BOOK REVIEWS

Corine Eyraud, L'entreprise d'Etat chinoise. De « l'institution sociale totale » vers l'entité économique ?

This work by Corine Eyraud is based on the doctoral thesis that won her the “Prix de la Thèse” in 1993. As its title suggests, it not only sets out to investigate the reforms in the state sector, but it also seeks to relate these reforms to the wider issues affecting urban society in China.

The idea of a “total social institution” is borrowed from Goffman to sum up the relationship between the enterprises and society at large in the late 1970s, when the state enterprises were not only economic entities but also—and perhaps even predominantly—organs of the single party state, which meant that they carried out numerous administrative, political and social functions. To grasp this evolution affecting both the enterprises and society, the author takes us on a double journey, the first an overview and the second an analytical trajectory: as she herself says, “[the overview goes] … from the organisation of society as a whole to the organisation of the enterprises ... [and the analysis] from the managerial practices within the enterprises to the structure of the social space and the overall management of Chinese society” (p. 375). These two approaches take up the second and third sections of the book, while the first allows the author to lay out her theoretical guidelines and methodology.

To give a more accurate picture of the internal organisation of the enterprises, her analysis deals successively with the administrative, industrial and political organisation of China, followed by its “state industrial system”, before coming to the micro-economic level of the enterprises themselves. This approach gives a complex picture of the enterprises, and reveals that their internal organisation along the lines of the single party state has not been greatly affected by the reforms. The author uses this insight to put forward a way of conceptualising the relationship between the administrative or political organs of the enterprises and those of the Party. She unveils what she calls “a single ramified system” (p. 81), both at the macro level and within each enterprise, meaning that the state and administrative organs are not subordinate to the Party but are actually “segments” of the Party, or what Nicole and Thomas Lowitt call state “ramifications” of the Party (quoted on p. 80).

However, although the organisation of the enterprises is characterised by a resistance to change, the author's analysis of the management patterns (sales, supply, recruitment and especially financial management and accountancy) throws into relief what she calls the coexistence of two distinct temporal planes. The first covers the speed of the reforms, meaning the rate at which the enterprises are integrated into the market mechanisms and assume responsibility themselves for their own profits and losses. The second involves the changes in the planned economy and the nature of the enterprise as a “mini-society”. These two different rates of change give rise to tensions and contradictions. They have a particularly strong influence on the management of the social functions of the state enterprises: “these firms are increasingly withdrawing from the financial management of society” (p. 364). Social services are becoming increasingly economically driven, and certain sectors of the employees are being excluded.

These meticulous analyses are perfectly presented, and they allow the reader to form a more precise idea about the state sector in the mid-1990s, as against the mid-1980s which have been the focal point of previous comprehensive works of this nature. Another positive feature is the frequent use of quotations taken directly from interviews with enterprise managers, which the author conducted over a period of 14 months. These quotations lend precision to the analyses while also bringing out the contradictions that such players on the economic scene are confronted with. Her critical use of a large amount of research material, from foreign and Chinese sources, earns her work a significant place both within ongoing discussions in the field of sinology, and at the heart of major debates in contemporary sociology (on the relations between enterprises and society, the autonomy of social groups, etc.). The author's references to research into other socialist countries should also be emphasised, because they allow her to advance hypotheses where Chinese sources provide neither answers nor clues. Finally, throughout her book, she provides us with very pertinent observations on certain shifts in Chinese vocabulary, which give her some original insights into her topic.

Nonetheless, her analyses are sometimes lacking in historical density, because she does not always put her observations into the context of the longer developmental trends in China since 1949. This tends to reinforce the impression of a permanence in the current administrative and political structures of the country. For example, the apparent solidity of the Party apparatus in the late 1990s cannot really be considered separately from its weakened condition after the Cultural Revolution and its restoration from the mid-1970s onwards.

In the light of the research programme outlined in the introduction, her analysis of the changes in urban society is weak and this is a shame. She herself emphasises that the overlapping rhythms of change affect more than just the styles of economic management, for “it is a matter of two coexisting kinds of social management, and two kinds of social organisation…” (p. 373). Consequently, “changing the state enterprise's ‘total society' aspect amounts to effecting a radical change in the spatial organisation of Chinese urban society itself, and therefore in the style of its management” (p. 365). Although the closing pages contain some pertinent reflections on these changes to the social structures, the reader is left a little unsatisfied. Clearly, the considerable amount of research into the enterprises meant that the author could not deal with everything. But a study of the other causes of urban change (for example, housing and social security reform, the reorganisation of the towns around new economic activities, the growth of collective and private enterprises) would have thrown more light, not only on the social changes themselves but equally, as she aptly demonstrates, on the changes and the obstacles confronting the enterprises.

This weakness far from detracts from the high quality of this work, however, for it opens up new perspectives that should enrich our own insights into contemporary China. Meanwhile, other researchers would do well to adopt and extend the approach that she has initiated in this volume: to learn about the enterprises by starting from the developments in society, and to understand society by starting from the enterprises.

Translated from the French original by Jonathan Hall