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 commonplace narrative regarding China's participation in the WTO is that the original expectations have not been matched in subsequent experience. China has not behaved in accordance with the spirit (and sometimes the letter) of its commitments. Reactions by trading partners have been from critical to hostile, and some have even called for a WTO without China, ignoring the boost to international trade that China's accession has provoked. Yet, China's participation in the WTO cannot remain un-addressed. The US almost brought the WTO to its knees largely because of China, and the EU has enacted laws to counteract China's trade expansion. In this short paper, we argue that the solution to the China-issue passes through an addition and re-invigoration of the multilateral trade rules.

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) have long constituted, and are likely to remain, an important instrument in any government’s toolbox for a variety of economic and societal goals. However, the significant extent of state ownership among the world’s top companies, and the quantitative and qualitative transformation and hybrid nature of SOEs, raises the issue of their impact on international trade flows and the competitive process. This article addresses the question of how international trade agreements regulate SOEs, with a view to furthering the international contestability of markets, while, at the same time, allowing governments to provide support to SOEs as a means of dealing with market failures and the pursuit of public goals. After a brief introduction to contemporary state capitalism, the argument is developed in three main parts. The first part situates SOEs within the GATT and WTO frameworks and elaborates on the findings of previous literature with a view to highlighting the main shortcomings of such discipline. The second part re-examines the notion of ‘competitive neutrality’ by locating contemporary trade agreements within the larger contextual relationships between the state, the market, and the social, and thus reconstructs the normative rationales and general policy implications of the disciplines under examination. Against this background, the third part critically assesses the new disciplines on SOEs in recent preferential trading areas (PTAs). The main conclusion is that the search for binding rules has not led to balanced regimes and, despite the wider scope of the new rules, notable problems that have emerged within the WTO context remain unsolved.

China's economic miracle has been achieved at considerable environmental cost. To fight against environmental pollution more effectively, the Chinese government established the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) in 2008. This study investigates the stock market reaction to this event and finds that, on average, listed firms in polluting industries experienced a statistically and economically significant negative abnormal return on the event date, which implies that the compliance costs of these polluting firms are expected to increase. In addition, this study finds that enterprises with different ownership styles and different political influence experienced different price reactions during the event window. More specifically, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in general experienced a less negative abnormal return over different event windows, and provincial SOEs perform much better than central SOEs and sub-provincial SOEs.

This article develops an integrated perspective to study whether formalization can significantly reduce precariousness for informal workers. This perspective combines the analysis of employment dualism with that of rural–urban dualism and the analysis of the production sphere with that of the social reproduction sphere. By applying this integrated framework to the case of a state-owned enterprise (SOE) in China, this article finds that formalization does little to reduce precariousness for the migrant agency workers there. Migrant agency workers in China are in a precarious position not only because of their employment status but also because of their incomplete citizenship and the commodification of social reproduction materials. With the compensation gap between formal and agency workers narrowed primarily owing to the deterioration of formal employment, formalization has little effect on increasing the income of agency workers or alleviating the financial pressure upon them in the sphere of social reproduction; neither can formalization raise migrants up to full citizenship or reduce related precariousness.

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.