China Country Dialogue 2005

Leading off the panel on corporate governance, Patrick Bolton, Chair of the IPD Task Force on Corporate Governance, Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute, and Professor of Economics at Princeton University presented, China: A New Model of Corporate Governance? His presentation highlighted the corporate governance principles and problems China is likely to have in common with other transition and emerging market countries. He discussed ‘Chinese Exceptionalism’ in corporate governance, which relates to the central role of the Chinese Communist Party. The presentation touched on the central corporate governance issues China faces today, and discussed several alternative policy options and tradeoffs.

Chong-En Bai, also a member of the IPD Task Force on Corporate Governance and Chairman of the Economics Department at Tsinghua University, presented Corporate Governance and Privatization . His talk provided a snapshot of the state of Corporate Governance in Publicly listed companies and reported on recent research on privatization.

Ann Florini opened the panel discussion on transparency. Ann Florini is the Chair of the IPD Task Force on Transparency, Senior Fellow in the Foreign Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, and Director of the World Economic Forum’s Global Governance Initiative. Her presentation Global Trends in Transparency focused on the notion that China’s striking moves toward greater information disclosure are occurring in a world where transparency is increasingly seen as the norm and as a powerful signal of good intentions. But many countries have discovered that good information disclosure policies are difficult to design and implement. The presentation provided an overview of global trends and highlighted successes and failures of transparency policies.

Hanhua Zhou, also a member of the IPD Task Force on Transparency and Professor of Law in the Institute of Law, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences presented on the transparency panel. His talk titled, Openness of government Information in China: Practices, problems & Prospects introduced current developments in China regarding openness of government information, including the lawmaking process.

The event was moderated by Junhai Liu, an Associate professor, Deputy Head of Department of Commercial & Economic Law, Institute of Law, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).