ABSTRACT
In the crude sense, China has a superabundance of workers, with 772 million employed persons in 2014. Industrialization and urbanization are shifting the sectoral and geographical structure of employment, marketization is changing the nature of employing organizations, and globalization is bringing Chinese workers and managers into competition and co-operation with their "foreigner" counterparts, both at home and overseas. Vestiges of the state-owned approach to management co-exist with intensively competitive private management practices and the modern but evolving version of an ancient culture has implications for the ways in which workers and leaders interact. The distinction between skilled and unskilled workers overlaps with the divide between the "formal" and "informal" employment sectors. Simple Tayloristic modes of performance management dominate in the assembly-for-export sectors, where intense competition directs executive attention away from more sophisticated "strategic human resource management" practices, and simple HR practices are a good fit with cost-driven competitive advantage.
