Relaxing the constraints from above: Politics of privatising public enterprises in China

This paper addresses the factors that caused widespread privatisation in China in the late 1990s. It argues that the relaxation of constraints by the central government made local governments less worried about the political risks of privatisation such as resistance from workers and the banks. This relaxation based on the policies of the 15th Party Congress, together with the economic rationale of reforming inefficient public enterprises, became a strong incentive for local governments to carry out this reform. As local governments regarded such reform as an opportunity to show their loyalty to the central government and to evade debts, a number of problems emerged in the reform process that affected the interests of both the central government and the workers.