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The substantive norms of Chinese corporate governance have been studied extensively inside and outside China. Yet much less attention has been paid to the Chinese institutional environment that determines whether and how far those norms will be made meaningful. While complaints about general lack of enforcement are common, less common are analyses that concretely tie institutional capacity to specific enforcement problems. This Article aims to fill that gap. It surveys a number of state and non-state channels for the enforcement of corporate governance rules and standards in China, from markets to regulatory bodies, looking at the specific capacities of each. It concludes by finding that both state and non-state institutions are surprisingly ineffective in their contributions to corporate governance. In addition, while the state, for political reasons, prefers to leave enforcement to state regulatory bodies, its repression of civil society institutions is so severe that even a modest relaxation could have substantial benefits.

AbstractSince the early 1990s, China has come a long way in legislating the foundational rules for its reformed economy. Virtually all of the important areas – contracts, business organizations, securities, bankruptcy and secured transactions, to name a few – are now covered by national legislation as well as lower-level regulations. Yet an important feature of a legal structure suited to a market economy is missing: the ability of the system to generate from below solutions to problems not adequately dealt with by existing legislation. The top-down model that has dominated Chinese law reform efforts to date can only do so much. What is needed now is a more welcoming attitude to market-generated solutions to the gaps and other problems that will invariably exist in legislation. The state's distrust of civil-society institutions and other bottom-up initiatives suggests, however, that this different approach will not come easily.

In March 1995, The China Quarterly published a special issue devoted to developments in the Chinese legal system. That issue canvassed a wide range of subjects: the legislative process, the implementation of legislation via the interpretive practices of courts and administrative agencies as well as through the enforcement of civil judgements, the personnel staffing the system in the role of legal advisers, criminal law and human rights, the key area of foreign trade and investment law, and finally China's place and role in the international legal order.