Abstract
The government-enterprise relations aren’t logically definite with a clear scope, but “embedded” in multifold relations. A holistic analysis of their evolutions must focus on behavioral entities, such as central government, local governments, large, small and medium and non-state-owned enterprises, and also on complex interest relations between these entities, such as the relations between the central and local governments, the local government and the small and medium state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the small and medium SOEs and the non-SOEs, the non-SOEs and the large SOEs, as well as the central government and the large
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Notes
- 1.
Wang (1999).
- 2.
Polanyi (1992).
- 3.
Quoted from Bian (1999).
- 4.
Granovetter and Swedberg emphasize: “1. Economic action is a form of social action; 2. Economic action is socially situated; 3. Economic institutions are social constructions” [see Granovetter and Swedberg (1992)].
- 5.
Liu (2003).
- 6.
March and Olsen (1989).
- 7.
Zhang (1998).
- 8.
Douglas (1986).
- 9.
Polanyi argues that there are three general types of economic systems: redistribution, reciprocity and householding (Polanyi 2007).
- 10.
Nee (1989).
- 11.
- 12.
Liu (2006).
- 13.
Parish and Michelson (2002, p. 553).
- 14.
Szelenyi and Kostello (2002).
- 15.
Stark (1992).
- 16.
Lin et al. (2012).
- 17.
Polanyi (2007).
- 18.
Liu (2006).
- 19.
Evans et al. (2009). As far as the concept of “state autonomy” is concerned, while making a comparative analysis of the social revolutions in France, Russia and China, Theda Skocpol argued that the state is potentially autonomous, with its own logic and interests, but the logic and interests of the state are not necessarily equivalent to or fused with the interests of the ruling class in the society. The state is not just the arena for interest groups, its form reflects the dominant means of production, and it is also a macroscopic structure for levying tax, using coercive means and managing the organization of residents in many aspects (Skocpol 2007; Liu 2010).
- 20.
Evans (1995).
- 21.
Zhao and Hall (1994).
- 22.
- 23.
Wang and Hu (1994).
- 24.
Wang (1997).
- 25.
Zhou (2000).
- 26.
Liang (2007).
- 27.
Lehne (2007).
- 28.
Ren (2009).
- 29.
Qian and Xu (2008).
- 30.
Lin (2012).
- 31.
A “totalitarian society” refers to a society in which all important resources monopolized by the state, and based on such monopoly, the state has total and strict control of all social life. For example, both work units in cities and people’s communes in rural areas are the social governance structures in the totalitarian society (Sun et al. 1994; Qu et al. 2009).
- 32.
The totalitarian governance model of China is summarized as the centralized management, prison style management, countdown management, containment management and campaign management. The government has broad and profound functions and is the combination of custodian, manager, protector, benefit creator and instructor (Yan 2011).
- 33.
Li (2004, p. 10, 87).
- 34.
Dong (1979).
- 35.
Lu (2000).
- 36.
According to the Decision on Some Issues Concerning the Establishment of the Socialist Market Economic System adopted on the Third Plenary Session of the 14th CPC Central Committee, “The establishment of the socialist market economic system aims at enabling the market to play the fundamental role in resource allocations under macro-economic control by the state”. To turn this goal into reality, it is necessary to further transform the management mechanism of state-owned enterprises, and to establish a modern enterprise system which meets the requirements of the market economy and in which the property rights as well as the rights and responsibilities of enterprises are clearly defined, government administration and enterprise management are separated and scientific management is established.
- 37.
As is widely accepted in the academic world, from the reform and opening up to the early 1990s, the relations between the government and state-owned enterprises can be divided into the following stages. In the first stage (from 1979 to 1982), the government implements the profit retention policy, expands the autonomy of operation and gives enterprises control of partial proceeds to stimulate them for the improvement of production efficiency. However, the profit retention policy leads to the problem of “wages eating into profit margins”. To solve this problem, some local governments adopt the economic responsibility system of profit contracts. In the second stage (from 1983 to 1986), the main drawback of economic responsibility system is that enterprises are enthusiastic for increasing their own income even at the cost of damaging interests of the state. Consequently, this causes chaos in the economic order and continuous financial deficits due to “more work for more profits, less work for less profits, and no work for no profits”. In order to deal with such unfavorable situations, but without dampening the enthusiasm of enterprises and damaging interests of the state, the government has introduced new measures, which are mainly the reform of the tax system (replacement of profit delivery by taxes) and the factory manager responsibility mechanism. These measures can avoid the phenomena of “contending for the benchmark and quarrelling with the proportion” between enterprises and government owing to the profit retention policy and the economic responsibility system. Later, this practice shows that the tax reform is far from solving the fundamental problems of state-owned enterprises, but results in “whipping the fast and hard-working ox”. Overall, the operating efficiency of state-owned enterprises continues to decline. In order to change this situation, the reform by the government at the third stage (from 1987 to the mid-1990s) aims at reinvigorating enterprises through various forms of responsibility systems (contract, lease and shareholding etc.).
- 38.
Dong et al. (1995).
- 39.
Oi (1992).
- 40.
Zhou (2008).
- 41.
Walder (1995).
- 42.
Zhao (2001).
- 43.
Madsen (1999, pp. 35–56).
- 44.
Walder (1999).
- 45.
Cited from Li et al. (2009).
- 46.
Madsen (1999).
- 47.
Zhao (2001, pp. 45–46).
- 48.
When a considerable number of Chinese scholars praise that “democracy is good”, in the book Four Lectures on Democracy, Wang Shaoguang avoids the normative discussions and demonstrate through an empirical research that the electoral system is not true democracy and that the realistic democratic system is not necessarily linked to economic growth, social justice and human happiness. The rites of election every few years in many states are only a kind of psychological comfort to the general public, whose participation in the real decision marking is still very limited (Wang 2008).
- 49.
Li (2004, p. 11).
- 50.
Li (1993).
- 51.
Qu et al. (2009).
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Wei, Q., Li, H. (2019). The Government and Enterprises “Embedded” in Multifold Relations. In: Entities and Structures in the Embedding Process. Social Development Experiences in China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2390-4_2
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