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Political Meritocracy and Corporate Governance: Insights from China’s Petroleum Sector

Guest Speakers:

Nikita Makarchev, Magdalene College Bye-Fellow (2017-2018) and Ph.D. candidate in Development Studies at Cambridge University. He completed an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies at Oxford and a B.A. in Government at Harvard. His research examines justice and governance in China’s state-owned enterprises.

Dr Yuan He received her PhD from Cambridge University. She completed an MPhil in Development Studies at Cambridge University, a Graduate Certificate at Hopkins-Nanjing Center and a B.A. in Applied Social Sciences at Nanjing University. She was also a Jawaharlal Nehru University visiting scholar and Chinese University of Hong Kong visiting student. Her research centres on China and India’s development models and governance logic from a human well-being perspective.

Abstract:

The depiction of China as a political meritocracy is gaining increasing traction. Indeed, China’s political meritocracy is even seen, at times, as a viable alternative to liberal democracy and a core determinant of economic performance. This seminar, thus, examines the impact of China’s political meritocracy on state-owned enterprise (SOE) governance. In particular, it concentrates on assessing the meritocratic nature of human resource management within Chinese national oil companies (NOCs). For, NOCs are China’s leading SOE employers and, in recent years, have expressed a growing commitment to ‘meritocratic’ and ‘performance-based’ corporate practices. Likewise, changing Party-SOE relations have brought the NOCs and SOEs under direct Party supervision and disciplinary procedures. As a consequence, the manner in which NOCs-SOEs engage with meritocracy is a pertinent and pressing issue, which this seminar explores through original interviews, statistical data sets and corporate documents.