Outline the main characteristics of the reforms and developments of China’s state-owned enterprises. Assess their contribution to overall economic development.
Introduction
The Chinese Party Congress (CPC) Central Committee’s third plenary session has traditionally served as a forum for economic reform. Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader, introduced economic policies between 1978 and 1992, laying the groundwork for China to emerge the globe’s second economy. The entire globe was waiting for the outcomes of the 18th CPC Central Committee’s four-day closed-door 3rd party plenary, which ended on November 12. The party plenums have had a big impact on China’s economic structure throughout the years, so there is a lot of anticipation for a plan of economic and social reforms (Brandt & Rawski, 2008). China’s economy has grown through state-driven investments, which is managed by banking institutions and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). In this paper, the main characteristics of the reforms and development of China’s state-owned enterprises will be discussed, as well as their contribution in the general economic development.
Process Review
Since the restructuring and reforming era, it has become obvious that a micro-economic framework in which public participation prevails and different varieties of ownership share common wealth and progress is more fit for China (Burkett & Hart-Landsberg, 2005). In the early stages of reform and opening-up under the planned economy, China’s micro-economic structure evolved from a fairly homogeneous one controlled by the state-owned enterprises to a more logical one. During this phase, the percentage of products generated by state-owned sectors of the economy was decreasing, while the amount of output produced by private firms was increasing. Additionally, the large number of China’s industrial production was provided by public firms, which included both state-owned and jointly run businesses. The clear objective of this shift in policy was to reconstruct the nation’s economic structure after the Cultural Revolution era.
Characteristics of China’s Reforms
Regional Policy
China has taken a highly specific strategy in which particular territories or regions have been picked to spearhead the reformation. This strategy represented the officials’ considerable preference for experimenting, which stemmed from their sense of the difficulty of concurrent widespread transformation in such a big nation, as well as their desire to avert instability. The progressive growth in external orientation, under which China strove to improve its foreign currency earning potential, was a recurring element of the reforms (Chow, 2015). The initial reforms were also notable for focusing on locations with a limited number of major state-owned companies committed to mandated planning. Due to so several characteristics, the coastal provinces became the central focus of numerous areas of the reform attempt, to the extent where they became the reform process’ motivating factor. It’s also possible to argue that the reform process simply removed the hurdles to the coastal regions’ competitiveness being exploited.
The first move was to create special economic zones (SEZs), which were given more economic and managerial authority, such as the ability to authorize large-scale investment initiatives, give tax breaks and other perks to foreign-funded business owners, and, till the recently, keep a higher percentage of foreign exchange. An increasing gap in advancement in the economy among provinces and push from provinces for increased independence in their economic interactions with the national government, especially in topics impacting resource distribution, were two outcomes of these changes (Brautigam, 2015). Net distributions between the provinces and the federal government have been regulated by three- to four-year contracts, and there is still a feeling that these payments are not fair. Furthermore, because the provinces keep the majority of the government’s money, the agency’s capacity to govern macroeconomics through fiscal policy is limited. This is worsened by the People’s Bank of China’s challenge in limiting loan development due to governmental influence on provincial bank branches.
Decentralization and its Effects
The increasing devolution of economic decision-making authority has been a hallmark of China’s reform effort. The system of decentralization of decision-making abilities and authority from the headquarters to the provinces is most visible in the transformation in the framework of public investment and raw material distribution through the commodity distribution system. These mechanisms were at the center of Chinese centralized planning before reforms were implemented. The national administration’s grip over investment, both in terms of volume and quality, has dwindled dramatically (Chris, 2009). Moreover, as the breadth of compulsory planning has been reduced, state control over the distribution of essential raw commodities has rapidly diminished. The importance of investment in China’s GDP has always been considerable, indicating the government’s dependence on “accumulation” for development. Prior to the reform, the majority of fixed asset investment was centralized. State-owned firms, collectives, and people invested in total fixed asset investment (Shambaugh, 2013). These investments were generally funded from the budget or through a credit plan that included policy loans from banking institutions. As a result, the level and character of investment might be tightly regulated by the national government. Despite the fact that most investment decisions are still handled at a certain government level once reforms are implemented, the share of overall investment funded through outright budgetary allocations has dropped considerably. Given China’s fast growth of the non-state sector in recent years, this decrease is unsurprising in some ways. When the portion of money from the budget invested by state-owned units is studied, however, similar trends emerge.
Enterprise Ownership
One of several key questions facing economic reformers in China, as well as elsewhere, is whether maintaining public ownership poses an insurmountable barrier to market functioning and efficient resource allocation. China’s preference for public ownership as a means of realizing its socialist market economy goal has not changed. As envisioned by Chinese officials, such a system would be distinguished by increased competition and the abolition of required planning, but not necessarily by the substitution of state ownership with “private” ownership, as in a capitalist system (Lee, 2017). The goal is to keep public ownership dominant, complemented by non-state and private ownership, while successfully separating state ownership rights of corporations. Although the advancement of a socialist market economy is a latest primary objective in China, it represents a significant shift in the ideology of economic reform, ownership structures have been altered in a number of key ways that have had significant implications for enterprise management. These changes, in particular, could be interpreted as an attempt to mimic market trends by inspiring profit-maximizing behavior.
Rural Land Tenure
Even more than with corporate ownership, land formal ownership has remained largely unchanged and is nearly entirely controlled by the government. However, land control methods underwent a significant transformation. From 1949 to 1977, a three-level model of collectivization of land reform occurred, with families divided into labor teams, which were then organized into brigades, and finally into communes (Chow & Perkins, 2015). On a certain grounds, private holdings were allowed. Land was jointly owned under this arrangement, and the fundamental production team was a group of several households. Despite the abolishment of the previous structure of communes, brigades, and production teams, the organizations were reconstructed as townships or villages, with the government in control of land ownership and contract negotiations with the families.
Shareholding cooperative structures have evolved in numerous sections of the nation, in which property under the collective’s administrative management is rated and distributed into equal shares. Some shares are held in trust for the entire community, while the remainder is distributed among local households. Although these shares are not tradable, they do pay dividends. The cooperative’s operational tasks are outsourced to a board of directors, who are chosen under a system in which each member has one vote, regardless of how many shares they possess, and decisions are made by a majority vote (Lin et al., 2004). Farmers no longer operate small plots of land as a result of these experiments; instead, they give their contractual land to the cooperative in exchange for dividend-paying shares. The cooperative may farm the land and use it as an industrial location, employing labor from the cooperative’s members’ houses. This method has assisted in resolving some of the issues that come with tiny, dispersed land holdings.
State-Owned Enterprises
Since the starting of the transition from a planned to a market economy, the Chinese government has focused on reforming state-owned enterprises (SOEs). By stimulating economic growth and assisting as a key force for policy implementation, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have played a crucial responsibility in many emerging economies with a dominant governmental control. In the previous four decades, China has changed from an agricultural state to the world’s second largest economy and a gateway for the most cutting-edge inventions (Brandt & Rawski, 2008). This would not have been conceivable if its state-owned companies (SOEs) had not endured several stages of critical reforms aimed at enhancing their leadership. China has taken a more moderate approach, getting ready the economy for the transformation by establishing the required organizations and private property infrastructure, as well as reforming state-owned enterprises into contemporary competitive corporate entities.
Efficiency of State-Owned Enterprises
In the last four decades, the fundamental problem has dominated the overall pattern of reforming China’s state-owned companies. The type of microeconomic framework China requires is largely determined by the effectiveness of the prevailing entrepreneurship model. The productivity of state-owned firms influences the organizational structure selection of state-owned businesses to a great degree (Burkett & Hart-Landsberg, 2005). When the theoretical group thinks that state-owned companies are extremely effective, it is usually during a time of development of the government economic domain, according to experiences at domestically and overseas. When the theory circle believes that government firms are ineffective, the government sector of the economy is often in a recessionary period or quickening of transformation.
One of the most crucial objectives of China’s economic system reform since the reform and opening-up has been to encourage the transformation of government businesses. Initially, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were the dominant type of enterprise environment. State-owned enterprises, on the other hand, had significantly poorer performance levels than other types of businesses. The goal of enterprise reform is to construct a socialist economic system with autonomous firms as the core unit, as well as to address the mismanagement of state-owned enterprises on a broad scale (Chow, 2015). While state-owned firms undergo reform, the more effective jointly owned enterprises, as well as the personal and private economies, have grown significantly by undertaking the responsibility of stimulating economic development that state-owned enterprises cannot. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the surge sparked by such reforms was halted for couple of years, but then resumed.
The inefficiencies of state-owned firms that trail behind in reform grew to such a level in the mid and late 1990s that change was required. In this sense, the major priority of the late 1990s reform was to “focus on large corporations and abandon small ones to survive on their own,” which meant implementing the reform of transforming big state enterprises into minimum inventory corporations as well as the marketization reform for ineffective state-owned microenterprises (Brautigam, 2015). Personal and private economies have unparalleled growth potential as a result of this wave of industry transformation. Some private businesses even assisted in the reform of state-owned businesses, allowing them to grow and expand on their own.
There has been an increasing understanding of the inefficiencies of state-owned firms barely a few years after beginning the twenty-first century. Several studies conducted during this time period demonstrate that when property rights are gradually reformed, the efficiency of state-owned firms will increase in the late 1990s (Giovanni, 2007). Despite the fact that reorganization has some societal costs, reorganized businesses are usually more lucrative and have lower administrative costs. State-owned firms, inspired by such beliefs, expedited the reform process of transformation into marketization and efficient enterprise systems, which had only surmounted the challenges at the close of the twentieth century.
SASAC of the State Council and numerous local state-owned asset monitoring entities were formed one after the other after 2003. Following that, a prolonged debate about “the privatization of state assets,” sparked by the disagreement between Lang Xianping and Gu Chujun, led to fresh ideas about the structure and effectiveness of the state-owned business organisational structure. Following the global economic catastrophe of 2008, the concept of “Making State-owned Enterprises Bigger, Stronger, and Better” has steadily gained traction in public sentiment. The state-owned assets monitoring agencies have been issuing optimistic signs of the whole state-owned economy’s continued growth over the decades (Lee, 2017). They’ve been focusing on giving optimistic indications of increase in total earnings of state-owned firms ever since ending of 2016.
Future Prospects of SOEs
If we can stand in the years ahead and reflect back on today’s state-owned firms in China, we are plausible to conclude that the existing era is not only a period when state-owned enterprises have experienced unparalleled economic success and expansion, but also a moment when additional reform and advancement of state-owned enterprises face a very complicated set of circumstances and extremely difficult difficulties (Naughton, 2018). In this complicated environment, the Communist Party of China’s Nineteenth National Congress report proposes that the fundamental aim for state-owned business transformation and battle in the new era is to cultivate world-class firms with international competence.
State-owned firms have been exposed to the economic system and have reaped the benefits of the socialist system’s inherent benefits for their expansion, achieving the pinnacle of their own wealth and progress. These accomplishments appear to have created the groundwork for the success of China’s state-owned companies. On the down side, state-owned businesses’ inner multi-objective dilemmas, as well as arbitrary disputes and inconsistencies in regarding organizational rationale, have accrued to date, leading in resource misappropriation and inefficiencies that cannot be ignored (Chow & Perkins, 2015). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United Kingdom, a major power that had once grown swiftly through the system of state-owned enterprises in one or two decades after the end of World War II, had to turn to a policy of privatization to address its almost unexplainable deficiencies in the state-owned enterprise organisational structure.
General Direction
China’s state-owned businesses have been in a more logical place in the country’s economy after four decades of reform and opening-up, and they have consistently served a critical function (Shambaugh, 2013). During this phase, the structure of state-owned companies’ organizational system has improved, developing a corporate share ownership system with Chinese attributes that essentially meets the specifications of the market system, completing the transition from state-owned units to self governing ventures. The main objective and aim of China’s state-owned company reform are obvious from the long phase of the previous 40 years.
People’s perceptions about state-owned firms have shifted in the last 10 years, and state-owned enterprises’ commercial operations have also altered dramatically. The economic magnitude and corporate architecture of today’s state-owned firms are vastly different from those of the late twentieth century (Chris, 2009). Simultaneously the general public has more faith in the ability of state-owned firms to succeed in their operations. However, in this context, the challenges of poor productivity and high debt that continue to afflict state-owned firms are once again underlined. China made it apparent in the mid and late 1990s that state-owned business reform should be the primary link in economic system change.
Even after two decades, there is still no agreement on where to go and how to pursue state-owned enterprise reform. The Eighteenth Central Committee’s Third Plenary Session outlined the prerequisites for comprehensive reform, which included reform of state-owned companies. Many papers have been written in recent years about the growth and transformation of state-owned firms, but from a realistic standpoint, the reform of state-owned enterprises has been a lot of talk and minimal action (Lin et al., 2004). Even though a vast number of state agencies are involved in the top concept, the ensuing experimental operation has been slow. The outcomes are unimpressive, and there are even some new issues that contravene enterprise operating law.
We must stick to the overall trend of deregulation and privatization and enterprization in the stages of developing China’s state-owned companies, hold business owners accountable for their choices, and allow the market select the winners and losers of businesses (Naughton, 2018). On the one hand, it is a necessity for state-owned enterprises and their insiders to make sure the overall trajectory of marketization and enterprization; on the other hand, it is a necessity for the entire society to establish an equal and fair competitive atmosphere for state-owned businesses as well as private corporations, other state-owned enterprises, and foreign-funded enterprises. Any “innovation” in a system should support the overall goal of deeper reform and entrepreneurship development.
References
Brandt, L., & Rawski, T. G. (Eds.). (2008). China’s great economic transformation. Cambridge university press.
Brautigam, D. (2015). Will Africa Feed China?. Oxford University Press.
Burkett, P., & Hart-Landsberg, M. (2005). Thinking about China: Capitalism, socialism, and class struggle. Critical Asian Studies, 37(3), 433-440.
Chow, G. C. (2015). China’s economic transformation. John Wiley & Sons.
Chow, G. C., & Perkins, D. H. (Eds.). (2015). Routledge handbook of the chinese economy. London: Routledge.
Chris, B. (2009). Chinese economic development. London and New York: Routledge.
Giovanni, A. (2007). Adam Smith in Beijing: lineages of the twenty-first century. New York.
Lee, C. K. (2017). The specter of global China: Politics, labor, and foreign investment in Africa. University of Chicago Press.
Lin, J. Y., Cai, F., & Li, Z. (2004). The China miracle: Development strategy and economic reform (Revised Edition). The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.
Naughton, B. J. (2018). The Chinese economy: Adaptation and growth. Mit Press.
Shambaugh, D. L. (2013). China goes global: The partial power (Vol. 111). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
write