Foreign Investors Caught between Central and Provincial Governments in China
本文基于访谈，分析外国投资者在中国面临中央与省级政府之间的利益冲突和审批障碍，指出类似问题也存在于其他发展中国家。
INTRODUCTION Foreign companies began rushing to invest in China in the early 1990s: official statistics claimed that foreign investors signed contracts for $57.5 billion of investments in 1992, compared to a total of $52 billion over the previous dozen years (WuDunn, 199a, Shroath 1993).(1) But this did not mean that the obstacles to obtaining government approval for investment proposals were a thing of the past. Despite substantial progress toward a market economy, China could still be a morass for naive or unprepared foreigners. To be sure, many joint venture proposals(2) were receiving approvals from provincial or municipal authorities and were bypassing (or attempting to bypass) the central government entirely [Kueh 1992]. But many other foreign companies have still found themselves whipsawed among competing interests in the various government ministries and agencies (Lindorff 199, Murphy and Miao 1993), and some were still victimized by corruption and petty rip-offs at the hands of both central and local officials (WuDunn 1993a). The author interviewed almost forty enterprise managers, foreign businessmen, Chinese and U.S. government officials, consultants, academics and others on recent trips to China. The obstacles that China posed were particularly blatant, but the author's experiences in numerous other less-developed and formerly socialist countries indicates that similar problems problems are found in many countries around the world. CENTRAL GOVERNMENT VS. THE PROVINCES China's history is replete with struggles between power centralizers and decentalizers--the emperor v. provincial authorities or warlords. Today's contests over control of foreign joint ventures are a manifestation in the economic arena, often fought out between the central ministries that oversee particular industries and provincial or municipal government units that want to control the factories within their borders (Brauchli 1993, Leung 1993, Stoneman 1993). The formal policy regarding approvals provides seemingly clear guidelines: foreign companies do not need central government approval for investments below US$30 million or in certain other categories. But John Frisbie, Director of the United States-China Business Council, related that in practice it is more complicated than that, partly because each ministry attempts to pursue its own version of industrial policy. In addition, there is a lot of overlap of functions among governmental units at all levels, resulting in a great scope for interference in each other's actions and great ambiguity for foreign investors (Business Week 1993). The Beijing ministries have some concerns about joint ventures that are not shared by the provinces. For example, Li Daoran, a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade (usually refered to as MOFERT)(3) related that many times the State Planning Commission (a high-level inter-ministerial body) will reject an investment proposal on the grounds that it is too similar to other projects in China. An American embassy official, William Brekke, said this reflects the socialist belief that competition results in a wasteful duplication of resources, an ideological point of much greater concern to Beijing than to provincial and municipal governments (Kamath 1990). Another difference involved foreign exchange earnings. Despite large balance-of-payments surpluses in the early 1990s, the central government still retained some concern about foreign exchange balancing and still tried to get joint ventures to commit to exporting a certain percentage of their output. But provincial and local governments frequently objected when the center tried to invoke export ratios against foreign ventures that were successfully producing and selling in their districts (Frisbie and Brecher 1993). The central ministries designated certain factories as gugang (meaning backbone) for the development of specified technologies, and they tended to oppose joint ventures that did not fit into their plans--i. …