Accounting for the Growth and Transformation of Chinese Businesses and the Chinese Economy: Implications for Transitional and Development Economics

Abstract

Within the last decade, international accounting, as a common language of business and a mode of governance, has come to be widely disseminated in China, and has become an indispensable infrastructure of its socio-economy. This diffusion of accounting was propagated as a national strategy for growth, led by a few senior officials as key actors, and implemented through the National Accounting Institutes (NAIs) as a distinct institutional mechanism. Despite its importance, accounting is rarely examined in the literatures of knowledge transfer, institutional sociology, transitional economics and development studies. Drawing on the multidisciplinary methods of contemporary history, this paper casts light on the NAIs as a focal point which effectively transfers and disseminates new knowledge, order and the spirit of a market economy, and which could be further developed, with cautions, as a replicable model for transitional and developing economies.

Keywords: financial institutions, China, National Accounting Institute, strategy and leadership, economic development, accountics, O16 economic development: financial markets, saving and capital investment, corporate finance and governance M41 accounting P31 socialist enterprises and their transitions