Beyond SOEs: Undertakings and the Political Economy of China’s Reform

Angela Xiao Wu, New York University

The spine for periodizing China’s Reform and Opening-up has been the restructuring of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), whereby SOEs have functioned as instruments of economic statecraft. While sectoral variation among SOEs has been extensively studied, this project turns to a parallel category: the vast domain of state-operated undertakings (shiye danwei, often misleadingly translated as “public institutions”). Under the socialist planned economy, undertakings were organized to support the national project of social and political reproduction. They encompassed a wide range of social and cultural services, as well as much of what would be considered public utilities in Western contexts. Undertakings employ large workforces, contain a high proportion of Party members, and are deeply embedded in China’s economy and politics. Since the late 1970s, as SOEs underwent successive waves of restructuring, sectors such as media and culture, research and education, and hospitals, despite becoming key actors in China’s “growth miracle,” remained administered and accounted for as undertakings, with many profitable entities functioning as “undertakings managed as enterprises.” Only as late as the 2010s did major undertaking sectors begin a formalized and partial subjection to incorporation and financialization, modeled on earlier SOE reforms. By tracing the delayed restructuring of China’s undertakings and mapping variation across sectors, this study reconstructs the distinct rationale, institutional configuration, and historical trajectory of public utility in China. In doing so, it rethinks the temporality of the Chinese reform through domains that are (at least nominally) uncommodifiable, yet central to the country’s evolving model of political economy.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 166. The Chinese Reform as Social Science History (II): Temporality and Contingency