Reforming China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is a complex endeavour. Among recent initiatives, the double-hundred action (DHA) programme stands out for its ambition, especially in its aim to revamp corporate governance structures and management systems. A notable change is that top executive positions are now open to a wider and more diverse candidate pool and are no longer restricted to Party cadres. Based on fieldwork and interviews at a DHA-selected enterprise, this paper explores the DHA's impact on SOE functioning and governance. Our research reveals unanimous support among top executives for the policy, despite stringent performance appraisals and limitations on future promotion opportunities. The policy has significantly transformed recruitment, performance evaluation and remuneration within the enterprise under study. However, although top executive recruitment is no longer tied to Party membership, the Party still exerts its influence through key appointments on the board of directors.

Whereas emerging market firms (EMFs) face severe legitimacy barriers when entering global markets, whether and under what conditions green innovation can help them gain legitimacy remains under-examined. This article argues that green innovation can help EMFs obtain regulatory and social legitimacy in host countries and consequently boost their exports. Based on a panel dataset populated by 254 Chinese-listed manufacturing companies from 2011 through 2017, this article finds that green innovation is positively associated with EMF export performance. Moreover, this positive relationship is stronger when host-country political risk is lower or host-country buyer sophistication is higher but becomes weaker for state-owned EMFs. These findings enrich the legitimacy-based view and international business literature by identifying the role of green innovation in boosting EMF export performance and specifying important institutional contingencies.

Chinese state firms are expected not only to profit but also to serve state interests. But the Chinese state is fragmented: border provinces are taking on an expanded role in China's global expansion and a broad range of firm activities could be defined as patriotic contributions. Through the case of Yunnan State Farms (YSF), a province-level state-owned enterprise, this article explores how state firms interpret and navigate multiple state interests while also pursuing profit. The firm's ability to profit depends on balancing the demands and support of different Chinese state actors while depicting itself as a development partner to the Lao state and a contributor to Sino-Lao diplomatic relations and border region stability. This case thus shows that, instead of YSF's behaviour being directed by the state, the firm exercises considerable latitude in defining its contributions to state interests through the expansion of rubber production as a driver of development.

The political connection between the state and firms in the context of China's corporate restructuring has been little explored. Using the clientelist framework and unpacking the incentives of both firms and the state, we analyse political connections as repeated patron–client exchanges where the politically connected firms can help the state fulfil its revenue imperative, serving as a failsafe for local authorities to ensure that upper-level tax quotas are met. Leveraging original surveys of the same Chinese firms over an 11-year period and the variations in their post-restructuring board composition, we find that restructured state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with political connections pay more tax than their assessed amount, independent of profits, in exchange for more preferential access to key inputs and policy opportunities controlled by the state. Examining taxes rather than profits also offers a new interpretation for why China continues to favour its remaining SOEs even when they are less profitable.

This article analyses the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the corporate governance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), including a case study of a central-level SOE holding group. Relying on official documents, secondary literature and interviews with enterprise managers, government officials and academics, the article documents how the CCP has actively formalized its role in Chinese business by embedding itself in the corporate governance structure of SOEs. Through the application of Chinese indigenous administrative corporate governance concepts such as “bidirectional entry, cross appointment” and “three majors, one big,” the CCP has consolidated its dominance of enterprise decision-making procedures and personnel appointment and created a hybrid, Party-led model of corporate governance. While this hybrid model can secure enterprise compliance, communication with higher state and Party organs, as well as long-term development planning, it is unlikely to help solve SOE efficiency problems and may even undermine other SOE reforms.

To what extent has governance of China's state-owned economy changed under Xi Jinping? Against the background of momentous shifts in the political arena since 2012, some observe a decisive departure in Xi's approach to managing state-owned enterprises (SOEs): towards tight centralized control by the Chinese Communist Party and away from gradual marketization. Analysing the main aims and methods of SOE governance over the last two decades, we find that SOE policy under Xi exhibits a deepening of pre-existing trends rather than a departure. First, the essential vision of SOE functions articulated under Xi is strikingly consistent with that of his predecessors. Second, his administration's approach to governing SOEs is not novel; it relies on established mechanisms of bureaucratic design, the cadre management system, Party organizations and campaigns. While Xi has amplified Party-centred tools of command and control, this appears to be an incremental rather than a radical shift in approach.

China is witnessing a growing trend towards financialization by the state. Drawing on the concept of state-led financialization, this study is the first to explore how the government-guided investment fund (GGIF) has evolved and spread throughout the country. The promotion policies and practices of the central government have laid the key foundation for the development of GGIFs, while local governments have quickly adopted this new financial tool, resulting in its widespread take up. State-owned enterprises are heavily involved in the operation of GGIFs, indicating that this market-oriented tool has largely failed to attract capital from the private sector. This study shows that state-led financialization in China has strengthened rather than weakened the influence of the state in the economy, which is not the case in most Western economies. However, the limitations and risks of the GGIF are also related to the dominant role of the state in GGIF operations.

Previous research has debated whether guanxi persists or declines with the development of formal institutions. This study addresses this debate by investigating how the development of formal institutions in China's state-owned organizations influences employees’ guanxi behavior. Building on institutional logics theory, I propose that guanxi behavior is a reaction to the socialist institutions adopted by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and is associated with the collective identity of SOEs. Thus, employees’ identification with SOEs is the mechanism that influences their guanxi behavior. A survey of 721 employees from 12 organizations compared guanxi behavior across three types of organizations with different degrees of state ownership: SOEs, public firms, and joint ventures. The results showed that the employees of joint ventures identify less with SOEs and engage in less guanxi behaviors than do SOE employees. The employees of public firms still identify with SOEs, and their guanxi behavior did not differ from that of SOE employees. Identification with SOEs mediated the effect of organizational type on guanxi behavior, whereas formalization did not. Therefore, the development of formal institutions does not necessarily decrease guanxi behavior, and its effect depends on whether the collective identity underlying guanxi is changed. This study has important implications for guanxi research, institutional logics theory, and transition economies.

Extensive research on the political mobility of Chinese officials at central, provincial, municipal and county levels has yet to fully consider an important group of elites – the leaders of China's core central state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper presents the first systematic analysis of their political mobility between 2003 and 2012 using an original biographical dataset with 864 leader-year observations. Under the Hu Jintao administration, these leaders emerged as a distinctive group within China's top political elite: increasingly well-educated but lacking experience beyond state-owned industry, with both lengthening leadership tenures and years of previous work in their companies. Instead of a “revolving door” through which these individuals rotate routinely between state-owned business and the Party-state to positions of successively higher rank, a top executive posting was most often a “one-way exit” to retirement. Of those who advanced politically, virtually all were transferred laterally along three career pathways with little overlap: to other core central SOEs; provinces; and the centre. This paper underscores the theoretical importance of disaggregating types of lateral transfer to research on Chinese officials’ political mobility and the cadre management system.

This article examines the so-called “central State Owned Enterprise (SOE) problem” in China's environmental governance system, namely central SOEs' defiance of environmental regulation. We present evidence showing that, in the last decade, central SOEs have been the source of a large number of serious pollution incidents and have often failed to comply with environmental guidelines and regulations. Central SOEs in the electricity generation and oil and gas industries are particularly culpable, with six firms alone accounting for 62 per cent of all 2,370 reported violations (2004–2016). We argue that a combination of “central protectionism” of state-owned national champions and insufficient regulatory capacity in the environmental bureaucracy have provided state firms under central management with both incentives and opportunities to shirk on environmental regulations. Yet, while the institutions of central protectionism are deeply rooted, countervailing forces within the complex Chinese state are also gaining momentum. In spite of the considerable regulatory challenges, officials in the environment bureaucracy display increasing resolve and ingenuity in trying to strengthen their enforcement capacity.

The Chinese Communist Party has recently unveiled its new agenda for state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform. Most attention to date has focused on structural reform through the so-called “mixed ownership” policy. This article is to direct attention to a critically important yet much less analysed item on the SOE reform agenda: the professionalization of the SOE executive personnel. This article provides an empirical study on the managerial elite of China's financial and non-financial SOEs. The findings suggest a politically constrained management approach in the Chinese state-owned sector. Moreover, an innovative analysis of the SOE executive career patterns reveals that the state-controlled banks and industrial SOEs employ divergent human resource management methods. The anatomy of the SOE managerial elite in this article provides a timely evaluation of the recent SOE reform policy and a richer understanding of China's state-owned sector from a comparative capitalism perspective.

Transformation is a vital challenge for Chinese state-owned enterprises(SOEs) and their top managers. To explore this increasingly important topic,we first summarize the institutional context of SOE transformation and theconflicting interests and interdependent relationships of six major actorsas inside/outside stakeholders. Based on the strategic action view ofinstitutional analysis, we emphasize the role of the change agent's level ofaspiration and political skills in transforming an SOE. Then, throughinductive case studies on the transformation of three SOEs, we address howtop managers, acting as change agents, can initiate and engage ininstitutional change through strategic actions such as negotiation,manipulation, and coercion; we also illustrate how they adopt differentactions to influence different actors. Based on the inductive results, wedevelop a theoretical model, which we refer to as the ‘strategic actionmodel’ that shows how the aspiration level, political skills, strategicactions, and change outcomes interrelate and offer insights into thestrategic action of top managers as change agents. Our most importantcontribution is revealing the interplay between the proactive role of insideactors as change agents and the enabling condition of institutionalcontext.

The transformation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) into efficient entities has been an important approach in transition economies. However, the transition literature reveals little about how control structure affects firm performance of transformed SOEs. Drawing on agency theory, we distinguish three modes of control in transformed SOEs: state-controlled, dispersedly controlled, and privately controlled modes and argue that actual control after transformation plays a critical role in determining performance. Examining the impact of different control modes in China, we find that the key is who controls the transformed firm. Non-state-controlled (dispersedly controlled and privately controlled) firms are more likely to have enhanced post-transformation performance and reduced agency costs than state-controlled firms.