Weapons Of The Rich. Strategic Action Of Private Entrepreneurs In Contemporary China. Thomas Heberer

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СКАЧАТЬ (accessed 22 June 2018).

      ¹⁸The ‘Three Represents’ were officially mentioned for the first time by General Secretary Jiang Zemin in 2001 in a keynote speech at the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. According to this formula, the Party represents China’s ‘advanced social productive forces’ (i.e. economic development), the ‘progressive course of China’s advanced culture’ (i.e. cultural development), and ‘the fundamental interests of the majority of the Chinese people’.

      ¹⁹This was no less than a revolutionary change in the party constitution: Private entrepreneurship, the epitome of mankind’s exploitation, was now defined as a major pillar of socialist development instead of, as in the early years of the People’s Republic, being considered only a transitory means in the struggle to bring about socialist transformation.

      ²⁰Zhongguo Gongshang Bao (accessed 20 March 1998).

      ²¹Chinese firm development confirms the theory of Hayami and Kawagoe (1993), among others, according to which a productive upswing in agriculture entails entrepreneurship specializing in industrially processing agricultural produce. In this way, the agricultural sector is connected with modern industry and urban markets. Traditional village and clan communities facilitate this process as they help to keep costs at a minimum. Rural industrialization generates increases in income for both urban and rural areas. Consequently, rural–urban migration is calibrated and limited at a tenable level.

      ²²For an interesting example of structural, institutional, and social change induced by ethnic entrepreneurs in an ethnic minority area in China as well as their competition with Han entrepreneurs — an issue which, however, cannot be addressed in this volume — see Heberer (2007).

      ²³As a Chinese entrepreneur noted, the private sector was developed by giving it freedom (fang) and not by means of a bureaucratic steering (guan) (Sun, 2018: 55).

      ²⁴The history of China’s TVEs, which developed out of the old communes and production brigades after the household contract responsibility system had been installed in rural China, is well accounted for by Oi (1999), Naughton (2007), and Huang (2008).

      ²⁵Huang Yasheng (2012) has argued that China’s capitalist takeoff was predominantly due to the success of its TVEs. On the development of TVEs and other rural ownership forms, see Fan et al. (2015: 65–160). In 1985, according to data published by the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, there were 12 million TVEs of which 10.5 million were registered as private and only 1.57 million as collective (!). In the same year, the official data started to divide TVEs into three categories, namely (1) collective, (2) privately run, and (3) household businesses. The growth of TVEs in the following years until 1993 occurred entirely in the second category. This means that the government was not only well aware of the private character of most TVEs, which had meanwhile registered as collective enterprises, but also accounted for them as such statistically. Huang also points at another interesting aspect of private sector development in China’s countryside during the 1980s: the liberalization of informal finance (via rural credit cooperatives and so-called rural cooperative foundations) as a substitute for formal finance to help private enterprises solidify their operations. However, starting in the early 1990s, the central government reverted its former policies and attempted to wipe out informal finance schemes in order to regain full control over the credit sector and the private sector economy. Since then, private companies have suffered from a structural ‘credit crunch’.

      ²⁶Dickson cites a survey conducted by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (gongshanglian) and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2002 which also showed that 25 percent of all officially registered private enterprises at the time had originally been part of the state sector.

      ²⁷Wo guo shi you geti gongshanghu he siying qiye zhan quanbu shichang zhuti 94 percent (Individual and private enterprises constitute 94 percent of all market players), Xinhua News Net, 22 January. http://www.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2018-01/22/c_1122297394.htm (accessed 9 August 2018).

      ²⁸Some reports, however, argue that these data do refer to small and medium enterprises only. See, e.g. ‘Wei xiaowei qiye shutuan, xu shichang ‘zhichi’ genshang’ (A bailout for small enterprises requires ‘support’ for their survival in the market), Xin Jing Bao (New Capital Newspaper), 31 August 2018; Zhongda lihao (Major advantages), Zheng, shang xuejie jiti xingdong, minqi xinde de chuntian yao laile (Collective action of politics, business and scientists, the new spring for private enterprises is arriving). https://465557.kuaizhan.com/11/45/p5516239418a8bf (accessed 1 September 2018).

      ²⁹Well-known ‘national champions’, which have ranked among the top 10 on the Forbes’ Global 500 list of 2017, are State Grid (2), Sinopec (3), and China National Petroleum (4).

      ³⁰‘National champions’ are companies which a government has identified as major driving forces of its overall economic development strategy. They have easier access to credit, are given preferential treatment in government contract bidding, and sometimes gain monopoly or oligopoly status in certain sectors of a country’s economy. China’s biggest companies, most of them state-owned, are called ‘national champions’, among which are the world’s three largest companies: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Construction Bank (CCB), and Agricultural Bank of China (ABC). Huawei, the world’s largest producer of smartphones, is probably the most prominent example for a private ‘national champion’, though a vast majority of them are SOEs. The establishment of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) in 2003 marks the starting point of China’s ‘national champion’ policy, as SASAC was assigned the task of enacting industrial policies to transform China’s top 40 companies into such giants (Graceffo, 2017). Today, in accordance with the state’s call to promote so-called ‘Strategic Emerging Industries’, which was written into the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011–2015) and further refined in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020), China’s ‘national champions’ play a major role in developing an ‘innovation economy’ in sectors like information technology, biotechnology, robotics and intelligence systems, high-efficiency energy storage, new-energy vehicles, etc. For a long time, the promotion of ‘national champions’ has been criticized by both foreign and Chinese experts as they threaten to ‘crowd out’ the domestic private sector and shut out international competitors from the Chinese market. For an early study on China’s ‘national champion’ policy, arguing that this policy can be traced back to the 1970s, see Nolan (2001).

      ³¹Our fieldwork in Wenzhou in 2013 and 2017 brought to the fore the manifold problems of the private sector in this prefecture-level city. Private entrepreneurs complained strongly that the local government does too little to help them survive the rough-and-tumble of economic adjustment due to necessary structural change. In a particularly telling interview with local entrepreneurs and business associations on September 23–24, 2017, the local government was asked, among other things, to shield the local economy from external investors, reduce taxes, facilitate access to credit, provide for skilled labor from outside Wenzhou, engage in more communication between private enterprises and government cadres, and reduce the pressures put on the private sector to adjust to environmental guidelines. Whereas many Wenzhou entrepreneurs did not care for the government in the early years of ‘reform and opening up’, they now call for the state’s help and guidance. This was confirmed by an interview with a former policy advisor to the Wenzhou government, 12 April 2018.

      ³²We have defined this shift as the rise of ‘local state corporatism 2.0’. In traditional local state corporatism СКАЧАТЬ