State Ownership and Corporate Governance in China: An Executive Career Approach

51 Pages Posted: 26 Oct 2013 Last revised: 2 Oct 2016

See all articles by Liwen Lin

Liwen Lin

Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia

Date Written: October 24, 2013

Abstract

China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) now comprise over 60 percent of the largest 500 companies in China and more than 10 percent of Fortune Global 500 companies in the world. Despite their importance to China’s domestic economy and foreign investment strategy, many governance characteristics of the SOEs remain a black box, one of which is the SOEs’ executive composition and recruitment development. This Article shifts away from the typical focus on how the things function (e.g. ownership structure and board of directors) to who the people in charge are, which is an important approach to understanding corporate governance and economic development in countries with weak legal institutions. It investigates the legal guidelines of SOE executive recruitment and the evolution of educational, political and career attributes of the CEOs of China’s large SOEs over the past decade. This Article utilizes legal, historical, sociological, and comparative methods to explain the change and stability of the executive composition in China’s large SOEs. The executive recruitment shows an orientation toward politically-bounded and firm-specific professionalism as well as some faint potential of bottom-up and competition-driven marketization. The recruitment guidelines and empirical findings in this Article raise questions about the adequacy and capacity of existing international laws and enforcement in coping with the rise of Chinese SOEs, the challenges to improving Chinese corporate governance, and the underlying forces that form apparent similarities in elite composition across countries.

Keywords: corporate governance, state-owned enterprise, human resources, varieties of capitalism, SASAC, China

Suggested Citation

Lin, Liwen, State Ownership and Corporate Governance in China: An Executive Career Approach (October 24, 2013). (2013) 3 Columbia Business Law Review Rev. 743-800, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2344987

Liwen Lin (Contact Author)

Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia ( email )

1822 East Mall
Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z1
Canada

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