Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 10, 2021

The Corporate Project System and the Practice of Productive Governance: A Report Based on Two Companies’ Poverty Reduction Campaigns

(Abstract)

Lü Peng and Liu Xue

In recent years, some Chinese enterprises have mobilized a large number of factors of production, including personnel, technology, management and data, to the rural area. With this, they hope to closely combine the supply of public goods and services with the strong points of their main business, which objectively has created a replicable, hematopoietic, and sustainable collaborative governance model. Theories of governance that highlight the perspectives of state and society fail to effectively explain the mechanisms and consequences of this new phenomenon due to their lack of a “market perspective.” In our examination, we selected the cross-industry practice of social governance of two enterprises as our case study. We found that these enterprises had cushioned the tension between production goals and governance responsibility through resource mobilization of the “enterprise project system.” They managed the villages in a manner similar to organizing goods production, thus shaped a “production-oriented governance” in organizing rural public life. This kind of governance has a positive effect on the modernization of social governance capacity, but it also has hidden risks.