Thirty Years of Turbulence - Chinese Enterprises

作者：admin  点击次数：12  发布时间：2025-09-09

The comedic ending of the Han Qingsheng incident does not mean that similar events have become a conclusion. In the coming years, whether technology personnel in state-owned institutions can work part-time outside will still be a tangled topic. Around 1985, an assistant engineer named Zheng Hongjian from Shanghai Pacific Bedding Factory was sentenced to prison and imprisoned for part-time work. It was not until January 18, 1988, when the State Council issued a document stating that "allowing technology cadres to work part-time", that this debate finally settled. In fact, at that time, it was already a very common and natural phenomenon for private enterprises to hire technology personnel. A very ridiculous and intriguing thing is that in discussions about whether technology personnel can sell their technology, no one has ever seriously discussed this matter from the legal perspective of official patents, despite the establishment of the Patent Office and the passage of the Patent Law in 1980. ①

The "Eight Great Kings Incident" and the "Han Qingsheng Incident" both caused a sensation at that time. From the perspective of future generations, the state is using government machinery to contain capital forces outside the system. Such institutional containment will continue to occur in the next 20 years, and this is not the decision behavior of one person, but the logic of the entire Chinese enterprise transformation. Since the first year of China's reform, formulating different policies based on different asset identities has become an undeniable strategy, and in many cases, it has even become a reform value. In 1981, when the reform of state-owned enterprises was weak and the nascent private sector began to form an economic force, the protection of the former and the containment of the latter became an instinctive policy response.