Weapons Of The Rich. Strategic Action Of Private Entrepreneurs In Contemporary China. Thomas Heberer
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Название: Weapons Of The Rich. Strategic Action Of Private Entrepreneurs In Contemporary China
Автор: Thomas Heberer
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Экономика
isbn: 9789811212819
isbn:
In order to counterbalance this dilemma, Chinese banks introduced a worldwide accepted measure of lending: discounting of bankers’ acceptances. When a company buys something from a supplier, it can pay using a so-called bankers’ acceptance, which is issued by a bank on behalf of the buyer. When the acceptance matures, the supplier exchanges it for cash from the bank for the amount of the sale. The bank then seeks payment from the company on whose behalf it issued the acceptance. If the company needs money before the acceptance is due, it can go to any bank and exchange the acceptance for cash, albeit at a discount to the value of the acceptance which is cashed in by the bank. That’s the reason why many private businessmen are reluctant to turn to this method as it reduces further the already small profit margins of private businesses.66
Discourses on Private Entrepreneurship
As mentioned earlier, self-employed individuals reemerged with the onset of economic reforms at the end of the 1970s, which were followed by the gradual legalization of private entrepreneurship in the 1980s. Since then, the term ‘entrepreneur’, which has always been ideologically problematic in a socialist system, has been hotly debated in China. Figure 2 summarizes the change in the official assessment and terminology of entrepreneurship until its reinterpretation as ‘traditional Chinese’ or ‘socialist’ in the 1990s. In the early 1990s, the term ‘peasant entrepreneurs’ (nongmin qiyejia) was employed to describe successful managers of rural enterprises who were seen as ‘representatives of the advanced productive forces in the countryside’ (e.g. Wang and Chen, 1985). Since the mid-1990s, Chinese academics have discussed the Schumpeterian idea of the entrepreneur. Not only them, even Chinese officials later admitted that an entrepreneurial stratum had once again come to the fore in China (Xu, 1997; Zhang and Li, 1998).
Figure 2 illustrates the change in the assessment and official conceptualization of ‘entrepreneurs’ up until the 1990s. In the 1950s, the characterization as ‘capitalists’ or ‘bourgeois’ attributed an anti-socialist character to entrepreneurship and thus placed them outside society. As of the mid-1950s, entrepreneurs effectively ceased to exist. The leading personnel of (state-owned) enterprises were officially nominated SOE directors, often acting as party secretaries at the same time. With the beginning of the reform policies in the late 1970s ‘individual businesses’ and, eventually, ‘private entrepreneurs’ (in rural areas initially called ‘peasant entrepreneurs’) finally came into existence once more. Only in the 1990s was the term ‘entrepreneur’ in its ‘correct’ usage discussed among both scholars and policy advisors, but with different attributes such as ‘socialist’, ‘Chinese’, or simply speaking of ‘entrepreneurs’.
Figure 2: The Chinese Entrepreneur as a Discursive Category
Source: The authors.
Throughout the 1990s, the entrepreneurial stratum was labeled the ‘most valuable’ resource of the economy, which thus had to be supported and further developed by granting private entrepreneurs equal economic, political, and legal status within Chinese society. It was argued that intellectuals should be encouraged to become entrepreneurs, and the state sector should no longer be favored one-sidedly (Wei and Sun, 1994). It also became apparent that innovative or ‘scientific entrepreneurs’ would be needed (Zhao, 1998). Being an entrepreneur was qualified as an ‘honor’ (rongyaode), and operating a company was portrayed as a kind of ‘heroism’ (yingxiong zhuyi) (Yu Shaowen, 1994). As the ‘most valuable’ resource (Zhao, 1998), entrepreneurs were created in the course of China’s social transformation as a product of the market economy, which they then subsequently nurtured (Mi and Gao, 1997: 42–44). By the end of the 1990s, entrepreneurship was finally classified as a ‘profession’ and no longer had political overtones (Zhang and Liu, 1996; Li, 1999).
At the same time, the Chinese entrepreneur was treated as a culturally specific type. It was argued that this type was different from its Western counterpart through its ‘distinct Chinese qualities’ (Zhongguo tese) as a ‘reformer’ (gaigejia) and a ‘hero’ (yingxiong), working in the interests of society and for the benefit of its overall prosperity (Liu, 1997). This discussion was continued in the more recent discourse on the ‘Confucian entrepreneur’ (rushang, see Chapter 3). Other authors have declared, in an apologetic fashion, Chinese entrepreneurs to be ‘socialist’ as they contribute to the building up of a ‘material’ and ‘intellectual culture of Socialism’. In contrast to their Western counterparts, ‘socialist entrepreneurs’ fulfilled two central requirements: they were innovators (chuangxinzhe) and at the same time possessed ‘political qualities’, i.e. they supported the CCP and the socialist system (Yuan, 1997). They belonged after all to the ‘avantgarde of the economic revolution’ (Zhang and Liu, 1996) and were called to be patriots, to behave in a ‘morally superior’ way, display a ‘good ideology’ and a good working style, and to constantly improve themselves (Zhongguo qiyejia diaocha xitong, 1998).
Overall, the role and function of private entrepreneurs in China’s economic transformation had been seen as widely positive within domestic discourse, and at the end of the Hu–Wen era, their ‘profession’ was socially and politically accepted. Under Xi Jinping, the private sector was called important for further economic reform at various occasions, and domestic discourse focused on their potential as ‘innovators’ and drivers of high-tech development (see, e.g. Liu, 2017). Particularly larger private enterprises were praised as a ‘leading force’ in promoting corporate social responsibility and public charity (see, e.g. Cao, 2018). Nevertheless, in recent years, private entrepreneurs have had to face much criticism, too. The 2018 vaccine scandal which exposed the criminal behavior of a large private drug producer, Changchun Changsheng Biological Technology Co Ltd,67 various incidents on construction sites for which private firms were held responsible, and numerous corruption cases involving private entrepreneurs have together triggered a discussion on the future of the private sector in China.68 Being aware of the political danger caused by such negative reporting for the private sector, Pan Shiyi, a celebrity blogger and chairman of SOHO China company, one of the most prominent real estate developers in China, wrote on his Weibo blog that private entrepreneurs should not only strive for profit but must also be role models in Chinese society and be committed to the social well-being of their employees (Pan, 2018). In September 2018, Wu Xiaoping, a veteran financial entrepreneur, published a short essay on social media in which he made the following surprising claim:
in the progress of China’s great history of reform and opening up, the private economy has tentatively completed its important historical task to assist the public economy in making a developmental leap forward. In the next step, the private economy should not be expanded blindly, but in a completely new fashion become a more centralized, solidaric and extensive public–private mixed system, so that in the course of the new development of a society based on a socialist market economy a new gravity will steadily come to the fore.69
Put differently, China’s private sector economy should be phased out to the benefit of a mixed system in which the public sector would be leading. Although this СКАЧАТЬ