China's state-owned enterprises(SOEs) have developed more than 70 years since the People's Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949. From 1949 to 1978,SOEs provided material guarantee for the construction of the PRC, laid a solid foundation for the industrialization process,and ensured that the people were masters of their own affairs. From 1978 to 2012, SOEs upgraded their growth quality and increased their efficiency for improving people's material and cultural life. Since 2012, SOEs have become “stronger, better and bigger”on all fronts for satisfying people's growing expectations for a better life. In essence,reforming SOEs means interpreting and exercising the people-centered development philosophy, and means addressing principal social contradiction through different stages of socialist development, as SOEs care about the main needs of the people. Such a development is a process of constant exploration and continuous growth from strength to strength, which is the inherent logic of theory and practice of SOE growth in new China for more than 70 years.
The top-level design of national governance plays a leading role in reforming the corporate governance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at the micro level. Following the overall objectives of comprehensively deepening reforms,this paper argues that the objective of SOEs corporate governance reform at this stage should be to improve and develop the SOEs corporate governance system with Chinese characteristics and modernize SOEs corporate governance system and governance capacity. To achieve this ambitious objective, this paper considers the theory of SOEs corporate governance with Chinese characteristics, and then explores the concrete manifestation and implementation pathway to the modernization of SOEs corporate governance system and governance capacity. This paper thus enriches the theory of corporate governance and provides insights into the new era SOEs corporate governance reform.
China's state-owned enterprises(SOEs) are facing an embedded integration of new functional mission,new classification reform and new digital development. These new tasks require SOEs to embrace digital strategic transformation and innovation for high-quality fulfillment of their national mission. Studying their digital transformation practices, this paper systematically explores the mechanism and path of embedding national mission into SOE digital transformation, and the mode selection of SOE digital transformation under different mission guidance. The findings are: (1) The SOE functional mission focusing on economic development,strategic support and public services in the new era is undertaken by for-profit, strategic and public functional SOEs; (2) the foreign circulation path based on the positioning mechanism-mapping mechanism and the internal consumption connection path for the state capital strategic positioning constitute a double two-way mechanism of embedding the national mission to the SOE digital strategic transformation, leading SOEs to build market-oriented, capacity-oriented and public-oriented digital transformation modes; (3) the three types of reform modes have respectively produced the action mechanism featuring agile strengthening,toughness strengthening and adaptability strengthening, which support the SOE classification performance. This paper attempts to make up for the research gap such as the lack of integration of the SOE digital strategic transformation mode by constructing the theoretical mode of SOE digital strategic transformation under the guidance of national mission, and reveals the intermediary mechanism of digital strategic transformation to support SOEs for fulfilling their functional missions.
Innovation is the source of power for high-quality development, and a relaxed institutional arrangement is a necessity for promoting innovation in enterprises. This paper examines the impact of fault tolerance on corporate innovation, theoretically analyzes the positive effects of fault tolerance on stimulating innovation, and estimates the influence of fault tolerance on corporate innovation by using the panel data of listed manufacturing companies from 2007 to 2019, taking the quasi-natural experiment of fault-tolerance system in various places since the new round of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform. This study finds that the fault-tolerance system has significantly improved the R&D investment and patent application of the pilot SOEs,but the incentive effect is mainly reflected in the utility model patents; fault-tolerance system mainly promotes corporate innovation by alleviating managers' career worries and improving governance ability.Furthermore, the fault-tolerance system is more effective for small and medium-sized SOEs with low market competition and can alleviate the restriction of agency cost on corporate innovation. In addition, the fault-tolerance system has not yet had a significant spillover effect on private enterprises.These results show that in the SOE reform, it is necessary to strengthen the institutional arrangement of fault-tolerance and create a relaxed environment to encourage innovation; it is necessary to organically integrate fault-tolerance-system design into executive measurement and corporate governance, promote fault-tolerant system to be implemented in a wider range of enterprises, and enhance the incentive effect on high-quality innovation.