Pacific Affairs: An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

Volume 73, No. 1

 

Guangdong's Challenges: Organizational Streamlining, Economic Restructuring and Anticorruption
By Joseph Y. S. Cheng

 

Abstract

Since 1979, Guangdong has been a laboratory in China's economic reform process, testing various reform policies and their political limits. In the 1990s, the thrust of China's economic reform has been transforming state enterprises into independent legal entities responsible for their own profits and losses. Re-defining government functions is both a prerequisite and a logical consequence of such reforms of state enterprises. The objective is to separate government from enterprises, and to promote "small government, big society". Guangdong's success in economic restructuring has enabled it to make satisfactory progress in organizational streamlining. However, corruption has been rampant in the province, attracting central interference, tarnishing its reputation and that of its leaders. Reducing the size of the bureaucracy is supposed to facilitate improvements in remuneration for civil servants and eventually contribute to combat corruption. The complex interactions of the above also raise the fundamental question of the limitations of the reforms in the absence of democratization.