When, how, and why did the state enterprise system of modern China take shape? The conventional argument is that China borrowed its economic system and development strategy wholesale from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. In an important new interpretation, Bian shows instead that the basic institutional arrangement of state-owned enterprise--bureaucratic governance, management and incentive mechanisms, and the provision of social services and welfare--developed in China during the war years 1937-1945.

In The Third Revolution, eminent China scholar Elizabeth C. Economy provides an incisive look at the transformative changes underway in China today. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi, himself, the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political, social, and economic life, and the construction of a virtual wall of regulations to control more closely the exchange of ideas and capital between China and the outside world. Beyond its borders, Beijing has recast itself as a great power, seeking to reclaim its past glory and to create a system of international norms that better serves its more ambitious geostrategic objectives. In so doing, the Chinese leadership is reversing the trends toward greater political and economic opening, as well as the low-profile foreign policy, that had been put in motion by Deng Xiaoping's "Second Revolution" thirty years earlier. Through a wide-ranging exploration of Xi Jinping's top political, economic and foreign policy priorities-fighting corruption, managing the Internet, reforming the state-owned enterprise sector, improving the country's innovation capacity, enhancing air quality, and elevating China's presence on the global stage-Economy identifies the tensions, shortcomings, and successes of Xi's reform efforts over the course of his first five years in office. She also assesses their implications for the rest of the world, and provides recommendations for how the United States and others should navigate their relationship with this vast nation in the coming years.

China's rise as the world's second-largest economy surely is the most dramatic development in the global economy since the year 2000. Volume II, which spans China's two turbulent centuries from 1800, charts this wrenching process of an ancient empire being transformed to re-emerge as a major world power. This volume for the first time brings together the fruits of pioneering international scholarship in all dimensions of economic history to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of this tumultuous and dramatic transformation. In many cases, it offers a fundamental reinterpretation of major themes in Chinese economic history, such as the role of ideology, the rise of new institutions, human capital and public infrastructure, the impact of Western and Japanese imperialism, the role of external trade and investment, and the evolution of living standards in both the pre-Communist and Communist eras. The volume includes seven important chapters on the Mao and reform eras and provides a critical historical perspective linking the past with the present and future.

This book focuses on the nature and significance of China’s state enterprises which have undergone substantial changes since China’s economic liberalization in 1978. It argues that much of the criticism is based on mistaken premises, where even the term ‘state-owned enterprises’ is a misnomer given that the emphasis is much less on ownership than on control. Using numerous case studies, this book highlights the extent to which these enterprises have evolved in response to reforms, and provides an in-depth analysis of their role in China’s outward investment strategy in the “Belt and Road” initiative. This role speaks to their growing influence as China expands her global footprint.

China's stunning growth rates have corresponded with the rise of 'state capitalism'. Since the mid-2000s, China's political economy has stabilized around a model where most sectors are marketized and increasingly integrated with the global economy; yet strategic industries remain firmly in the grasp of an elite empire of state-owned enterprises. What are the implications of state capitalism for industrial competitiveness, corporate governance, government-business relations, and domestic welfare? How does China's model of state capitalism compare with other examples of state-directed development in late industrializing countries? As China enters a phase of more modest growth, it is especially timely to understand how its institutions have adapted to new challenges and party-state priorities. In this volume, leading scholars of China's economy, politics, history, and society explore these compelling issues.

In China’s Social Insurance in the Twentieth Century, Aiqun Hu develops a framework of “interactive diffusion of global models” in examining the history of China’s social insurance since the 1910s. The book covers both Nationalist- and Communist-controlled areas (1927-1949) and Taiwan (1949-present), surpassing the party divide. It argues that China’s progression in social insurance resulted from diffusion of two global models (German capitalist and Soviet socialist social insurance) until the early 1990s. Thereafter, China’s social insurance reforms were increasingly directed by the World Bank’s neoliberal models, which also influenced Taiwan’s pension reforms. During the entire process, however, global forces provided the basic intellectual framework, while national forces determined the timing and specifics of adopting the models.

This work explores state building and the processes by which supporting state bureaucratic organizations aided the state building effort in Republican China between 1927 and 1940. It suggests that in hostile environments profoundly non-congenial to state building efforts, it is the state organizations that stand the best chance of becoming well institutionalized. This book details the administrative histories and institution-building strategies of three organizations in Republican China dealing with the national civil service, taxation, and foreign affairs.

China's breathtaking economic growth, has often led observers to assume that the country's economic system has been transformed into a capitalist economy dominated by private enterprise. Although China's reliance on private enterprise and market-based incentives has been growing, and the CCP's treatment of private enterprises and entrepreneurs has been changing, it would be a mistake to minimize the current role of the State and the CCP in shaping economic outcomes in China and beyond. The Chinese government and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) remain potent economic forces. Indeed, some of China's SOEs are among the largest firms in China and the world. They are major investors in foreign countries. They have been involved in some of the largest initial public offerings in recent years and remain the controlling owners of many major firms listed on Chinese and foreign stock exchanges.

The Nature, the Performance, and the Reform of State-owned Enterprises provides a detailed description of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China with respect to both efficiency and income distribution. It shows that state ownership in the form of SOEs does not use resources efficiently and has a poor record in income distribution. Moreover, SOEs are found to enjoy unfair advantages in their competition with other firms. To illustrate the point, the book presents data revealing how favored policies, monopolistic powers, and subsidies benefit SOEs. These advantages are worth several trillion yuans a year. It is a sad irony that such wealth of the people is used to beef up the revenues of the SOEs, making their accounts look much better than they should be.This book, with its rich empirical data and information, is an authoritative reference for researchers interested in SOEs. It is also a good read for students of social sciences and the public to learn more about SOEs.

Given the near-silence in technological and business history about post-World War II socialist enterprises, this book gives voice to a generation of Communist China’s managers, entrepreneurs, cadres, and workers from the Liberation to the early 1970s. Using recently-opened online archival resources, it details and assesses the course of technical and organizational experimentation at state-owned, cooperative, and private enterprises as the PRC strove to construct a socialist economy through trial-and-error initiatives. Core questions treated are: How did Chinese enterprises operate, evolve, experiment, improvise and adjust during the PRC’s first generation? What technological initiatives were crucial to these processes, necessarily developed with limited expertise and thin financial resources? How could constructing “socialism with Chinese characteristics” have helped lay foundations for the post-1980 “Chinese miracle,” as the PRC confidently entered the 21st century while Soviet and Central European socialisms crumbled? And what might current-day Western managers and entrepreneurs learn from Chinese practice and performance a half-century ago? Readers can anticipate a granular, bottom-up analysis of how businesses worked day-to-day in a planned economy, how enterprise practices and technological strategies shifted during the first postwar generation, how managers and technicians emerged after the capitalist exodus, how organizations experimented and adapted, and how the controversies and convulsions of the PRC’s early decades fashioned durable technical and organizational capabilities.