Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’

The accumulation of wealth at the other end of the social scale is

a more complicated story. It seems to have proceeded in part via a

combination of corruption, hidden ruses, and overt appropriation

of rights and assets that were once held in common. As local gov-

ernments transferred shares of enterprises to management as part

of their restructuring strategy, so many managers ‘have overnight

come to hold shares worth tens of millions of yuan through various

means, forming a new group of tycoons’. When SOEs were

restructured into joint stock corporations ‘the managers were

given signi

ficant portions of the shares’ and sometimes received a

yearly salary one hundred times that of their average worker.

51

 The

chief managers of the Tsingtao Brewery, which became a stock-

holding company in 1993, not only came to own a large slice of the

shares of a lucrative business (that is augmenting its national pres-

ence and oligopolistic power through takeovers of many local

breweries) but also pay themselves handsomely as managers. The

privileged relationships between party members, government o

ffi-

cials, and private entrepreneurs and the banks have also played an

important role. Managers of newly privatized businesses who have

received a certain number of shares may borrow from banks (or

from friends) to buy up the remaining shares from the workers

(sometimes coercively, by threatening layo

ffs for example). Since a

large number of bank loans are non-performing, the new owners

either run the companies into the ground (asset-stripping for per-

sonal gain along the way) or 

find ways to renege on their debts

without declaring bankruptcy (bankruptcy law is not well

developed in China). When the state takes $45 billion of foreign

exchange earned o

ff the backs of highly exploited labour and bails

out the banks to cover their non-earning loans then it may well be

redistributing wealth from the lower to the upper classes rather

than writing o

ff bad investments. Unscrupulous managers can

gain control over newly privatized corporations and their assets all

too easily and use them for their own personal enrichment.

Indigenous capital is also playing an increasingly important role

in wealth creation. Having bene

fited from more than twenty years

of technology transfer through joint ventures, blessed with access

to large pools of skilled labour and managerial skills and above all

harnessing the ‘animal spirits’ of entrepreneurial ambition, many

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