to this process: the circulation of engineers, technicians, supervisors, managers, and other workers assigned to corporate projects, generally for limited periods. The study investigates how BYD’s productive investment contributes to this change. It adopts a qualitative, exploratory, and analytical approach, guided by the inductive method and based on bibliographic and documentary research. The sources include migration statistics, reports from the Brazil-China Business Council, government documents, corporate information, and press coverage. In the first quarter of 2026, Chinese citizens received 3193 work authorizations, accounting for 38% of all authorizations granted to foreign nationals during the period. Bahia was the destination associated with 55% of the Chinese authorizations in the first quarter of 2026, while Passos, Prado, and Pitombo (2026), drawing on Ministry of Justice data and company-linked information, reported that approximately 2700 Chinese BYD employees obtained work authorization between early 2025 and May 2026. The evidence does not indicate the disappearance of entrepreneurial migration, but rather the emergence of an overlapping form of corporate mobility organized around industrial investment. In the case under examination, capital, technology, and labor circulate in an interconnected manner. This creates opportunities for industrial learning while raising questions about the localization of production, the incorporation of Brazilian workers, and the actual extent of technology transfer.