ABSTRACT
This chapter, building on the previous, turns to look specifically at the ‘national team’ of enterprise groups and related policy trials initiated by China’s State Council. This small number of very large enterprise groups have now come to dominate large-scale Chinese industry and are therefore very important to its understanding. They are sometimes also known as the ‘generals’, ‘key few’ or ‘aircraft carriers’ of the current ‘grasp the large’ industrial strategy, to which they are central. By looking at State Council initiatives to nurture these groups a different perspective on understanding the large-scale sector is provided, generating new insights into both the large-scale sector and the role of state policy. Chapter Two highlighted key features regarding the broader trends in the large-scale sector, explaining its relevance to the current theory and policy debate, contributing to the specialized debate of the LME literature and suggesting how large enterprises have grown quickly throughout China and how they have performed better than generally appreciated. The problem with the LME approach, however, is that it does not reveal in any detail the nature of the institutional transformation of largescale industry. More importantly, the history, role and nature of state intervention, integral to its development since early on in reforms, remains largely overlooked. This chapter, taking a different approach, describes how the small number of national team groups, with state support, have become increasingly important to the current reform strategy, following in spirit the East Asian developmental state model of Japan and South Korea. It looks specifically at the various ways that the micro-evolution of the large-scale sector has been encouraged as China, unlike the former Soviet Union, has actively pursued policies to construct large-scale multi-plant enterprises on the basis of the former large-scale state-owned sector. It therefore builds on the few detailed studies as yet made of China’s large enterprises, moving away from views based ‘on purely a priori conceptions . . . towards the kind of appraisal that is based on empirical investigations’ (Lo 1997: 2). It draws
on interviews undertaken at a leading state think tank, the Association for the Promotion of China’s Enterprise Groups (Zhongguo Jituan Gongsi Cujinhui), as well as using a wide range of Chinese academic sources not readily available in the West. A number of visits were also made to some of China’s largest pioneering national team groups from the auto industry and detailed research into the other 120 enterprise groups now found in the national team was also carried out.
