State Led Privatization In China

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.

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.

From 1978 through the turn of the century, China was transformed from a state-owned economy into a predominantly private economy. This fundamental change took place under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has been ideologically and politically predisposed to suppress private ownership. In Dancing with the Devil, Yi-min Lin explains how and why such a paradoxical reality came about. He shows that private ownership became a necessary evil for the CCP because the public sector was increasingly unable to address two essential concerns for regime survival: employment and revenue. Focusing on political actors as major change agents, Lin examines how their self-interested behavior led to the decline of public ownership in the context of China's evolving demographics and fiscal system. The constraints and incentives associated with these factors help explain CCP leaders' initial decision to allow limited private economic activities at the outset of reform. They also shed light on the ballooning opportunism among lower officials, which undermined the vitality of public enterprises. Furthermore, they hold a key to understanding the timing of the massive privatization in the late 1990s, as well as its tempo and spread thereafter. Dancing with the Devil illustrates how the driving forces developed and played out in these intertwined episodes of the story. In so doing, it offers new insights into the mechanisms of China's economic transformation and enriches theories of institutional change.

In the new global political economy, "privatization" names a transformation of the roles of public and private actors with the goal of reforming government policies and economic aid programs. It is an objective, a slogan, a fetish. But what does it signify? On the one hand, it refers to the process of changing industries, businesses, and services from governmental or public ownership to private agencies. But privatization now also extends to what are normally the prerogatives of national states: taxation, customs, internal security, national defense, and peace negotiations. In much of the literature, privatization is associated with the retreat, decline, or even demise of the state. Using Max Weber's concept of delegation, or "discharge," as a point of departure, Hibou and the contributors of this volume propose an alternative view, interpreting the contemporary restructuring of economic and political relations in much of the world as "the privatization of the state." This book challenges received ideas about the process of globalization and its presumed homogenization by suggesting that rather than weakening the powers of the state, privatization actually strengthens it. With examples from Russia, Poland, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, the book questions the supposed inefficiency of states in regulating capitalism and the role economic and financial knowledge play as substitutes for political and social analysis.

This insightful book demonstrates how China has emerged as one of the world's largest privatizing countries within a decade. Since the 1980s, there has been a global wave of transfer of state assets to private hands. China is a relatively late participant in this worldwide trend, yet, in the last decade it has emerged as one of the largest privatizing countries. Shu-Yun Ma argues that China s privatization is not based on any grand blueprint; rather, it is privatization by groping for stones to cross the river , a well-known metaphor often attributed to Deng Xiaoping, meaning that the reform simply proceeds on a trial-and-error basis without being guided by any theory. With original case studies, including one on China s first industrial shareholding enterprise, this informative book, will be of great interest to the academic community, China observers and policymakers, as well as financial analysts.

How China Became Capitalist details the extraordinary, and often unanticipated, journey that China has taken over the past thirty five years in transforming itself from a closed agrarian socialist economy to an indomitable economic force in the international arena. The authors revitalise the debate around the rise of the Chinese economy through the use of primary sources, persuasively arguing that the reforms implemented by the Chinese leaders did not represent a concerted attempt to create a capitalist economy, and that it was 'marginal revolutions' that introduced the market and entrepreneurship back to China. Lessons from the West were guided by the traditional Chinese principle of 'seeking truth from facts'. By turning to capitalism, China re-embraced her own cultural roots. How China Became Capitalist challenges received wisdom about the future of the Chinese economy, warning that while China has enormous potential for further growth, the future is clouded by the government's monopoly of ideas and power. Coase and Wang argue that the development of a market for ideas which has a long and revered tradition in China would be integral in bringing about the Chinese dream of social harmony.

This volume explores how Chinese institutions have adapted to the new challenges of 'state capitalism'.