Thirty Years of Turbulence - Chinese Enterprises

作者：admin  点击次数：3  发布时间：2025-06-13

In his later years, Yuan Geng's regret seemed to be that if Li and Huo had been allowed to invest, Shekou would have been completely capitalized and perhaps gained greater economic vitality.

This is a highly symbolic deduction. It seems to indicate that in the early 1980s, the most reform minded Chinese officials firmly believed that as long as they fully delegated power and pursued reform, they were fully capable of doing well in state-owned enterprises and revitalizing the local economy. By the late 1990s, they had vaguely felt that this breakthrough within the system had reached its "limit", and perhaps only with the help of a more powerful and free "mixed race" of foreign capital could it constitute further impetus. Shekou was born too early, so it is impossible to shoulder the propositions of two eras at the same time.

Yuan Geng should have realized his' mistake 'before he retired. So, his last important decision during his tenure was to exclude public opinion and allow the three subsidiaries of Shekou to go out of the system and implement shareholding. These three companies, one of which is China Merchants Bank (formerly known as the Internal Settlement Center of Shekou Industrial Zone), have caught up and become the most efficient bank in China (also ranked seventh in the world); One is Ping An Insurance Company, which has become the most dynamic insurance institution in China. Its head is Ma Mingzhe, Yuan Geng's former driver, who later became the "richest man in China"; Another company is Nanshan (Port) Development Company. If the entire Shekou were to be released from the system like this, what would Shekou do today? "This was a topic that Yuan Geng often talked about with people in his later years.