Reappraising the performance of China's state-owned industrial enterprises, 1980-96

Abstract

This paper seeks to reappraise the performance of China's state-owned industrial enterprises over the period 1980-96. By examining all the available indicators of performance, and by placing that performance in the context of the country's specific path of economic system reform and industrial growth, it argues that the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have performed much better than is widely perceived in the literature. In particular, the performance of large-scale, state-owned enterprises has been at least comparable to that of the acclaimed collectively-owned enterprises. The latter have been much more market-oriented than SOEs, but their status has been equally unclear from the standpoint of private ownership. The paper thus constitutes a challenge to the big-bang or shock-therapy approach to the transformation of Soviet-type economic systems.