Trade Unions and Management in China and Their Legal Context

Foreign capital has re-entered China for almost 20 years now, since it was admitted in the late 1970s when Deng Xiaoping launched the ambitious ‘Four Modernizations’ and opened up the economy through the ‘Open Door’ policy to investment by sources from outside the country. In retrospect, the foreign-funded enterprises, including the joint ventures (JVs), have been a pioneering force not only on the frontier of productivity and technological innovations (see Vogel, 1991) but also in managerial and labour reforms for a China now in search of a new realm of ‘market socialism’. After these years of experiments to advance ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the question worth investigating is whether the once ‘enclaved’ practices adopted in these foreign-owned enterprises will be increasingly emulated by their ‘native’ counterparts in the state-owned sector, now in a vigorous process of restructuring and rationalization, as suggested by the thesis of ‘institutional convergence’ brought about by the unifying imperative of ‘industrialism’.