ABSTRACT
As China’s market economy has developed, its state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have also faced reform and rationalization. With the implementation of SOE reform across the country, SOEs have been transformed into shareholding firms. Some have become privatized in full – leaving the state-owned sector. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China (2009), SOEs are those organizations properly registered as such ‘where the entire assets are owned by the State’. They do not include ‘solely State-funded corporations in the limited liability corporations’. Nevertheless, many commentators use broader definitions to include those jointly-owned corporations where the state is the largest or even a smaller shareholder. This can also include corporations where provincial and city levels of government are the shareholding party (Shi 2010; Woetzel 2008). In this sense, China’s state-owned sector is what Chapter 2 defines as a separate ‘business system’. We define SOEs as the same thing.
