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This chapter attempts to explore the strategic implications of enterprise reform that have been undertaken at three major Chinese firms in the context of the recent wave of nation-wide policies aimed at promoting market socialism and China’s projected entry into the WTO after the year 2000. These high-profile efforts have been directed at the national goal of building a market-oriented economy with Chinese characteristics (Child, 1994; Warner, 1995). The overall strategy, prescribed by the state, attempts to emulate the practice of the capitalist system known as marketization, which it hopes can still be accommodated within a doctrinal framework that still enshrines socialist principles (see Fortune, 1999). This hybrid blending of dialectical oppositions, between capitalist and socialist practices, is novel but has to date proved to be a workable piece of social experimentation at the wider level of the national economy. It is hence interesting to ascertain whether at the microlevel of the individual enterprise and workplace, such a fusion of the antithetical assumptions and practices of capitalism and socialism has been pursued with similar prudence and apparent success.

Since the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping since 1978, China has been gradually introducing greater flexibility into its factormarkets. Previously, under the pre-reform employment system, for example, workers were assigned to enterprises by state labour bureaus. Now, a nascent labour market is evolving (Ng, 1995; Warner, 1995; Ng and Warner, 1998). China’s industrial relations were once only weakly comparable to those in other countries, such as in Western economies or those in Asia. Today, its labour-management relations and management of human resources are increasingly subject to outside influences (see Warner, 2000, in press).

Historical development and economic and social setting institutional framework freedom of association and workers' and empoloyers' organizations collective bargaining and industrial conflict workplace industrial relations working conditions and wages women and young workers, subcontract labour and homeworkers and "social wages" foreign investment and some current industrial relations issues. Appendices: wage negotiation in Hong Kong international labour conventions on which a declaration has been made for Hong Kong by the government of the United Kingdom.