Any recommended reading on the role of worker co-ops in the political economy of China?
Thanks
You may as well drop in the source document for people to read if they want. It’s a summary of a paper by a Chinese law professor on Huawei’s ownership structure, with a translation of the (rather long) paper linked in.
In terms of what you’ve said, yes, the shares are ‘virtual’ (essentially held on trust by a trade union entity), but that does not prevent shareholder decision making, which is exercised jointly with the founder.
It’d also be remiss to bring up Huawei without referring to the recent significant dividend payout to shareholder-employees.
Oh you’ve gone straight to the Chinese—I figured you were running off of the various English-language analyses floating around. Huawei’s ownership became a political football a while back, so there’s a fair bit of decent English content on it.
Huawei is a good example of how legal categories can be a little misleading—if Chinese lawyers are anything like English ones, they’ll use whatever legal structure gives the most advantage. For instance, I can’t tell which category SAIC would fall under. On one hand, Wikipedia calls it a state-owned entity, and the state asset commission has a controlling stake. On the other hand, it’s a limited liability company, it’s a joint-stock corporation, and it has multiple joint-venture subsidiaries.
The follow up question, of course, would be why structures other than cooperatives would be preferred, and it’s not one I’ve read widely enough to be able to answer.
Private enterprises in China are overwhelmingly small family-run businesses. The situation is similar to Vietnam. According to the Global Family Business Research Center:
Currently in China, 85% of the 32 million private enterprises are family business
The government decided to adopt the policy of “zhuada fangxiao” (grasp the big, release the small), which resulted in waves of mergers of larger state-owned enterprises and privatization of the many smaller and less efficient enterprises outside the commanding heights of the economy that the government saw as too costly to maintain or supervise. Consequently, the state-owned enterprises that remain have been consolidated to be much larger in size in terms of total assets but significantly smaller as a percentage of total enterprises in the country. China's centrally-administered state-owned enterprises hold total assets of nearly 69 trillion yuan.
According to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission regarding the public sector's contribution to GDP in China:
Very few exists in China. They simply could not compete with private enterprises.
That's weird, I've heard the opposite in general, that year by year China has more new coops than anywhere else. Although I suppose that's probably not a high bar to clear, and probably included "like one person owns a thing and does a business with it" as a coop since technically a business with one worker that's owned by that worker is a worker-owned business.
China has more new coops than anywhere else. Although I suppose that’s probably not a high bar to clear,
Italy would actually win. Or the province Emilia-Romagna at the provincial level. Sometging like 30% of the economy is coöperatives.
I remember this UN paper, which cites China’s National Market Administration State Bureau, which says that there were 2.13 million farmer cooperatives in 2018. Could it be that in the census, “enterprises” are a specific classification of business, rather than all business in general, and that means that these farmer cooperatives are excluded?
Huawei is supposed to be worker owned, isn't it? The founder has an outsized portion but its like 1% of stock, the rest is employee owned.
