This volume provides a history of the domination of the Big Four in the Chinese accounting industry, explaining why China was unable to keep the market for its own accounting firms. The book details how easy access to U.S. capital markets led to major accounting scandals, and a clash between U.S. and Chinese regulators.

This study is a historical critical analysis of the role of the transnational professional services firms known as the Big Four in the development of the accounting profession in China. China emerged in the early 1980s after decades of seclusion and began an economic transformation that would make it the world?s second largest economy by 2010. China did not have an accounting profession after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 until the accounting profession restarted in 1980 as the country opened up to foreign investment. The Big Four, as members of the globalizing transnational capital class came to dominate the accounting profession in China with the support of other members of the transnational capital class including investment bankers, international lawyers, and transnational institutions such as the World Trade Organization. Grounded in Marxist theories of class struggle, particularly in Gramsci's theory of hegemony, this study explores how ideology, expressed as normative roles for independent accountants, enabled the Big Four to dominate the market. Using mixed research methods with archival and interview data, this study finds that the Big Four achieved its dominant position through three hegemonic projects: foreign direct investment, the reform of State-owned enterprises through international capital markets, and the enabling of private enterprise to access international capital markets. This study also explains how indigenous accounting firms followed Dutschke's counter-hegemonic strategy of a “long march through the institutions” that reformed the domestic accounting profession and gave it access to the coercive power to the state to challenge the hegemony of the Big Four. This study finds that the globalization of accounting markets leads to regulatory holes, gaps in the transnational regulation of accounting firms. This study provides recommendations to the Big Four, indigenous firms, and local and transnational regulators.

"Messrs. Gow and Kells have made an invaluable contribution, writing in an amused tone that nevertheless acknowledges the firms' immense power and the seriousness of their neglect of traditional responsibilities. 'The Big Four' will appeal to all those interested in the future of the profession--and of capitalism itself." —Jane Gleeson-White, Wall Street Journal With staffs that are collectively larger than the Russian army and combined revenues of over $130 billion a year, the Big Four accounting firms—Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG—are a keystone of global commerce. But leading scholar Ian Gow and award-winning author Stuart Kells warn that a house of cards may be about to fall. Stretching back to the Medicis in Renaissance Florence, this book is a fascinating story of wealth, power, and luck. The founders of the Big Four lived surprisingly colorful lives. Samuel Price, for example, married his own niece. Between the world wars, Nicholas Waterhouse collected postage stamps while also hosting decadent parties in his fashionable London home. All four firms have endured major calamities in recent decades. There have been hundreds of court cases and legal prosecutions for failed audits, tax scandals, and breaches of independence. The firms have come so close to “extinction level events” that regulators have required them to prepare “living wills.” And today, the Big Four face an uncertain future—thanks to their push into China, their vulnerability to digital disruption and competition, and the hazards of providing traditional services in a new era of transparency. This account of the past, present, and likely future of the Big Four is essential reading for anyone perplexed or fascinated by professional services, working or considering working in the industry, or simply curious about the fate of the global economy.

This thesis is a study of the development of the Chinese public accounting profession since China launched the "Reform and Opening-up" policy in 1978. The current, established theoretical representations of accounting professionalisation in China are predominantly underpinned by Gramsci's (1971) hegemony perspective. Such a hegemony perspective has led to a one-sided understanding of accounting professionalisation in China. It is one-sided in the sense that accounting professionalisation in China is treated as a predictable end in itself - i.e. depending on the focused and studied actor (e.g. the Chinese state or the Big Four), this very actor is set to achieve and retain dominance over the process of accounting professionalisation in China. This thesis argues that such a one-sided understanding is overly simplistic because it presumes that other actors are fully aware of how power operates but consciously choose to go along with it.??The aim of this thesis is to nuance the hegemony representations of accounting professionalisation in China. Drawing on previously unaccessed archive materials and a series of interviews with representatives of the Chinese public accounting profession, this thesis examines the interactions between key domestic and international actors involved in and the impact of such interactions on the process of accounting professionalisation in China over time. This thesis demonstrates that, through interactions, actors collectively construct an evolving consensus on the institutional arrangements that are central to two key aspects of accounting professionalisation in China: the organisation of the professional domain and the practice of professionals within the professional domain. In contrast to the hegemony representations, neither the Chinese state nor the Big Four were found to be fully capable of dominating the process of accounting professionalisation in China. The process is more complicated than that recognised in prior studies, involving ongoing interactions between the Chinese state, the Big Four and other actors including, most significantly, the CICPA. The interactions between these actors are also relevant for the identity construction of individual practitioners. In doing so, this thesis provides more nuanced insights that help to deepen our understanding of accounting professionalisation in China.

Historical Developments in the Accountancy Profession, Financial Reporting, and Accounting Theory contains ten manuscripts authored by C. Richard Baker during an academic career that spans four decades, picking up on various understudied threads of academic and professional initiatives over the past several hundred years.

This title was first published in 2001: In 1979, China opened the door to the West and implemented a series of economic reforms that led the accounting system to depart from the Soviet model. This book investigates the development of Chinese accounting in a broad social, economic and cultural environment and analyzes the environmental influences on the development of accounting in China. Including the latest accounting systems, which have to date received little scholarly attention, this cutting-edge analysis makes a worthy addition to a growing area of research.

Essentials of Computational Electromagnetics provides anin-depth introduction of the three main full-wave numerical methodsin computational electromagnetics (CEM); namely, the method ofmoment (MoM), the finite element method (FEM), and thefinite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. Numerous monographscan be found addressing one of the above three methods. However,few give a broad general overview of essentials embodied in thesemethods, or were published too early to include recent advances.Furthermore, many existing monographs only present the finalnumerical results without specifying practical issues, such as howto convert discretized formulations into computer programs, and thenumerical characteristics of the computer programs. In this book,the authors elaborate the above three methods in CEM usingpractical case studies, explaining their own research experiencesalong with a review of current literature. A full analysis isprovided for typical cases, including characteristics of numericalmethods, helping beginners to develop a quick and deepunderstanding of the essentials of CEM. Outlines practical issues, such as how to convert discretizedformulations into computer programs Gives typical computer programs and their numericalcharacteristics along with line by line explanations ofprograms Uses practical examples from the authors' own work as well asin the current literature Includes exercise problems to give readers a betterunderstanding of the material Introduces the available commercial software and theirlimitations This book is intended for graduate-level students in antennasand propagation, microwaves, microelectronics, andelectromagnetics. This text can also be used by researchers inelectrical and electronic engineering, and software developersinterested in writing their own code or understanding the detailedworkings of code. Companion website for the book: ahref="http://www.wiley.com/go/sheng/cem"www.wiley.com/go/sheng/cem/a