China enters the WTO: Choices and prospects

Abstract

Part 1 analysed the ways in which China’s policymakers and managers attempted to build large firms in different sectors that could challenge the global giants. In the course of two decades of struggle, China’s large enterprises changed greatly, achieving evolutionary institutional change in key aspects of their business organization. As was seen in Part 2, during the same period the world’s leading businesses underwent high-speed, revolutionary transformation. As the epoch of the ‘global level playing field’ moves ever closer, it becomes increasingly necessary for China’s reforming large enterprises to benchmark themselves realistically against the global giants. The historic agreement of 15 November 1999 between the US and China on China’s accession to the WTO (see below, Section 3.3), makes that task even more urgent. This section examines the capability of China’s national champions to compete on the ‘global level playing field’. It uses firm-level case studies, as well as secondary sources to examine the IT and financial services sectors.