Marginalised masculinity in the fiction of Mo Yan and Zhu Wen: Socialist residues, struggles, and resilience

In China, as in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, economic reform initiatives seek to increase productivity by introducing elements of market-oriented policies and institutions into an economy formerly dominated by state planning. Efforts to evaluate the impact of reform of Chinese industry have focused on the measurement of productivity change in state enterprises. This study expands the prior framework of analysis in several directions. Our investigation of productivity trends is not limited to state enterprises but includes quantitative comparisons with China's fast-growing collective industries, which contributed 36% of overall industrial output in 1988.1 Unlike previous studies, our analysis works with gross rather than net output. This permits us to investigate changes in the productivity of intermediate inputs, which occupy a large portion of total costs in Chinese industry, as well as labor and capital. To do this, we develop a "quasi-frontier" estimation procedure which seems appropriate for comparisons of total factor productivity based on Chinese industrial data. Finally, we offer a quantitative perspective on the extent to which reform efforts have moved industrial resource allocation toward patterns expected of a market system. The analysis confirms our previous finding, based on a restricted framework employing only labor, fixed capital, and net output, that multifactor productivity in state industry has risen substantially during

In 2015, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the “Guiding Opinions on Deepening the Reform of State-owned Enterprises”, pointing out that by 2020, decisive results will be achieved in the important fields and key links of the reform of State-owned Enterprises （SOEs）. One of the important aspects is to improve the corporate governance structure of SOEs, which is the important task of state-owned enterprise reform at present. Actually, many SOEs in China have not yet formed an effective governance structure, and the level of governance is limited.As the pillar of China’s national economy, the development of SOEs is of vital importance to the sustained and healthy development of China’s economy and the building of the socialist modernized country. However, there are serious agency problems in China’s SOEs, such as on-the-job consumption, excessive investment and profit shifting, which have led to huge efficiency losses. Western scholars generally hold that dividends can alleviate agency problems between business owners and managers effectively, moreover, increase corporate value. Some scholars in China have also found that the dividend payout of SOEs can bring about the reduction of free cash flow and the increase of supervision from external financing market, thus reducing agency costs and increases the value of SOEs. On the realistic condition provided by the fact that SOEs’ profits are increasing sharply, the call for SOEs to pay dividends to the state is getting higher and higher. In this context, China promulgated the “Administration Ordinance of Charging State-owned Capital Gains” （CQ [2007] No.309） in 2007, and began to collect state-owned capital gains.However, the current governance structure of SOEs in China cannot effectively restrain the behavior of management. In such a governance environment, forced gains payout of SOEs may breed new agency problems and enhance the profit shifting behavior of management, which would worsen corporate governance and lead to a decline in the profit of SOEs. This kind of worry is not unreasonable. After the implementation of the “Administrative Ordinance”, the total profit of SOEs did not continue its growth tendency and began to decline. This fact confirms the increase in the profit shifting behavior of SOEs’ management to some extent. But, there is not only no empirical test on this mechanism in the existing researches, but also less literature on the impact of charging state-owned capital gains on the profit of SOEs. So, this paper attempts to verify this mechanism and test the impact of the “Administration Ordinance” on the profit of SOEs.This paper uses the Difference-in-Differences method to evaluate the impact on the profit of SOEs, taking the “Administration Ordinance” as a policy shock with the A-share data of listed companies from 2003 to 2009.The study finds that: First, the implementation of the “Administration Ordinance” has a negative impact on the profit of SOEs, significantly reducing the rate of return on common stockholders’ equity （ROE） of SOEs. Second, through the mechanism analysis, we find that forced gains payout of SOEs and gains’ circula- ting in the body has increased the management’s behavior to turn over profits under the current governance level of SOEs, resulting in the decline in the ROE of SOEs. Third, the “one size fits all” rate of gains payout has made more decrease in ROE of large-scale SOEs than small-scale ones, which is called the unfair punishment of “whipping the fast and hard-working”.The marginal contribution of this paper is mainly reflected in: （1） Most of the existing empirical research studies the effect of dividends payout on SOEs, but little discusses the effect of the “Administration Ordinance” on SOEs, and even more rare about the influence on the profit of SOEs. This paper uses the Difference-in-Differences method to evaluate the impact of the implementation of the “Administration Ordinance” on the profit of SOEs, which will enrich the study in this area. （2） Although some scholars have suggested that forced gains payout may increase the profit shifting behavior of management, thus leading to the decline in the profit of SOEs, there is no empirical evidence to support this mechanism. This paper takes the degree of real activity earnings management as the measure of the profit shifting behavior of management, and empirically tests this mechanism.

Comment on “The Current Wave of State Enterprise Reform in China: A Preliminary Appraisal”

The shattered “Iron Rice Bowl”: Intergenerational effects of Chinese State-Owned Enterprise reform

Introduction Vietnam began the first steps of its reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the early 1980s. This subsequently evolved into a massive and fundamental reform of SOEs, towards a greater degree of market orientation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At first, the reform of Vietnam's SOEs was primarily in the area of management and planning, thereby providing more autonomy for SOEs within the framework of a centrally planned economy and the gradual reduction of state subsidies and allowances. Until the implementation of the doi moi (economic reform) programme in 1986, whilst there had been some renovation of the state sector, SOEs were still operating within an environment without market competition. At that time the economy simply consisted of the state and collective sectors, with no private sector. Under such conditions, the management of SOEs was a purely administrative exercise. Without the pressure of competition, SOEs found no motive for the revision and improvement of regulations intended to make them more operationally efficient. Instead, SOE managers tended to concentrate all their efforts on fulfilling mandatory targets assigned to them, and dutifully obeying directives or orders stemming from the resolutions and decrees of the ruling party and government. To implement the economic renovation process, and develop a multisectoral economy, is to develop a wide range of production factors, including: SOEs, family and collective enterprises, individuals’ businesses, private limited companies, shareholding companies, joint ventures with foreign firms, and so on. Economic reform, therefore, is to change from a centrally planned economy into a market-oriented, multi-sectoral economy, operating under a market mechanism. Enterprises with different forms of ownership structure are encouraged to develop and compete in this market environment. In such a context, a demand arises for a better defined and more appropriate legislative framework, in order to ensure the equality of all enterprises before the law, and the concretization of the legal provisions needed to regulate the economy and the various enterprises (including SOEs).

Since the late 1980s, historians have described certain eras as marked by ‘crisis’ in the production of gender norms. At the outset, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ proved useful for understanding changes in normative cultural systems. The rhetorical trope of crisis distinguished key turning points in the construction of gender and helped to shape a coherent narrative centred on moments of breakdown and reconstruction. Unfortunately, however, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ has now outlived its usefulness; it has lost its analytic purchase. This article reviews the notion in modern, American and European historiography, then critiques its usefulness as an analytic concept. ‘Gender crisis’ has been overworked to the point of semantic collapse. It has been so reified as to foreshorten analysis, and it conceptualises masculinity as a fixed set of essentialised norms. Finally, ‘gender crisis’ describes subjectivity and its relation to normative systems in overly binary and mechanistic terms. Using the case study of postwar French masculinity, the author proposes the alternative concept of ‘gender damage’ as a way to understand periods of transformation in gender. The term ‘gender damage’ moves beyond a mechanistic notion of interaction with normative systems in order to incorporate such emotions as frustration, humiliation and confusion in our thinking of human subjectivity. In addition, the term forces us to specify exactly which gender norms are being reconfigured in some way. ‘Damage’ is by nature specific and local because it does not totalise catastrophe in the same way as does ‘crisis’.

This paper studies the mechanism of how China?s state-owned enterprise (SOEs) reform can influences economic growth, and distinguishes the capital efficiency between state-owned and private enterprises. The results show that: 1) the capital allocation efficiency among state-owned enterprises is lower than private enterprise due to an insufficiently released productivity of state-owned enterprises; 2) although with a higher capital allocation efficiency, the improvement of technology progress of private enterprises at a much slower pace compared to its rapidly increasing share in China?s economy. In case of poor allocation with private sector, blindly reforming ownership of state-owned enterprises cannot effectively alleviate the problem of efficiency losses. State-owned enterprise reform can boost economic growth by increasing capital marginal output, improving capital dynamic allocation efficiency, promoting TFP growth and exerting external spillovers on other firms. At present, China is exploring the endogenous power of economic growth, improving the market institutions and promoting the state-owned enterprises reform with positive and steady pace. By properly re-allocation SOEs into the private sector, which has significant influence on improving economic efficiency and promoting sustained economic growth.

The SOE reform was the first time that economic insecurity was introduced since 1949 in China, with hundreds of million employees affected by the laid off. This study took the State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) reform in China as a natural experiment to explore the impact of economic insecurity on depressive symptoms in later life. Data were obtained from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS), 2014 and 2015. CHARLS is a nationally representative survey covering 28 provinces in China. CHARLS used the probabilities proportional to size (PPS) sampling method and involved 450 villages/resident committees, 150 counties/districts and 12,400 households. A total of 5113 urban dwellers born earlier than 1971 (aged 25years old and above at the start of the SOE reform, 1995) were involved. Using the province-level economic loss from the layoffs, we examined the impact of economic insecurity exposure on the score of depressive symptoms using a difference-in-differences model (DID). Individuals with economic insecurity exposure had a significantly increased risk of higher depressive symptoms scores, in which a 1 percentage point increase in expected economic loss would increase the CESD-10 score by 0.10. For an individual at the median distribution (CESD-10 = 5), this implies a shift to the 58th percentile (CESD-10 = 6). Given that the average intensity of expected economic loss is 10.22% and the mean CESD-10 is 6.92, exposure to the SOE reform led to an average increase in the CESD-10 score by 1.02 and by at least 14.74%. The heterogeneity analyses showed that the role of SOE reform in depressive symptoms scores was robust in both female and male groups and groups with different educational attainment. Economic insecurity exposure increased the depressive symptoms score later in life in the context of China. Programs, such as adequate unemployment insurance benefits, can protect individuals against the risk of financial loss, thereby reducing their negative impact on depressive symptoms. Providing mental symptoms surveillance and psychological counseling to those experienced at a time of great uncertainty is important for preventing depression in times of economic insecurity.

(A Study on State-Owned Enterprises Reform in China)

Reviewed by: Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again Sang Yee Cheon (bio) Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again, by Kelly Y. Jeong. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011. 156 pages. $55 cloth. Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again is a study of South Korea’s unprecedented experience of modernization, with a focus on the literature (and also in the films in the [End Page 157] 1960s) that portrayed the historical traumas of colonialism in the 1930s, decolonization in the 1940s, the Korean War in the 1950s, and uneven economic development in the 1960s. The book includes the introduction of modernity’s paradox, trauma, and multiplicity into Korean life; gender issues and nationalism or modernity depicted in the literature of the period from the 1920s to the 1960s; and nation rebuilding, masculinity, and decolonization depicted in the postwar South Korean cinema of the 1960s in films like The Coachman and The Stray Bullet. The author starts with the umbrella topic of modernity, asking “What is modernity?” The author claims that the content and context of modernity in Korea changes depending on the different historical period in question. Also, modernity is like a double-edged sword in Korea, promising freedom, as well as gender or social equality, but creating destabilization and confusion of existing hierarchies and truths. Korea’s modernity started with colonization, arriving slowly and filtered through Japan even before Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. By the 1930s, the Korean experience of modernity via colonialism was filled with novelties, the greatest of which resulted from higher educational levels. For example, colonial modernity provided Korean young women with a modernized or Western-style education, but Korea’s ancient patriarchal Confucian worldview conflicted with the ideals that newly educated young women pursued—a contradiction illustrated perfectly in the life of the “New Woman” Na Hye-sŏk. The New Women were an anachronism in the colonial Korean context, where chastity was still widely considered a woman’s foremost virtue, and Korea was thus not ready for the new ideals that New Women signified (for example, marriage based on romantic love). The primary role of intellectuals as leaders of the nation in the colonial era was to be exemplars of the “modern.” Many colonial intellectuals had to submit to the Japanese or showed an ambivalent attitude toward colonial power because they were not courageous enough to endure oppression; they later typically regretted their role as titular leaders of a colonized country. In the late 1940s, Korean modernity was characterized by decolonization and its aftermath, which resulted in confessional writings by intellectuals. By the 1950s, Korea’s modernity was synonymous with Americanization. Postwar Korean literature from 1955 to 1960 was influenced by the militaristic culture that pervaded the sociocultural atmosphere that followed the Korean War and the subsequent stationing of American forces in South Korea. This included ideals of masculinity and ideological conflict, and thus it manifested itself as a nihilistic, existentialist modernism. (For example, the word yanggongju, literally, “Yankee princess,” refers to [End Page 158] Korean women who engaged in prostitution around American military camps and was popularized via Korean literature of this period.) Postcolonial South Korea was chaotic, with a government still unstable due to inadequate infrastructure. South Korea’s most influential and best-organized institution was the military, and the state ideology was the military ideology: anticommunism. However, during the Rhee regime, the nation simultaneously militarized and Americanized, and this led to social conflict. In the 1960s, exposure to Western culture—specifically, American culture via the presence of American troops and the system of Americanization that the Rhee regime followed—resulted in divergence from traditional hierarchical and gender roles and even challenged the patriarchal social order. However, although the American quasi-colonial presence in this period undermined tradition, it failed to introduce the redeeming qualities and ideals of American life such as openness and democracy; this is illustrated in the film The Stray Bullet. The author asks which other forms of modernity have become established in South Korea since the 1960s and how new forms of modernity...

The differential compensation distribution of executives is an important direction of deepening the reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The compensation of SOEs is mainly decided by SASAC according to the unified compensation management method, and tends to adopt the equalitarian compensation distribution mode, leading to the generally low pay dispersion among non-CEO executives in SOEs, which greatly frustrates the work enthusiasm of the executives in SOEs, and often leads to more serious executive agency problems. However, there are few studies on the difference of compensation incentives in the top management team, which mainly focus on the vertical compensation gap between CEO and non-CEO executives, and the research on the internal compensation allocation of non-CEO executives is relatively scarce.Using the compensation data of all the non-CEO executives in listed SOEs from 2005 to 2017, this paper studies whether the pay dispersion among non-CEO executives has a positive governance effect in reducing the executive agency costs of SOEs. We find that, the pay dispersion among non-CEO executives can effectively reduce the executive agency costs of SOEs, and the results are still robust after adopting the IVs and the differential compensation reform of SOEs in 2015 as the exogenous event to control the endogenous problem. Further, we document that reducing the supervision cost and improving the incentive efficiency of non-CEO executives are two potential mechanisms. Specifically, when there are more supervision costs and less incentives for non-CEO executives, the above positive governance effect are more salient.This paper offers empirical evidence for the positive governance effect of the pay dispersion among non-CEO executives in SOEs, and makes up for the deficiency of negative effects such as high turnover and poor corporate performance caused by the pay dispersion among non-CEO executives. This paper not only enriches the literature on the pay dispersion among non-CEO executives, but also extends the related literature on the executive agency costs of SOEs. In addition, this paper has certain policy reference value for further deepening the reform of SOEs and improving the differential compensation distribution system of executives in SOEs. The promulgation of Guiding Opinions on Deepening the Reform of SOEs in 2015 means that, in the context of a new round of comprehensively deepening the compensation reform of SOEs, the incentive mechanism of executives in SOEs should not be limited to the level of executive compensation, but should consider whether the compensation distribution within the top management team is reasonable. Increasing the pay dispersion among the top management team is not only an efficiency issue, but also a fair issue. The underlying economic logic is that the pay dispersion among the top management team is an institutional arrangement for SOEs to reduce the agency costs under the specific governance environment in China. Only by truly realizing differentiated incentives for the top management team, can the enthusiasm of executives in SOEs be effectively activated, the agency efficiency be improved, and the high-quality development of SOEs be realized.

In reviewing the new round of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms characterized by mixed ownership since 2013 in China, this book systematically investigates the theoretical underpinnings, model options and approaches to implementation of SOE mixed-ownership reforms. SOE reforms have functioned as an integral part of China’s transformation to a market-oriented economy. Responding to the changing economic context and negative repercussions of earlier SOE reforms launched in the late 1990s, SOE mixed-ownership reforms encourage the participation of different types of capital and sounder management mechanisms. The author first reviews the impetus behind SOE mixed-ownership reforms and discusses how modern property rights theory and decentralized control theory perform as the theoretical underpinnings of the reforms. Based on cases of many completed SOE mixed-ownership reforms, the book summarizes and assesses the feasible models and implementation details of the reforms. It also examines how the reforms have impacted state-owned assets as well as executives’ compensation and incentives, both of which run parallel to the core reforms surrounding ownership. The book will appeal to professional readers studying entrepreneurial theory, corporate governance, China’s SOE reforms and Chinese business and the economy, as well as investors and policy makers interested in the Chinese market and Chinese enterprise reform.

Naughton (2017) covers a lot of territory, with great authority, in what he modestly describes as a ‘preliminary appraisal’ of the current reforms of China's state enterprises. State owned enterprises (SOEs) are inherently difficult to analyze, even in the most transparent of societies, owing to the multiple, sometimes conflicting, objectives that governments impose on them. The key to understanding the Chinese reforms is in fact what Naughton terms the ‘impossible trinity’, as the government attempts to combine improved incentives, enhanced oversight, and new missions for its SOEs. Not surprisingly, therefore, Naughton concludes that the current wave of reforms, like those before them, is ‘deeply troubled’. Naughton's central theme is the multiplicity of reform objectives. These include three apparently core goals: corporatization of SOEs; their classification into ‘competitive’, ‘public service’ and ‘other’ categories; and strengthening the boards of directors. In addition, a further five objectives are mentioned, including managerial contracts, caps on managerial compensation, and the possibility of mixed ownership. In all countries where SOEs are present, these firms reflect the country's political history, especially in a country like China with its earlier phase of a centrally planned and controlled economy. The question is, what sort of role do they have in the transition from plan to market: do they exist mainly as vestiges of an earlier ideology, or as a vehicle for the Party to maintain its control over the economy (and associated rents), or for some broader developmental purpose? Naughton clearly illustrates the struggle, common to most countries with a sizeable SOE sector, to achieve a balance between commercial performance and political control. A sub-theme in Naughton is therefore the continuing search for a rationale for the SOEs, whether as sovereign wealth funds, technological innovators, development of ‘strategic sectors’, or broader developmental and equity goals. Naughton's Section 3 summarizes the key features of the SOE sector. The story is more or less as expected. The state sector is a shrinking share of the economy. While it employs just 13.5% of the industrial labour force, its share of industrial assets is more than double this figure. In other words, its operations are much more capital-intensive than the private sector. It would be interesting to know more about the services sector, especially finance and transport where the state presence in formerly communist economies is typically large. Naughton notes that there are significant, often opaque, entry barriers in these sectors. Moreover, being mostly non-tradables, there is not the discipline of import competition. We also get a picture of SOE performance from Naughton's Figure 3. The main conclusion here is that industrial SOEs have a rate of return on assets that is quite similar to, and appears to track, that of private firms. Given the constraints under which SOE's operate, this might appear surprising. But evaluating SOE performance on the basis of published financial data is inevitably highly problematic, as Naughton notes. There is typically a myriad of implicit (and sometimes explicit) subsidies and exactions and thus these comparisons can conceal as much as they reveal. Shifting from the positive to the normative, in a second-best world the major elements of an SOE reform package are typically transparency, hard-budget constraints and competition. That is, the public needs to have a full picture of their finances (both direct and implicit). SOEs need to have clearly prescribed fiscal constraints. And SOEs need to be exposed to level-playing-field competition, unless there are very carefully defined (and regulated) public service and/or natural monopoly considerations that dictate otherwise. All three recommendations are advanced in various sections of Naugton's paper. One paper cannot cover everything, especially such a vast and complex subject as this. Inevitably I have some additional queries. The first is situating the SOE sector in the broader Chinese economy. As the economy slows, and consumption becomes a more important driver, how will the role of SOE's evolve? Presumably, slower growth will increase the impetus for reform, as Naughton notes in passing. Second, how do SOE's connect to ongoing efforts to reform the financial sector, especially the ‘shadow’ banking sector? Presumably SOE's fund their businesses primarily through the formal, state-owned banking sector. It would be interesting to learn more about the relationship between non-financial SOEs and the SOB's – are the latter primarily a vehicle to underwrite the operations of the former? Moreover, connecting these two points, are SOE borrowings and leverage ever of such a scale that they could have the potential for macroeconomic destabilization? Third, what role do the SOE's play in the internationalization of the Chinese economy? Have they been major players in the outward orientation of Chinese firms? My impression is that they have been in a few sectors, such as natural resources and construction. Fourth, and related, what role do the SOE's play as technological spearheads and drivers of China's modernization? This is a common objective for SOE's in developing countries but, judging from the author's brief remarks (and other recent research, for example, Yip & McKern, 2016), China's SOE's appear to rarely perform this function.

Reviewed by: The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture Yiyan Wang (bio) Song Geng . The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. x, 256 pp. Hardcover $39.50, ISBN 962-209-620-4. The study of gender relations and forms of sexuality is an established field in Chinese studies, and van Gulik's pioneering Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1974) was among the earliest inquiries in this regard. However, for decades most of the publications in the field have focused primarily on the gender identity and living conditions of women. It was not until the mid-1990s that an investigation of masculine roles began, with a focus on literary representation. In premodern Chinese literary studies, there are Louise Edwards' Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the Red Chamber Dream (Leiden: Brill, 1994) and Keith McMahon's Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). In contemporary Chinese literature there are Lu Tonglin's Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and Zhong Xueping's Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). More recently, Kam Louie and Morris Low's edited volume, Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), offers a number of chapters on the literary representation of masculinity, and Ding Naifei explores sexual practice and sexuality in detail with her monograph Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Kam Louie's Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) also devotes a considerable amount of space to Chinese masculinity as manifested in fictional characters. The historical study on Chinese masculinity is a recent event, most noticeably beginning with the forum "Gender and Manhood in Chinese History" in American Historical Review (vol. 105, no. 5 [2000]) and Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom's edited volume, Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Song Geng's The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture is devoted to the study of effeminate male characters and their cultural connotations in premodern Chinese literature. He claims that his book is a "postcolonial reading of Chinese masculinity" (pp. 8-9), and his emphasis is on the differences in masculinity between China and the West in the time before colonialism and Westernization. Song considers the outstanding features of the premodern Chinese gender discourse to include the absence of male and female polarity, [End Page 554] the absence of mind-body duality, the presence of ungendered figures in Confucian classics, the presence of desexualized military heroes in popular fiction and drama, and the presence of the correlative "yin/yang" and wen/wu dichotomies (pp. 10-11). Noticeably, Song disagrees with Kam Louie on the significance of the notions of wen/wu in Chinese gender configuration. While Kam Louie considers wen/wu as fundamental in shaping Chinese masculinity, Song places strong emphasis on yin/yang, asserting that only when one acknowledges the essential role played by yin/yang in the Chinese perception of gender relations can one explain the effeminacy of men in Chinese literature and culture and understand the reasons why the fragile scholar has been held as an embodiment of the ideal male in Chinese culture (pp. 15-16). Song's study of Chinese masculinity is framed in the gender theories of Western thinkers, in particular those of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. He employs Foucaultian concepts of history, power, and sexuality in his reading of premodern Chinese texts. He positions his investigation in the postcolonial context and pays special attention to the distinctive quality of Chinese masculinity as a cultural practice with very different origins from that of the West. It is important to note that Song's reading of the yin/yang discourse is primarily Foucaultian in the sense that his study is centered on power politics and its subsequent determination of gender role by the positioning of the...

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to illuminate the hidden process of collusion among power holders in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in an emerging economy, which endures despite comprehensive reforms towards democracy and good governance. Why are mechanisms of checks and balances not functioning in the way they should?Design/methodology/approachThe analysis is based on in-depth interviews with board members, executives, politicians, bureaucrats and representatives from auditing boards involved in the management of SOEs in Indonesia.FindingsThe findings reveal practices of collective conservatism, reciprocal opportunism and normalisation of corruption. The costs of getting into powerful positions are so high that conglomerate business owners gain control over the management of SOEs. The authors use the terms “wall-building and gatekeeping” to explain such cases.Research limitations/implicationsThere is a continuous process of wall building and gatekeeping occurring among business oligarchs, bureaucrats and elected politicians in Indonesia. New entrants into the system are co-opted by the established elite.Practical implicationsThis study shows collusion, rent-seeking and corruption among political and business elites as well as top officials in the government hinder good governance reforms in state-owned Indonesian enterprises.Social implicationsCollusion and illicit business practices in SOEs are clearly grounded on wall building and gatekeeping. Tackling this problem is a precondition for good governance and an improved legal and regulatory business environment in Indonesia. The ideal separation of powers and the checks and balances for good governance apparently need more than a democracy to break through. A further strengthening of the free press and critical academics will be one crucial contribution.Originality/valueThere is generally a lack of understanding of the context of corruption, such as the influence of institutional and organisational structures. The topic of corruption is also under-researched due to the difficulty of finding empire evidence. This paper contributes to explaining why new political and organisational structures, such as a democratically elected parliament and a particularly designed corruption eradication commission, are not able to hinder rent-seeking practices and illicit political business in state agencies.