Thirty Years of Turbulence - Chinese Enterprises

作者：admin  点击次数：69  发布时间：2025-08-03

In his memoirs published 16 years later, he said that if he had followed his ideas, China's economic reform would have avoided many detours. However, another opinion holds that the reform of state-owned enterprises "must strengthen centralization and unity", and "the ultimate goal is centralized and unified at the central level". Therefore, some people have proposed the theory of "cage and bird", which means that enterprises are birds and cannot always tie their wings. They should be allowed to fly freely, but the state-owned economic system is a big cage. No matter how birds fly, they should not fly out of this cage. These arguments ultimately convinced the central decision-making level that the "cage and bird" theory would dominate the enterprise reform ideas of the entire 1980s, and the reform of state-owned enterprises became a "cage change".

Starting from this theory, looking at the situation in 1981, the conclusion is very easy to come to: the transformation of state-owned enterprises must be gradual and orderly under stability and central control, and how to make changes can be "crossing the river by feeling the stones" ①, taking one step at a time. The urgent task is to rectify the "birds outside the cage" that do not obey commands and cannot be controlled, which have disrupted the entire economic situation.