Xueliang Ding

The Illicit Asset Stripping of Chinese State Firms

In Chinas manufacturing, public utilities and commercial sectors alike, the diversion of the assets and profits of state firms into the private hands of the managers and officials in charge of them has been occurring on a truly massive scale ? far more massive than most observers of China have realized. These asset transfers are either forbidden by Chinese law or discouraged by the central government, even though a certain degree of tacit consent is given from time to time by local government authorities. In the early 1990s such illicit transfers comprised the greater part of the draining away (liushi) of state assets, amounting to 50-100 billion yuan (US

Informal Privatization Through Internationalization: The Rise of Nomenklatura Capitalism in China's Offshore Businesses

6-12 billion) each year.1 The decapitalization of Chinas state-owned industries has been accelerating since then, as the governments capacity to monitor the managers of state firms proves ineffective.2

Who gets what, how? When Chinese state-owned enterprises become shareholding companies

Chinas remarkable business expansion abroad since the mid-1980s cannot be explained simply by applying existing theories, which focus on conventional international businesses from capitalist systems. Many puzzling phenomena in Chinese investments abroad become intelligible only when we introduce a key variable–illicit privatization through internationalization. So far only advantageously-placed nomenklatura members and their kin have had access to crossborder ownership, but many of them are accumulating sizeable private wealth at the cost of nationalized property. Contrary to an impression held by many in the West, the Chinese economy under Communist rule experiences spontaneous privatization parallel to what has happened in European postcommunist nations–though with a few Chinese characteristics. An examination of informal privatization in Chinas multinationals adds a new dimension to our understanding of the shift from state socialism to market capitalism.

The quasi-criminalization of a business sector in China

The Chinese state is allowing administrative and managerial cadres to create new property-rights arrangements. Not surprisingly, many of them instead are creating private property for themselves first.

The Disparity between Idealistic and Instrumental Chinese Reformers

This study probes the institutional mechanisms and operational processes that have turned the Chinese construction sector into a quasi-criminal domain during the past two decades. On the basis of its exploratory investigation, the paper tries to make a few generalized empirical observations, which centre on the problem of institution-formation and order under the conditions of a systemic transition from command to market environments. This study is part of a major project on state-rebuilding in transitional China.

The decline of communism in China : legitimacy crisis, 1977-1989

In the summer of 1987, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) imposed punishments on a second group of leading intellectuals. Wu Zuguang, vice president of Chinas Association of Writers and Artists; Zhang Xianyang, head of the Division of Studies on Marx and Engels in the Institute of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS); and Wang Ruoshui, former deputy editor-in-chief of the Peoples Daily, were purged from party membership, and Su Shaozhi, party secretary and director of the Institute of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, was removed from those two leading positions. Although the authorities did not publicize this action, its implication was no less significant than the public purge of the first group of leading intellectuals in January-Fang Lizhi, Liu Binyan, and Wang Ruowang. The political fortunes of two prominent advocates of reforms in the second group, Su Shaozhi and Wang Ruoshui, are a particularly accurate indicator of the conflicting ideological frameworks for Chinas reform program. In order to bring out the implications of Sus and Wangs experiences, we need to review briefly the general tendencies in Chinas ideological field during the past decade.