Dejun Kong, Shuang Lu

Dejun Kong

May 06, 2026

Business environment, Ethnic regions, Community construction, Meso mechanisms.

The optimization of the sphere of business in ethnic territories can bring about spillover effects on community building by organizational coordination and the change in rules. Nevertheless, there is no adequate explanation of the intermediate mechanisms that propagate these effects based on currently available theory. In order to bridge this void, we analyze the ethnic specialty food sector in Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu Province, and present a meso-level analysis framework with the focus on institutional supply -organizational coordination- relationship reconstruction- community outcomes. Our findings indicate that industrial park anchoring, chain-leader enterprise mobilization, standardization and brand integration have transformed the industry into organized cooperation instead of fragmented operations. Such alterations are creating step-by-step conditions to build communities since they allow establishing common rules, expressing interests, and strengthening the interactions between the participants. Our claim is that the spill-over into community building of business environment optimization does not rely on the policy rhetoric. It is determined by the way institutional supply is converted into steady cooperative relationships and continuous interaction situations through industrial organization. The research offers a fruitful analytical viewpoint on the issue of how the regulation of business environment in ethnic regions could play a role in building communities.

© 2026, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license