Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform

China's State-Owned Enterprises Faced Seemingly Insurmountable Problems At The Beginning Of The 1980s.

Three decades later, the Chinese state has managed to overcome the economic and political obstacles to corporate restructuring and radically improve performance. The success of the process raises questions that challenge existing theories about the requisites for development and reform.

As the Chinese Communist party-state tried to reform its centrally planned economy, one of the most challenging policy questions was how to reform its state-owned enterprises. The difficulty was rooted in an ideological conundrum of whether the Chinese Communist Party should support a move from public to private ownership of the means of production. If so, what would be the political fallout? Worker unrest and resistance? Loss of regime legitimacy? Mixing the business of corporate restructuring with the politics of socialism presented nothing short of a policy nightmare.

With policy-relevant acuity and theoretical insights, the contributors to this wide-ranging volume address the questions about reform programs that have plagued China---and East Asia more broadly---since the 1990s. While China, Japan, and South Korea have all been criticized for implementing reform too slowly or too selectively, this volume delves into the broader contexts underlying certain institutional decisions. The book seeks to show that seemingly different political economies actually share surprising similarities, and problems. It examines what happens when sweeping systemic changes needed for effective reform are not possible all at once, and shows the difference state-led change can make in mediating the lack of basic institutions, including a national social security system. While Going Private in China sheds new light on China's corporate restructuring, it also offers new perspectives on how we think about the process of institutional change.