Chinese Privatization

Large-scale privatization did not emerge spontaneously in China in the late 1990s. Rather, the Chinese state led and carefully “planned” ownership transformation with timetables and measurable privatization quotas, not for the purpose of extracting the state from the economy, but in order to strengthen the rule of the Party. While it is widely believed that authoritarian regimes are better suited than democracies to carry out economic reform, this book provides a more nuanced understanding of reform in China, demonstrating that the Chinese state’s capacity to impose unpopular reform is contingent on its control over local state agents and its adaptability to societal demands. Building on rich fieldwork data gathered in three Chinese cities (Shenyang, Shanghai, and Xiamen), this book offers the first comparative study of China’s privatization processes at the local level. Instead of focusing solely on political elites, Jin Zeng adopts a multi-level interaction approach to examine how the complex interplay of the central leadership, grassroots officials, and state-owned enterprise managers and workers shaped the contour of privatization in China.The book advances three central arguments. First, local economic structure and cadre evaluation system mediated local officials’ incentives to initiate privatization. Second, local officials relied on mobilization campaigns and various appeasement measures to implement privatization. Finally, the dynamics of privatization were fundamentally driven by the central government’s reactions to social opposition and by the subsequent responses of local officials to the changed political-regulatory environment. As a detailed analysis of the dual transformation of the property regime and state–society relations in China, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Chinese politics, economic reform, as well as those interested in comparative political economy and economic development more broadly.

Although China's centrally planned economy is a little more than a shadow of its former self, the closely inter-linked reforms of the enterprise and banking sectors are still incomplete. The relative size of the state-owned enterprise sector has been much reduced, however, the sector remains the dominant borrower from the banking system and is responsible for the majority of bank non-performing assets. Thus in the interests of financial stability it is crucial to implement the remaining reform agenda. The accession to the WTO has also made it more urgent for China's most-dynamic state-owned en.

PRIVATIZING CHINA INSIDE CHINA'S STOCK MARKETS In more depth than any other, this highly readable book lays bare why China's capital markets have fallen so far short of their promise. It is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the realities and the future of an extraordinary economic transformation. - James Kynge, Former Beijing Bureau Chief, Financial Times, Author, China Shakes the World Carl Walter and Fraser Howie bring together a wealth of experience to this complex and deeply important topic. Their book contains a mine of invaluable quantitative and qualitative information as well as an incredible depth of knowledge. It is essential reading for anyone investing in companies from mainland China. - Professor Peter Nolan, Judge Institute of Management Studies, University of Cambridge Privatizing China is essential for anyone who wants to understand China's companies and stock markets. no one should invest in China without reading it. - Arthur Kroeber, Managing Editor, China Economic Quarterly Carl Walter and Fraser Howie combine a deep knowledge of China and finance to provide an unflinching perspective on the country's effort to build functioning capital markets. China may have wowed the world with its high-speed economic growth and manufacturing prowess, but this book is compelling evidence that Beijing's mastery of the universe does not yet extend to the stock market. - Richard MacGregor, beijing Correspodent, FinancialTimes This book will answer many people's questions regarding SOEs and the stock market. I think it is destined to become the standard reference work on the subject. - Jean C. Oi, Director, Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University

Dancing with the Devil explains why public ownership has declined in post-Mao China. Focusing on the behavior of political actors under changing incentives and constraints, the book illustrates how growing concerns about jobs and revenue have forced the country's communist rulers to change their policies toward private capital.

Everyday life in China is increasingly shaped by a novel mix of neoliberal and socialist elements, of individual choices and state objectives. This combination of self-determination and socialism from afar has incited profound changes in the ways individuals think and act in different spheres of society. Covering a vast range of daily life—from homeowner organizations and the users of Internet cafes to self-directed professionals and informed consumers—the essays in Privatizing China create a compelling picture of the burgeoning awareness of self-governing within the postsocialist context. The introduction by Aihwa Ong and Li Zhang presents assemblage as a concept for studying China as a unique postsocialist society created through interactions with global forms. The authors conduct their ethnographic fieldwork in a spectrum of domains—family, community, real estate, business, taxation, politics, labor, health, professions, religion, and consumption—that are infiltrated by new techniques of the self and yet also regulated by broader socialist norms. Privatizing China gives readers a grounded, fine-grained intimacy with the variety and complexity of everyday conduct in China's turbulent transformation.

This work evaluates China's privatization experience, drawing on the research of ten scholars from around the world. It investigates the factors determining the decision by government officials to sell or retain their firms, discusses how credible the government's ambition is to create world-class, state-owned conglomerates and much more.

This book illustrates the role that Private Security Companies (PSC) with ‘Chinese characteristics’ play in protecting people and property associated with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The revival of the ancient Silk Road economic “belt,” combined with the 21st Century sea lanes of communication known as the “road,” is intended to enhance global connectivity and increase commercial activity. However, the socio-political risks associated with Chinese outbound direct investments are often overlooked. Terrorism, separatism, kidnapping and other risks are mostly new to Chinese companies, some of which are operating abroad for the first time. Economic globalization and the transnational exploitation of natural resources have increased the need for Chinese-owned PSCs in spite of the disdain for the profession of “a lance for hire.” Due to peculiar geo-strategic and geo-economic features, the “belt” from Central Asia to Pakistan and the “road” from the Somali coast to the Strait of Malacca are characterized by a high level of insecurity. This book’s focus on how the state’s monopoly of force privatization can play a significant role in protecting the New Silk Road will be of interest to policymakers, journalists, and academics.

Based on Party and state documents, Chinese newspaper reports and surveys, the Chinese and Western scholarly literature and the author's own fieldwork, this important study examines the private sector as a case study of the mechanics of reform in China, emphasizing the relationships among local officials, private businesses, and central policy. The book traces the growth of private business in China since 1978 and focuses on the interaction between private sector policy and other reforms and examines how this has affected China's political economy.

This title was first published in 2000: This work provides a new insight into china's township and village enterprises (TVEs). It views the governance structure of TVEs as effectively combining the comparative advantage of local government officials in external management and of dual firm managers in internal management to overcome imperfections in both market and government during the transitional period. Through extensive field investigation analysis and case studies, this work shows that the governance structure of TVEs has been evolving during the past fifteen years. To adapt to the changing environment, TVEs have continuously innovated firm contractual form from a government official dominant fixed-wage form to a partnership style profit-sharing form, then to a privatization oriented fixed-rent form. This work develops a complete model to explain how the central government’s partial reform efforts in market liberalization have become the driving force to induce the contractual form innovation, and to explicate how heterogeneity in firms’ technical structures and in local economic settings may affect local government’s decisions regarding contractual form innovation. Using the author’s unique data set, the model simulations predict that the development in the whole market system will result in the diffusion of contractual form innovation and lead to an 'induced privatization’ in this sector. The following empirical studies show this to be a powerful prediction and the progress toward such ’induced privatization' can be expected in China in near future. This research work provides a rich empirical study on China’s institutional transition towards a market system. It explains how a bottom-up endogenous, instead of top-down exogenous, property rights reform can be realized in transitional economies. This work will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and students in economics, economic development and institutional economics - and especially for those interested in research.

Much is written about the various efforts aimed at reforming China’s state-owned enterprises. But in all this literature the Chinese government’s determined effort to use the equity capital markets as a tool of enterprise reform has been virtually ignored. The fact is that during the past decade this has been, and will continue to be, the principal thrust with regard to the reform of state-owned enterprises. On-again, off-again, noises about bankruptcy, M&A solutions and asset management companies are only sideshows in the process. Carl E. Walter is a Managing Director of JP Morgan and Chief Operating Officer of its China businesses. Prior to joining JP Morgan in 2001, Mr. Walter was a Managing Director and member of the Management Committee of China International Capital Corporation. He was Chief Representative in Beijing for Credit Suisse First Boston from 1993-8. During his decade in China, Mr. Walter has participated in a number of pathbreaking international and domestic share listings and debt issues for Chinese companies, banks and the Ministry of Finance. He holds a PhD from Stanford University and a graduate certificate from Beijing University. Fraser Howie is an independent financial analyst located in Beijing. Over the past ten years he has worked in Hong Kong trading equity derivatives at Bankers Trust and Morgan Stanley. After moving to China in 1998 he worked in the Sales and Trading Department of China International Capital Corporation then with a domestic retail financial services company and most recently with China M&A Management Company.