ABSTRACT
The 15th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 1997 formally launched nationwide industrial reforms by adopting a policy to ‘preserve the big and let go the small and medium (Zhua Da Fang Xiao)’ SOEs (state owned enterprises) on the basis of experiments in Shanghai and other places. Shanghai’s experiments started in 1994 with the Municipal Government’s adoption of the recommendation to ‘Transform the Small SOEs intoShareholdingCooperatives’. This recommendation suggested that an enterprise whose assets fell below ten million Yuan and which had 500 employees or less should restructure into a shareholding cooperative under the supervision of a district level government in Shanghai and enjoy a tax holiday for the first two years. It could also remove up to 20 percent of the employees who became redundant in the process and for whom it would be responsible to locate jobswith the help of the district. Those SOEswhich had over 500 employees remained supervised by amunicipal government agency and sent redundant workers to receive training in the Reemployment Centers established by the government agency in order to find another place of employment. This recommendation led small andmedium-sized enterprises, especially in light and handicraft industries where womenwere an important workforce, to embark upon a process of restructuring. One outcome of this process was an increasing number of laid off women in urban areas, many of whom ended up in informal sectors of work, often without job security and experiencing a loss of entitlements to social benefits.
