A Review of Corporate Governance in China

The 2005 policy decision to change the status of non-tradable state and non-state shares into tradable A shares ushers in a new era in the stock markets of China. Over time all of these shares will be tradable and potentially transferred to foreign and domestic private sector investors. These changes have the potential to significantly alter the monitoring and control of the majority of listed firms that until now have been controlled by tightly held blockholders of non-tradable shares. It is therefore timely to reassess the corporate governance of Chinese listed firms. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical corporate governance literature in China.