ABSTRACT
Although it has a much longer history, the national and multilateral pursuit of enhanced corporate governance has been strongly articulated in the rhetoric of capitalist markets over the last two decades. Western-inspired corporate governance models have been heavily oriented towards self-regulatory approaches to regulation. This has seen the development of model corporate governance codes; these have often been motivated by the desire to prevent government intervention in markets. Where the state has intervened and passed laws that seek to affect the structure of corporate governance, these are sometimes seen as merely putting in place rules that market actors would have devised themselves had they sought to negotiate appropriate rules. However, in China, the corporate governance project has been a top-down exercise with the State playing a major role in fashioning and implementing this agenda.
