ABSTRACT

The story above may or may not be true, but if it is not, it is certainly a very happy invention. It captures nicely an important underlying strand to the economic reforms that have been going on in China for over 20 years now, leading away from reliance on ideological commitment and a totally planned economy towards material incentives and market forces. In the course of this transformation, those responsible for managing China’s industry have had their world turned upside down. Old certainties have been eroded, new challenges have emerged. How these changes have been responded to is the subject of this book.