Managing China's Energy Sector ─ Between the Market and the State

Since China has now become the world’s largest energy consumer, its energy sector has understandably huge implications for the global economy. This book examines the transformation of China’s conventional and renewable energy sectors, with special attention to state-business relations. Two studies examine the development of China’s energy profile, especially China’s renewable energy. Two others explore governmental relations with state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and their reform. Despite drastic restructuring in the late 1990s, SOEs continue their oligopolistic control of the oil and gas sectors and even overshadow the stock market. Three studies investigate the factors that help propel the expansion of China’s conventional energy firms, as well as those producing renewable energy (i.e. solar PV industry). A study of China’s solar PV industry suggests that China’s governmental support for it has evolved from subsidising production (a "mercantile" stage aimed at expanding the industry’s global production and export share) to subsidising the demand side (aiming at expanding domestic demand and absorbing redundant manufacture capacity). Another review of this industry finds that firms tend to pay heavy attention to extra-firm institutional network relationships both inside and outside China, and that buyer-supplier networks are influenced by extra-local managerial education. The final chapter compares China’s provinces and their embedded carbon-footprints per capita in urban areas from a consumption perspective, using a self-organizing feature map (SOFM) model. This book was originally published as a special issue of theAsia Pacific Business Review.

Hongyi Lai is Associate Professor at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. His research and journal articles cover China’s national and local reform strategies and regional development in China, as well as China’s oil diplomacy and the internationalisation of its energy firms. His books relate to China’s political economy and includeAsian Energy Security: The Maritime Dimension (2009) and Reform and the Non-State Economy in China (2006).

Malcolm Warner is Professor and Fellow Emeritus at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK. He was the Editor-in-Chief of theInternational Encyclopedia of Business and Management (IEBM) (2002), and the author/editor of many books and articles on China. His latest work has recently been published:Understanding management in China: Past, present and future, (2014). He is currently Co-Editor of theAsia Pacific Business Review.