The CPC presides over a large state-owned economy, which is a key pillar of China’s state capitalist model and a critical source of Party power. The party has adapted its governing strategies of the state-owned sector to maintain its economic dominance without stifling growth and innovation – largely by learning from outside. We highlight the importance of the international system as a source of both policy inputs and pressures to change. We find that in the early phases of China’s marketization process during the 1980s, Chinese policymakers looked to Japan and the World Bank as they restructured state-owned enterprises. In the 1990s, American, European, and Japanese policymakers’ pressure on China to downsize its state sector as a condition of WTO accession was a key consideration in Chinese policymakers’ efforts to build “national champions” capable of competing with foreign multinationals in domestic and international markets. We analyze Chinese leaders’ responses to successive challenges in the state-owned economy, and the resilience of state capitalism which buttresses party rule.

Chapter 4 adds another intellectual dimension and genealogy to Nkrumah’s political-economic philosophy by arguing that he was aware of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas and that the Ghanaian economy existed and functioned within this state capitalist, mixed economic framework. Moreover, this chapter examines how people within and outside Ghana understood the duality of Ghana’s socialist and capitalist economy – its socialist state capitalist project – and its applicability to Ghana’s conditions and the postcolonial world. It demonstrates that the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, Socialist De-Colony merges the nonoverlapping intellectual and geographic spaces of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” and Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism” with Maxim Matusevich’s “Africa and the Iron Curtain.” It shows how the cultural and intellectual interchange of ideas between and amongst Black thinkers moved beyond the Atlantic circuit and were simultaneously heavily mediated and impacted by ideas from the East.

This chapter introduces a novel measure of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China using an equity network perspective. Leveraging a comprehensive firm registration dataset from SAIC, the authors construct dynamic ownership trees that trace direct and indirect government control from central, provincial, and city levels. By setting various ownership thresholds (100 percent, 50 percent, 30 percent, 10 percent, and >0 percent), the new measure reveals a substantially larger pool of SOEs than traditional self-reported indicators from the Annual Industrial Survey. The analysis uncovers systematic misreporting issues in existing definitions and demonstrates trends in state ownership, including a shift toward decentralization and increased indirect control over time. The findings offer fresh insights into the structure of China’s state capitalism and the evolving role of government in the economy, laying a robust foundation for future research on the economic impact of state ownership in China.

This chapter offers three historical accounts from the post-World War II flows of manufactured products and raw materials, but also the machinery of such flows, i.e., marine transport, focusing on the role that four international organisations played in these processes. The three histories are: liberalisation of telecommunication networks and services, the rise of open shipping registries in the transport of raw materials, and the mass logging of tropical forests. The chapter argues that these three histories, but also the broader history of international organisations since the mid-nineteenth century, embeds impersonal struggles between two modes of organizing capitalist social relations: laissez-faire and state capitalism. While the former is grounded in de-territorialised capitalist expansion, the latter is geared towards territorially confined regimes of accumulation – itself a reaction to the peripheralising effects of laissez-faire capitalism.

Toward Sustainability and Responsible Organizations addresses the purpose of business and social and environmental sustainability in the complex context of working across boundaries. State capitalism, shareholder capitalism, and stakeholder capitalism are compared. The chronological development of the concepts of sustainability and corporate responsibility is presented. Major corporate sustainability frameworks are identified. The United Nations’ 17 SDG’s, the Global Reporting Initiative, and the sustainable value framework are discussed. The relationship between ESG and financial performance is addressed. Involving and communicating with internal and external stakeholders are important aspects of navigating paradoxes associated with sustainable transformation. The common stakeholder–shareholder paradoxical tension that exists in sustainability management is discussed with an example.

Since its accession to the WTO twenty years ago, China’s image has shifted from a good student aspiring to assimilate itself into the multilateral trading system to one that is increasingly alienated from key WTO principles. How has China’s perspective on WTO been evolving? What are the reasons behind China’s changing perspective? This chapter addresses these questions from the Chinese perspective with a comprehensive analysis of the key moments in China’s first two decades in the WTO, followed by practical suggestions on how to engage China more constructively in the WTO and beyond.

Since its accession to the WTO twenty years ago, China’s image has shifted from a good student aspiring to assimilate itself into the multilateral trading system to one that is increasingly alienated from key WTO principles. How has China’s perspective on WTO been evolving? What are the reasons behind China’s changing perspective? This chapter addresses these questions from the Chinese perspective with a comprehensive analysis of the key moments in China’s first two decades in the WTO, followed by practical suggestions on how to engage China more constructively in the WTO and beyond.

Part III applies the suggested analytical framework at the micro level by delving deep into China’s corporate and capital market development puzzle. It uses the explanatory power of law and political economy to bring more clarity to China’s evolving approach to corporate governance. The purpose is to better understand the role played by formal law in governing Chinese public firms and ultimately in China’s capital market growth and to unpack the political–economic determinants that drove its evolution. The chapters in this part of the book pay particular attention to the creation and efficacy of corporate governance institutions, both traditional and idiosyncratic, that operate in the Chinese market.

This part of the book finds that law and political economy dynamics have produced operational results. They have mobilized market participants (both economic and political) to design and deploy various growth-promoting mechanisms within firms and in the market at large. The analysis shows how such mechanisms at times triggered, supported, boosted, or replaced more conventional corporate governance institutions in ways that eventually marched the market forward.

Chapter 4 examines legal configurations of political power dynamics during the Legal Modernization Era (ca. 1992–2010) – a golden age for legal reformers in China. The chapter reviews the development of significant national-level economic laws and regulations that gradually replaced many of the fragmented and probationary rules used earlier. The analysis of legal and policy documents suggests that the use of law in this period was consciously directed in two main directions: the use of law to structure and support the creation of markets (i.e., the economic function) and the use of law to reconfigure governance capacities and boost more centralized market regularity within the Party-state system (i.e., the political function). These two functions of law also set the foundation for what is known today as China’s state capitalism and its dominance in the domestic and international markets.

Scholars have long regarded certain attributes of corporate governance, particularly legal institutions that protect investors, as engines for financial development, capital market expansion, and growth. Yet, the development of China’s market challenges many of the underlying assumptions in those theories and leaves its observers puzzled. Consequently, many have dismissed the role of law in China’s economic development. But they have neglected to consider the political functions of law and how they have bolstered the development of the Chinese market. Part I delineates the conceptual and analytical frameworks underpinning the book. Chapter 1 unpacks the traditional framework that shapes how scholars and policymakers think of corporate governance and its role in financial development and market growth. Chapter 2 offers law and political economy as an alternative analytical framework through which to address the puzzle and the role of law within it.

The chapter examines the corporate governance institutions that developed during the Legal Modernization Era. It analyzes the traditional corporate governance mechanisms, both internal and external to the firm, that were embraced in China and adapted to domestic political–economic circumstances. The chapter discusses how China’s superficially convergent, investor-oriented corporate governance framework actually diverged in practice. It illuminates the political functions of law, showing how the corporate governance framework was ultimately directed to support the reconsolidation of political–economic powers and the shift toward state capitalism. The chapter offers comparative insights drawn from alternative systems of corporate governance and analyzes the implications of the Chinese framework for investors in the Chinese market.