中国的会计和减少国有股份(英文)

Critical Perspectives on Accounting 18 (2007) 559–580 Accounting and the reduction of state-owned stock in China Shujun Ding a,∗, Cameron Graham b a Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alta., Canada T2N 1N4 b Schulich School of Business, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ont., Canada M3J 1P3 Received 22 September 2005; received in revised form 9 January 2006; accepted 20 February 2006 Abstract In 2001, the Chinese government announced that it would reduce its ownership position in com- panies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets. As state-owned shares had previously not been permitted to be traded, this announcement was a significant market event in China. The announce- ment stated that the shares would be sold at a market-determined price, rather than at the much lower “net assets” price that investors had naively anticipated. The difference between these prices was considerable for virtually all listed companies. We examine how accounting information was used discursively to frame the situation, constructing the “problem” of how to reduce state ownership and simultaneously restricting the set of permissible solutions. We distinguish the ex ante and ex post uses of accounting calculations and vocabularies in the public discourse during this event, and examine how the discursive function of accounting in China is conditioned by bureaucracy and ideology in Chinese society. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Ideology; Discourse; State ownership; China; Socialism; Marketization; Academics In early 2001, the government of the People’s Republic of China announced its intention to sell off some of the shares it owned in companies listed on the two Chinese stock exchanges. The state owned the majority of shares in many listed companies, but ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: shujun.ding@haskayne.ucalgary.ca (S. Ding). 1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2006.02.006 560 S. Ding, C. Graham / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 18 (2007) 559–580 state-owned stock had never before been traded publicly. This announcement was therefore not only of great ideological significance for China’s emerging hybrid economy and evolving political climate, but also of great financial significance for the Chinese stock markets. However, differences between the pricing method expected by investors and the method that was implemented months later, along with hesitations and uncertainty about whether or not to proceed with the plan, led to large swings in the market. Statements by government and market officials and by accounting and economics academics during this period framed the reduction of state-ownership in various ways. Participants in the discourse often drew on accounting technologies and accounting vocabularies. At stake were wealth transfers, shifts of power, the ideological integrity of the state, and the continued industrialization and modernization of the Chinese economy. This market incident presents an opportunity to study the role of accounting technologies and vocabularies in the political economy of a socialist1 country. Drawing on a variety of sources, we examine the discursive uses of accounting information and vocabularies during the incident, distinguishing between their ex ante and ex post uses. Our aim is to show how the discursive function of accounting was conditioned by bureaucracy and ideology in Chinese society. The situation of accounting in China presents interesting challenges to the presupposi- tions of prior research. Yet despite the economic and social importance of China and its unique features with respect to the nature of organizations, the role of the state, and the goals of society, little critical accounting research on China has reached Western journals. The present study examines a time of intense economic change in China, and attempts to show how accounting was used to justify political and economic choices at a broad soci- etal level. Different contexts and research methods notwithstanding, several prior studies in critical accounting literature have also examined the role that accounting has played in broad political and social struggles. Particularly germane to the present study is the work of Arnold and Hammond (1994), who examined the ideological role accounting and social disclosure played in the South African divestment debates in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s. Their approach is picked up in Section 1. The present study also continues previous critical research on the role of account- ing in markets-based economic reforms (e.g. Arnold and Cooper, 1999; Crompton and Jupe, 2003; Letza and Smallman, 2001; Ogden and Anderson, 1999; Pallot, 2003; Shaoul, 1997; Uddin and Hopper, 2001; Wickramasinghe and Hopper, 2005), and extends this prior research by examining forms of state-ownership and marketization that do not exist in the West. 1. Theoretical framing One of the distinguishing features of the social context of accounting in China, which underpins these forms of state-ownership and frames the attempts at marketization, is the 1 The appropriate label for China—socialist, Marxist, communist, or (perhaps hybrid) capitalist—is contentious, and is germane to the present study. We use the label “socialist” here because it is the self-description used by the Chinese government. S. Ding, C. Graham / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 18 (2007) 559–580 561 explicit role played by socialist ideology. Arnold and Hammond (1994), in their study of ideology and accounting in the U.S., demonstrated that opposing forces in political and economic conflicts can use accounting as a contested ideological terrain to serve different social ends. They looked specifically at how accounting could serve subordinate groups in society who challenged dominant economic interests. They argued that accounting serves ideological purposes, but that because accounting is a contested terrain, the ideological function of accounting is a “two-edged sword” (p. 124) that can serve both sides in a political conflict. Arnold and Hammond defined ideology as “any significant conjuncture between dis- course and political interest” (p. 111, citing Eagleton, 1991). This broad definition specif- ically sets aside the notion of “false consciousness” and any pejorative sense of the word ideology (p. 118). By adopting this definition in the present study, we are able to focus on the social context of discursive statements, and not assume that accounting necessarily serves either the ideology of socialism or the ideology of capitalism. Arnold and Hammond argued that ideology creates social meaning that upholds relations of domination. In the present study, the domination of the state and the domination of capital are at odds, and accounting is enlisted to support these contesting ideologies. Ideology is implicit in the changing institutional features of the Chinese economy, as capitalist market mechanisms displace socialist bureaucratic controls. It is also explicit in the discursive justifications for and against the changes being made. We examine the particular role played by accounting in shaping the institutions of the economy, and in framing the discourse surrounding the attempted changes. In doing this, we are able to connect accounting simultaneously to its social and ideological functions in the Chinese economy. Accounting has long been recognized as playing a number of such social roles that transcend its prima facie functions in both the disclosure of organizational performance to investors and the rational management of organizations. Hopwood (1983, 1987) and Burchell et al. (1980) have laid out the research considerations for exploring accounting in its broader social context. Hopwood is concerned with accounting change. Accounting is not static, he points out, but changes in response to interrelated changes in society. As importantly, changes in accounting cause reciprocal social changes. Accounting shapes its social context as it translates economic goals into specific social power. Accounting accomplishes this, says Hopwood (1983: 300–301; 1987: 229), by creating new visibilities, by creating and redistributing social knowledge. However, the results are often unantic- ipated, as accounting changes can create the means and opportunity for resistance to intended goals. The present study examines the way that the creation and redistribution of social knowledge by accounting, specifically pertaining to state ownership of eco- nomic resources in China, enabled participants in public discourse to construct competing perspectives. Because accounting functions as an integral part of the economic system, it contributes to “the construction of a symbolic order within which social agents can interact” (Burchell et al., 1980: 20). Burchell et al. argue that the nature of this contribution is contingent on the degree to which social agents agree on their collective objectives. When agreement over objectives is low (that is, when there is collective uncertainty about objectives), accounting serves an ex ante role in providing support for competing factions as they try to influence collective will, and an ex post role in justifying decisions that have already been made. 562 S. Ding, C. Graham / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 18 (2007) 559–580 They refer to these roles using the analogies of “ammunition machine” and “rationalization machine”, respectively.2 Burchell et al. make these observations of accounting as it functions in an organizational context, as opposed to a wider, social one. When they do address accounting in a wider social context, Burchell et al. adopt a Weberian perspective, saying that accounting contributes to “the emergence and maintenance of the particular order inherent in economic rationality” (p. 20). While we do not wish to dispute this line of argument, we find it comparatively vague (and indeed, the authors themselves call their social observations “even more tenta- tive” [p. 13] than their organizational ones). We would suggest that part of the reason for this vagueness is that Burchell et al. attempt to make a distinction between the organizational and the social that is not well founded. Given that organizations constitute and shape much of the social world, and that the social world permeates organizations at least through the socialization and habitus of individuals, we prefer the organizational insights of Burchell et al. for examining the role of accounting at a societal level. We therefore apply them to the study at hand, while attempting to be alert to problems that may arise. These organi- zational insights are particularly suited to a study of Chinese society: with a centralized approval system of political and economic management, socialist China has had a society considerably more bureaucratic than that of Western nations. The complex of factors influencing the role of accounting in China is dominated by the role of the Chinese state and its considerable power to influence and control economic institutions. Yet this power is changing and becoming more indirect as China’s economy undergoes reform. This creates new opportunities for accounting in China to mediate the power of the state. Burchell et al. point out that accounting operates by making things visi- ble: “out of the mass of organizational actions and their consequences, accounting systems can influence those which become relatively more visible” (p. 17). This insight takes on particular significance in light of Foucault’s (1980) dictum that power is a strategy for main- taining a relationship between the visible and the sayable. As accounting systems influence what is visible, they shape discourse. And because accounting systems are asymmetric, and accounting expertise is unevenly distributed, accounting particularly serves as a tool for those individuals and organizations that gain advantage from this asymmetry and expertise. As the accounting profession grows in China (Hao, 1999), the distribution of accounting expertise is shifting. This compounds the uncertainty of the effects of accounting, which, even in the most stable environments, does not operate unambiguously. Accounting has uncertain effects because it operates discursively, not deterministically. Accounting systems “mediate between divergent interests, . . . [and] create a symbolic struc- ture within which discourse [can] take place and through which action [can] be achieved” (Burchell et al., 1980: 18). However, the information accounting provides to public dis- course is decontextualized, removed both from the social conditions in which accounting calculations are performed and from the social conditions accounting purports to repre- sent. By these removals and abstractions, accounting forecloses alternative representations, narratives, and value positions (Neu and Taylor, 1996). The result is that accounting tech- nologies, systems, and numbers “rule out the very types of analyses that are crucial to 2 Burchell et al. also deal with the contingency of collective certainty about goals. We set this portion of their model aside here, as it does not apply to the Chinese social context during the period in question. S. Ding, C. Graham / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 18 (2007) 559–580 563 understanding the broader functioning of accounting” (Neu and Taylor, 1996: 441). The way that accounting forecloses discourse, instead of opening it up, is an important dynamic within the case at hand. We will see how, in the discourse over reducing state-owned stock in China, accounting serves to limit the recognition of “problems” and the acceptability of “solutions”. The present study draws on these established understandings of the social impact of accounting in order to investigate the particular roles of accounting in the ideological contest surrounding the development of capital markets in China. The insights of Arnold and Ham- mond on the interplay between ideology and accounting allow us to perceive the political interests that underlie both the governance technologies being implemented by the Chinese state, and the resistance to certain aspects of these technologies. This, in turn, allows us to evaluate how well our Western understandings of the social impact of accounting apply in this “other” social context. 2. Data and methodology Our sources of data for exploring these discursive functions of accounting in China are archival, and fall into five categories. The first category consists of academic literature in the Western mode, by both Western and Chinese scholars writing about China in Western academic journals. The second consists of economic and accounting data regarding the Chinese financial markets and certain listed companies. A major source of this data is the websites of the financial markets themselves (for Shanghai, http://www.sse.com.cn, and for Shenzhen, http://www.szse.cn), which contain archival records of market filings and transactions. The third category is the set of official government announcements regarding the financial markets, centering on the attempt by the state in 2001 to reduce its level of ownership of listed companies. Included here are the regulations and various topical statements of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). The fourth category is information from Chinese news media covering the financial markets and related economic events. The fifth, and most unique, category is a portion of the public discourse in China on the “reduction” event. By “the public discourse”, we mean something quite specific, as China has modes of discourse that differ from those in the West. In this case, a prominent part of the discourse occurred in a very focussed and concentrated way, in an online discussion forum maintained by a major Chinese web portal, SINA (http://www.sina.com.cn). The main SINA website is similar to portals such as Yahoo or MSN, and like these Western portals, it has a very popu- lar finance section (http://www.finance.sina.com.cn). This section sponsors and maintains discussion forums on a number of finance-related topics, one of which has been dedicated to the reduction event. In contrast to many Internet discussion forums, which often feature ill- informed participants in an unmoderated free-for-all, this SINA forum included among its contributors several of the leading economics, finance, and accounting academics in China. Some of these participated as individual academics, while others spoke in the voice of the government, as is traditional in China for academics supporting government positions. All translations from this discourse from Chinese into English are by the authors. We have identified statements as being by “academics” when the speaker/writer is generally 564 S. Ding, C. Graham / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 18 (2007) 559–580 recognized as having academic credentials or an academic position, as academics in China often also hold positions in government or business. Where the speaker/writer has no such credentials, she or he has been identified as speaking on behalf of government or business, according to the organization they represent. This categorization is necessarily loose, given the multiple affiliations of many participants. However, for the purposes of this analysis, the organization represented is of secondary importance to the content of the discursive contribution. Using these data, we have constructed a narrative context for the case study. Our analysis describes how accounting information and technologies were enlisted to provide ammuni- tion and rationalizations during this pivotal event in Chinese financial reform. 3. Economic reform and the state in China Since its establishment on October 1, 1949, the government of the People’s Republic of China has played a constantly changing role in conducting political, economic and social life. In 1978, the Central Committee of Chinese Communist Party promulgated a landmark report that set a tone for reform. The report stated that large-scale class struggle was over, and that the attention of the Party and the Chinese people should turn to economic life. Various government officials expanded on these statements in the ensuing years, stating that the country would embrace a socialistic market-based economy, with the government limited to ideological leadership and macro-economic control (Hu, 1982; Jiang, 2002). As a result of these reforms, the role of the state in China has now been so altered that some techniques and institutions used to govern economic life are “only loosely associated with executives and bureaucracies of the formal organs of state” (Miller and Rose, 1990, p. 1).3 These technologies of governance act at a distance, and “rely in crucial respects upon ‘expertise”’ (p. 2), such as accounting, to permit more indirect modes of economic gover- nance. In terms of social policy and programs, however, the state still regards itself as playing a direct role. This is particularly true with respect to the Chinese social security system. Since China’s move towards a market-based economy, enterprises no longer bear the extensive social welfare responsibilities that they had in the pre-reform period. This has exacerbated inequality in social security benefits, and increased the urgency of social secu- rity reform. Business organizations have undergone mergers, restructuring, lay-offs and even bankruptcy, and a new employer–employee relationship has replaced life-long employment (Cheng, 2004). Attempts to reform state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have led to more than 25.5 million SOE employees being laid off between 1998 and 2001 (State Department of China, 2002). The prospect of further reform of SOEs increases the urgency of setting up a na