This article investigates the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the rise of China's centrally controlled businesses (yangqi 央企), a batch of large business groups and financial institutions controlled by China's central party-state. It starts by comparing two competing policy approaches to defining the relations between the Party and state enterprise sector: the separation approach versus the adaptation approach. It then examines how the Party's “pro-big business” policies have shaped China's large enterprise reform since the 1960s and led to the formation of the yangqi. It also describes the key mechanisms used by the CCP to control the yangqi, including its personnel management system and disciplinary force. It further identifies and summarizes three key modes of the Party's intervention in the rise of the yangqi: institutional and policy entrepreneurship; leveraged personnel control; and residual mobilization capacity. The article concludes by discussing the future prospects for reforming the relations between the Party and big business in China.

As a result of economic reform and administrative restructuring in China, a number of powerful state-owned business groups (“national champions”) have emerged within sectors of strategic importance. They are headed by a new corporate elite which enjoys unprecedentedly high levels of remuneration and managerial independence from government agencies and which derives legitimacy from symbolizing China's economic rise. However, through the nomenklatura system, the Party controls the appointment of the CEOs and presidents of the most important of these enterprises and manages a cadre transfer system which makes it possible to transfer/rotate business leaders to take up positions in state and Party agencies. In order to conceptualize the coexistence of the contradicting forces for further enterprise autonomy and continued central control that characterizes the evolving relationship between business groups and the Party-state, this paper proposes the notion of integrated fragmentation.