An assessment of the state sector reform in China: Viability of ‘legal person socialism’

Keun Lee ()

Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, 1996, vol. 1, issue 1, 105-121

Abstract: The transformation of the old state enterprises into shareholding corporations is now being attempted as one form of corporatization in China. The Chinese authorities intend to encourage public‐oriented legal persons as shareholders for these shareholding corporations. This strategy, which can be termed ‘legal person socialism’, may be successful to the extent that corporatization brings in more funds and autonomy to the enterprises, but eventually more and more individual shareholders will have to be invited. Only currently ‘profitable’ state enterprises will be transformed into shareholding corporations and be able to sell stocks successfully. For loss‐making enterprises, transformation into shareholding corporations is now rarely permitted by the authorities and will not be a solution even if attempted. Thus, it can be said that the idea of legal person socialism is viable only for currently profitable enterprises if the state concentrates its financial and administrative resources on them, and that loss‐making enterprises are likely to be sold to or merged with domestic and foreign private investors. Thus, an emerging picture of the Chinese economy is that of a dual economic structure consisting of a majority of privately owned and a minority of state owned or controlled enterprises.

Date: 1996
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13547869608724578 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rjapxx:v:1:y:1996:i:1:p:105-121

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjap20

DOI: 10.1080/13547869608724578

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy is currently edited by Leong Liew

More articles in Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().