ABSTRACT

It is clear that corporate culture been enthusiastically embraced by Chinese corporate policymakers. The main reason appears to be that cultural management approaches combine practical techniques for improving employee performance and productivity with more lofty concepts such as cultural values and corporate vision. Since China is a socialist nation, these policymakers conclude, the core values that motivate its business corporations should be socialist ones. This distinctive Chinese idea was articulated in some of the earliest official and semi-official interpretations of corporate culture from the 1980s. Han Tianshi, former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, declared in a speech in 1988:

Business enterprises … are the basic organizations of economic activity in modern society, but in China they combine political, economic and cultural roles, especially taking on the role of cultivating human talent and raising the cultural quality of the people … Corporate culture provides the best method for integrating economic development with cultural development, thus it is very likely to become a key pillar of the new socialist culture.

(Han 1988: 120–21) Han then waxes lyrical about the ideal values for which corporations should strive:

On the basis of respect for the worth and independence of individual people, we must then create … a corporate spirit that unifies people’s individual characters with their social character. This corporate spirit can bring employees closer together into a cohesive whole, and transform the business enterprise into a “greater family” full of harmony, teamwork, affection and vitality, one that contributes to building the nation. This is the central aim of Chinese socialist corporate culture!

(Han 1988: 123) Han delivered this speech prior to the Chinese corporatization movement and prior to the official acceptance of private property and the wholesale privatization of small and medium-sized enterprises that occurred during the 1990s. It should be no surprise, therefore, that he emphasizes the important role of socialist values in corporate culture. Yet official Chinese interpretations continue to draw such a link between Chinese corporate culture and socialism right down to the present, along with a corresponding emphasis on the central role of the CCP in implementing and monitoring corporate culture within Chinese business enterprises. As we noted in Chapter 1, SASAC’s Guiding Opinion (2005) declares:

Building an advanced corporate culture is a significant factor in strengthening the [Communist] Party’s hold on power, in forcefully developing a progressive socialist culture, and in building a harmonious socialist society.

(SASAC 2005a: art. 1) Interestingly, “socialist” values are now equated with the positive aspects of “traditional Chinese” values too: “[Firms] must pay attention to spreading the legacy of the outstanding traditional culture of the Chinese nation” (SASAC 2005a: art. 12). It appears that the current Chinese regime is seeking to broaden its legitimacy by claiming to represent and promote not just the values of the brief socialist period from 1949 onwards, but the “positive” values of traditional Chinese culture from the beginning of time. This is “socialist corporate culture with Chinese characteristics” (Zhang 1994: 77).