The Management and Power Structure of Chinese Enterprises during and after the Cultural Revolution; with Empirical Data Comparing Chinese and European Enterprises

During the history of Communist China, the management and structure of enterprises have undergone great changes, reaching their culmination during the Cultural Revolution and afterwards under the new administration which followed the late Chairman Mao-Zedong. The main shifts in recent years have been: from the use of ideology in guiding organizations towards the use of economic rewards; a move towards decentralization of enterprise management; and one towards a limited free market system in the economy. The paper is divided into two main parts. First we analyse the development of the power structure in Chinese enterprises since the Cultural Revolution, and in the second part we study how the changes in the power structure appear in the influence of different interest groups in decision making at the end of 1980, comparing the results of the IDE study of European enterprises with interview and personally administered questionnaire data collected in China. On the whole, European personnel appear to exercise more influence than do their Chinese counterparts.