This chapter examines bureaucratic politics surrounding Angang in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC). Major state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as Angang were subject to both vertical control from the PRC government in Beijing and horizontal control from local Chinese Communist Party organizations. The tension between these two lines of control manifested in debates over the “one-chief system” – a Soviet-style top-down management structure. This tension was also evident in Angang’s construction, production, and sales. Despite the ostensibly centralized system, the PRC planned economy operated at the grassroots level as a field of constant negotiation among various government offices and SOEs, each interpreting the state policies in their own way.

The US legal system is notoriously complex. Navigating this labyrinthine structure requires knowledge of legal precedents, procedures, and rules, along with the ability to anticipate and adapt to shifts in the legal landscape. Businesses, therefore, require the guidance of seasoned lawyers. Over the past few decades, US corporations have increasingly turned to in-house lawyers for legal services, leading to their rising prominence in the corporate hierarchy and profound changes in the US legal profession and corporate governance. This could also be true for Chinese companies operating in the United States. Hence, this chapter investigates the Chinese companies’ utilization of full-time internal legal managers within the dual institutional context. For those employing such managers, this chapter scrutinizes two key aspects: (1) whether these legal managers are locally hired or are expatriates and (2) whether they hold licenses to practice law in the United States, which approximates their ability to handle US legal risks and opportunities. Analysis under the dual institutional framework reveals not only effects of both home- and host-state institutions but also substantial intercompany variations associated with other institutional and firm-specific variables of theoretical and policy importance.

This chapter analyzes the relationship between entrepreneurs and capitalists. It argues that the function of capitalists is to select entrepreneurs, and without capitalists there would be no entrepreneurs. The government can replace neither entrepreneurs nor capitalists. State-owned enterprises cannot produce entrepreneurs. The chapter also discusses corporate governance. Existing corporate governance theories focus exclusively on conflicts of interests between investors or shareholders and operators. In fact, there are two types of conflicts. One is the conflict of interests, and the other is the conflict of cognitions. Given that the future is uncertain and indeterminate, and that different people have different imagination and judgements, the conflict of cognitions is more challenging than the conflict of interests. The best corporate governance structure allows entrepreneurship to play the biggest role, as opposed to incentivizing and disciplining professional managers. The legal rules of corporate governance must be general, flexible, and entrepreneur friendly.

This chapter explores the precarious experiences of retired workers who used to work in a former state-owned enterprise. As Vietnam shifted from a planned to a market economy, the regulation of labor relations changed from the socialist social contract to a legal regime operating in line with market principles. As a result of these changes, workers in the case-study enterprise experienced less economic security and deteriorating working conditions. The chapter demonstrates how their discontents and dissatisfaction at work reveal the gap between socialist ideals of workplace justice and post-reform reality. These workers turned to informal and corrupt practices, which operate in a vague, ill-defined area of the law, to be granted early retirement and claim benefits that they perceive as deserved and just. Yet the actual benefits that workers have received fall short of their expectations and make them vulnerable to poverty and further exploitation in their old age.

This chapter examines whether and to what extent emerging countries may be able to engage in alternative approaches to trade regulation among themselves and in their relations to developed economies. It shows that liberal orthodoxy is in retrenchment. It documents the reservations that many emerging powers have about the neoliberal approach, and shows the conflict between some trade rules and state-led development strategies (“developmentalism”). In some areas, emerging powers are resisting liberalization pressures by ignoring certain existing rules, refusing to agree to others, and seeking to create alternative orderings with more flexible standards. However, there is not always consensus within key countries about trade and development policy. They have differences on many aspects of liberalization, and there are limits to their capacity to create alternative economic spaces. While resistance from the South and rising protectionism in the North have stalled the liberalization drive, leaving trade law more open to developmentalism for now, the South has not developed the kind of strong ideological consensus and strategic coordination needed to fundamentally alter the trade regime. Countries are guided by pragmatism and divergent national interests.

Semiconductors represent a major building block of high-tech industry. This chapter analyzes the trajectory of China’s rapidly growing semiconductor sector, focusing on the interplay among global technology developments, Chinese government policy, and three groups of firms: purely domestic manufacturers, Chinese operations of multi-national corporations, and hybrid firms based in China but with offshore ownership and financing.

China has pursued policies aiming to build a globally competitive domestic industry. Policy instruments include outlays on technical education, and more focused initiatives that channel investment funds, imported technology and product demand toward domestic firms, mostly state-owned ones. Despite strong government backing, domestic state-owned firms have generally failed to generate technological dynamism. Only the hybrids have delivered substantial technological advance.

Recent policy initiatives continue to lavish resources on state-owned firms while limiting the capacity of potentially more innovative hybrid and domestic private operators to expand and upgrade. As a result, China’s semiconductor industry appears locked into a path that combines quantitative expansion with low financial returns and limited qualitative improvement. This trajectory offers little prospect for attaining China’s long-term objective of propelling domestic semiconductor manufacture toward the global frontier of technology and innovation.

There are long-held assumptions that Chinese firms, especially state-owned enterprises (SOEs), cannot innovate because distorted incentive structures discourage them from taking risks. This paper disputes this assumption. It explains why and how the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) engaged in technology innovation that propelled this state-owned giant into the top rank of global leaders in the development of ultra-high-voltage electrical transmission systems. Government policies of SOE reform and technology innovation provided incentive structures within which SOEs operated; yet the outcomes could vary greatly. This paper explains how SGCC’s entrepreneurial managers formulated an ambitious innovation strategy, convinced government leaders to include advanced UHV technology in plans for indigenous innovation, and then implemented a risk-laden approach deploying an open-innovation strategy – project-driven, inclusive, and collaborative. SGCC worked with a range of players: universities, research institutions, suppliers and multinational corporation (MNCs), all on SGCC’s terms. Successful R&D produced designs and equipment that enabled SGCC to build and operate long-distance transmission lines that achieved unprecedented scale and efficient energy utilisation. SGCC’s technical accomplishments reshaped the rules of the game in research with universities and the relationship with electric equipment manufacturers.