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ACGA's China report published!

The Asian Corporate Governance Association (ACGA) today released a major new study on corporate governance in China. Titled “Awakening Governance: The evolution of corporate governance in China”, the report is an independent and objective review of the development and current state of corporate governance in China. Published in both English and Chinese, the report seeks to explain China’s unique system of corporate governance (CG) to foreign investors and the relevance of emerging global CG best practices to China-listed companies and domestic institutional investors. It contains a series of practical recommendations to regulators, companies and investors for improvement.

The main part of the report examines “CG with Chinese characteristics”. It contains chapters on the role of Party Organisations, boards of directors, supervisory boards, independent directors, and audit committees—and challenges facing each. It also examines the similarities and differences between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and privately owned enterprises (POEs), finding that POEs are more similar to SOEs in governance terms than is often appreciated. Other chapters cover “ESG Reporting and Investing”, “M&A with Chinese characteristics” and case studies on five companies: Sinopec, ICBC, Vanke, Minsheng Bank, and Tencent.

An important feature of “Awakening Governance” is the results of two original surveys carried out by ACGA in Q3 2017, the first on 155 foreign institutional investors and the second on 182 China-listed companies. Further depth is added to the text through a series of interviews with 12 governance experts, directors, board secretaries, investors and others.

The full media releases, in English and Chinese, may be found below.

The report may be downloaded from the our Thematic Research page.