State-Led Privatization in China

This book examines the complex interactions between state and societal actors such as the central leadership, grassroots officials, and state-owned enterprise managers and workers, and the role they have played in China’s economic reform. Building on rich fieldwork data gathered in three Chinese cities, Jin Zeng argues first, that local economic structure and cadre evaluation system shaped local officials’ incentives for privatization; and second, that in implementing privatization, local officials relied on mobilization campaigns and appeasement measures. Finally, this book shows that the dynamics of privatization were fundamentally driven not by short-term losers or early winners in reform but by the central government’s reactions to social opposition and by the subsequent responses of local officials to the changed political-regulatory environment.