Strategic Convergence or Divergence: Comparing Structural Reforms in Chinese Enterprises

This chapter attempts to explore the strategic implications of enterprise reform that have been undertaken at three major Chinese firms in the context of the recent wave of nation-wide policies aimed at promoting market socialism and China’s projected entry into the WTO after the year 2000. These high-profile efforts have been directed at the national goal of building a market-oriented economy with Chinese characteristics (Child, 1994; Warner, 1995). The overall strategy, prescribed by the state, attempts to emulate the practice of the capitalist system known as marketization, which it hopes can still be accommodated within a doctrinal framework that still enshrines socialist principles (see Fortune, 1999). This hybrid blending of dialectical oppositions, between capitalist and socialist practices, is novel but has to date proved to be a workable piece of social experimentation at the wider level of the national economy. It is hence interesting to ascertain whether at the microlevel of the individual enterprise and workplace, such a fusion of the antithetical assumptions and practices of capitalism and socialism has been pursued with similar prudence and apparent success.