Corporate governance or governance by corporates? Testing governmentality in the context of China’s national oil and petrochemical business groups

Introduction There has been an astonishing growth in China’s oil and petrochemical industry since the late 1990s, when state-controlled business groups formed through institutional separation from the state. This study probes a group of 31 domestically listed (in Shanghai and Shenzhen) national oil and petrochemical companies (NOPCs) in the period from 2007 to 2011. It entails examining the post-1998 restructuring of China’s qiyejituan business groups, their related party transactions (RPTs) and related party corporate finance. The results point to how property rights are decisive in how corporate governance based on China’s governmentality, the state-business interface, in a socialist market economy works.