Corporate Governance Evaluation Research of China’s Listed Companies

Since over three decades ago, focus on the subject of global corporate governance research has expanded from major developed countries such as Britain, America, Japan and Germany to emerging market countries. Among these, the footprints of China’s corporate reform — the modern corporate system, the Corporate Law, corporate governance structures, corporate governance mechanisms, and so on- have become well-known reform marks. China’s corporate reform has gone through over three decades with corporate governance being the principle line, which is to say that corporate governance is the core of corporate reform. The general prerequisite of corporate reform is change to the economic system. Before 1978, China implemented a planned economy followed by a series of reforms, until the establishment of a market economy system. With the transformation of China’s economic system, corporate governance is also transforming from administrative governance to economic governance, which forms the principle line of China’s corporate governance reform. During the transformation process, China’s corporate governance is experiencing a sublimation process of ‘similarity in form’ to ‘similarity in spirit.’ Looking back on the development of the Chinese economy and its corporate sector over the last three decades or so, we can divide corporate governance practice across the decades into four phases: Concept introduction, structural reform, mechanism building and gradual improvement.