Protecting the State from Itself? Regulatory Interventions in Corporate Governance and the Financing of China's 'State Capitalism'

Authors

Nicholas C, Howson, University of Michigan Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2015

Abstract

From the start of China’s “corporatization without privatization” process in the late 1980s, a Chinese corporate governance regime, apparently shareholder-empowering and determined by enabling legal norms, has been altered by mandatory governance mechanisms imposed by a state administrative agency, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). This has been done to protect minority shareholders against exploitation by the Party-state controlling shareholders, the power behind China’s “state capitalism.” This chapter reviews the path of this benign intervention by the CSRC and the structural reasons for it, and then speculates on why this novel example of the China’s “fragmented authoritarianism” continues to be tolerated by the Party-state, and indeed how it is necessary for the continued financing of China’s state capitalism.

Comments

Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

Publication Information & Recommended Citation

Howson, Nicholas C. "Protecting the State from Itself? Regulatory Interventions in Corporate Governance and the Financing of China's 'State Capitalism'." In Regulating the Visible Hand? The Institutional Implications of Chinese State Capitalism, edited by Benjamin J. Liebmann and Curtis J. Milhaupt, 49-69. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.