The Nature, the Performance, and the Reform of State-owned Enterprises provides a detailed description of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China with respect to both efficiency and income distribution. It shows that state ownership in the form of SOEs does not use resources efficiently and has a poor record in income distribution. Moreover, SOEs are found to enjoy unfair advantages in their competition with other firms. To illustrate the point, the book presents data revealing how favored policies, monopolistic powers, and subsidies benefit SOEs. These advantages are worth several trillion yuans a year. It is a sad irony that such wealth of the people is used to beef up the revenues of the SOEs, making their accounts look much better than they should be.This book, with its rich empirical data and information, is an authoritative reference for researchers interested in SOEs. It is also a good read for students of social sciences and the public to learn more about SOEs.

Based on extensive original research, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the current status of state enterprise reform in China. Chinese State Enterprise Reform considers the relationship between public ownership and public enterprises, and the historical evolution of China's economic reform programme since 1978, including assessments of the Contrast Responsiblity System, which operated from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, and the Group Company Experiments, which began in the 1990s. It discusses the relations between workers, managers, and the state in post-Dengist China, the implications of the reform programme for human resources management in state enterprises, the nature of labour representation, and organization under tate capitalism and the problems of surplus labour and reemployment.

China's basic work units, collectively known as the danwei system, have undergone significant reform, particularly since 1984. The author examines how this system operates and how reform is generating change in the party at grassroots level. The author demonstrates how China's post-Mao reforms have produced a quiet revolution from below as the process of political and economic liberalization has accelerated. This book presents new research findings that will be invaluable to those wishing to understand the nature of change in China.

This work is a continuation of the authors' earlier publication, "The China Miracle: Development Strategy and Economic Reform". The authors review the historical evolution of the state-owned enterprises, analyze the current problems, and suggest the direction for future reforms.

China's extraordinarily rapid economic growth since 1978, driven by market-oriented reforms, has set world records and continued unabated, despite predictions of an inevitable slowdown. In The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?, renowned China scholar Nicholas R. Lardy argues that China's future growth prospects could be equally bright but are shadowed by the specter of resurgent state dominance, which has begun to diminish the vital role of the market and private firms in China's economy. Lardy's book arrives in timely fashion as a sequel to his pathbreaking Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China, published by PIIE in 2014. This book mobilizes new data to trace how President Xi Jinping has consistently championed state-owned or controlled enterprises, encouraging local political leaders and financial institutions to prop up ailing, underperforming companies that are a drag on China's potential. As with his previous book, Lardy's perspective departs from conventional wisdom, especially in its contention that China could achieve a high growth rate for the next two decades—if it reverses course and returns to the path of market-oriented reforms.

The greatest economic challenge facing China in the post-Deng era is the reform of unprofitable, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) which threaten to drag down the rest of the economy. Despite an array of well-intentioned, market-oriented reform measures, these firms have never truly been forced to face the pressure of a bottom line, or the threat of bankruptcy. Forging Reform in China explains how and why these measures have not been sweepingly successful to date, and what it would take to achieve meaningful reform. The author investigates firm-level processes, including case studies of China's steel industry giants, revealing institutional and systemic barriers to market-oriented performance. This book makes a compelling argument that private ownership cannot work in China's current system until governance over complex economic factors has been established, that is, until credit is tightened and market selection processes made to work.

In the 1990s, the Chinese government launched an unprecedented reform of state enterprises, putting tens of millions of people out of work. This empirically rich study calls on comprehensive surveys and interviews, combining quantitative data with qualitative in its examination of the variation in workers' collective action. Cai investigates the difference in interests of and options available to workers that reduce their solidarity, as well as the obstacles that prevent their coordination. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, this book explores the Chinese Government’s policies and how their feedback shaped workers’ incentives and capacity of action.