Say Goo on The Role of Party Committees in SOEs and Stakeholder Representation in China (The Journal of Comparative Law)

"The Role of Party Committees in SOEs and Stakeholder Representation in China"
Say Goo
The Journal of Comparative Law, Vol 20, Issue 2, 2025
Published in Oct 2025

The Background

State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in China have long been struggling with, amongst other problems, the question of the efficiency of their governance structure and their corporate social responsibility (CSR). The recent introduction of party committees into China's SOEs and the imposition of a duty of corporate social responsibility on the SOEs was intended to deal with these issues, but have raised concerns in the West of political interference by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the SOEs' operations, thereby affecting the objectives and efficiency of the SOEs, and how this duty is to be fulfilled by SOEs. This paper therefore, examines the research question: how China can improve the corporate governance structure of SOEs to better fulfil CSR while maintaining efficiency, and specifically, whether implementing stakeholder representation within existing party committee structures or boards of directors would be able to address current governance shortcomings?