ABSTRACT
To poke fun at themselves and at their own branch of science, aeronautical engineers once proved that bees could not fly. With considerably more seriousness, organization specialists, applying sound principles of management, have demonstrated that Chinese family-owned firms cannot grow large and cannot undertake sizeable and complex projects. This reasoned conclusion leads to a second one: because Chinese firms cannot succeed in enterprises requiring scope or scale, those economies in which large Chinese family firms are found in some numbers must, therefore, be examples of “ersatz capitalism” (Yoshihara 1988), speculative economies that are hollow at the core. This conclusion implies that an economy organized by Chinese firms cannot flower and bear the fruits of a capitalist way of life.
