ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the ways in which social enterprises and enterprises with social responsibilities make changes to the social contract without generating government pushback. In the case of the specific social enterprises, this is due to their way of working across the boundaries of economic spheres. One paves the way for new industrial relations, another steers resources from the market to the moral economy, and the third blends professional managerial competence with Leninist management practices. In the case of the SOEs, the central government withdraws from the social contract by limiting its involvement to SOEs defined as nationally strategically important. The relations between the state and the rural cooperatives continues much as before, while the religious communities are not defined as part of the social contract. Seen from the point of view of society, the enterprises make numerous bottom-up alterations to the social contract. What they all take part in is a form of rightful resistance in a very social non-political way that is quite new in China.
