In 2015, Beijing issued a set of Guiding Opinions as part of a program to reform China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The new policy requires SOEs to amend their corporate charters to formalize and elevate the leadership role of the Chinese Communist Party in their corporate governance. To better grasp the contours of political conformity in Chinese corporate governance, Curtis Milhaupt will empirically examine the patterns of “party-building” (dangjian) charter amendments adopted in response to this policy by all listed nonfinancial Chinese firms in the four-year period from 2015-2018. He will also analyze the wide, substantive variation in the adoption of this dangjian policy within and across firm types, including privately-owned enterprises.

Curtis J. Milhaupt is the William F. Baxter-Visa International Professor of Law, Stanford Law School and a Senior Fellow, by courtesy, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.  He is a Research Associate of the European Corporate Governance Institute and a member of the American Law Institute.  His research and teaching interests include comparative corporate governance, the legal systems of East Asia, and state capitalism.  In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he has co-authored or edited seven books, including Regulating the Visible Hand? The Institutional Implications of Chinese State Capitalism (Oxford, 2016), Law and Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development Around the World (Chicago, 2008) and Transforming Corporate Governance in East Asia (Routledge, 2008).  Prior to Stanford, Professor Milhaupt held chaired professorships in comparative corporate law and Japanese law at Columbia Law School, where he served on the faculty for nearly two decades.  Before entering academia, Professor Milhaupt practiced corporate law in New York and Tokyo with a major law firm.  He holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School and a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame, and conducted graduate studies in law and international relations at the University of Tokyo.