A Review of Chinese E-Commerce Research: 2001–2020

Electronic commerce (EC) has become the most critical business activity worldwide. China has become the world’s second largest economy. This study reviewed EC studies in China because although research on EC has yielded numerous results, limited research have reviewed these papers. The data used in this study were obtained from the Web of Science database. A total of 1,982 journal articles published between 2001 and 2020 were collected. In addition to conducting an overall analysis on EC in China, this study referred to the Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China and divided the research period into 5-year stages. The BibExcel, UCINET, and SPSS software programs were used to conduct co-word analysis on the keywords in the papers for determining the knowledge structure and clustering of each stage and understanding the trend of leading research in the future. The results indicated that (a) Stages I–IV comprised 4, 3, 4, and 4 clusters, respectively. (b) Consumer’s personalized demands were considered in EC development activities ranging from the initial EC infrastructure construction to the integration of artificial-intelligence-related technology. (c) Topics regarding consumer behaviors were centered on Stages II and III, which indicated that the research on these topics was mature. (d) Stage IV explored the new research topic of integrating smart technology into the EC environment and indicated the characteristics of the e-market.