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Reforming China's State-owned Enterprises: From Structure to People

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2017

Li-Wen Lin*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia. Email: lin@allard.ubc.ca.

Abstract

The Chinese Communist Party has recently unveiled its new agenda for state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform. Most attention to date has focused on structural reform through the so-called “mixed ownership” policy. This article is to direct attention to a critically important yet much less analysed item on the SOE reform agenda: the professionalization of the SOE executive personnel. This article provides an empirical study on the managerial elite of China's financial and non-financial SOEs. The findings suggest a politically constrained management approach in the Chinese state-owned sector. Moreover, an innovative analysis of the SOE executive career patterns reveals that the state-controlled banks and industrial SOEs employ divergent human resource management methods. The anatomy of the SOE managerial elite in this article provides a timely evaluation of the recent SOE reform policy and a richer understanding of China's state-owned sector from a comparative capitalism perspective.

摘要

中国共产党最近公布了其最新的国企改革议程。目前多数评论者的眼光多专注于股权结构的改革, 即所谓的混合所有制。然而, 国企领导人的专业化是一项极重要惟较少研究关注的国企改革政策。本文以实证研究的方式分析金融与非金融国企的高管背景, 其研究结果显示中国国有企业有着政治上束缚的管理方式。此外, 本文以一种创新的方式对国企高管职业经历进行分析, 其结果显示金融与非金融国企展现出不同的人力资源管理配置方式。本文对于国企高管的解构对当前的国企改革政策提供了及时的评价, 并且从比较资本主义的观点对中国国有企业有更深的了解。

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © SOAS University of London 2017 

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