工业体系和民营企业兴起——基于252家中国最大民营制造业企业的经验研究

主流经济学家把改革开放后民营企业的大规模兴起,主要归因为市场经济条件下发挥企业家精神和遵循比较优势的必然结果。但是这无法解释为什么民营企业在兴起之初就广泛和快速地进入到各个工业,尤其是技术和资本密集型工业。基于中国工业史和252家中国最大民营制造业企业创业发展史的历史证据,文章找回"工业体系"这一被主流所忽略的重大历史现象和学术概念,从而首次提出一种理解中国民营企业发展独特性的结构性解释。文章发现：从计划经济时期继承而来的门类齐全和独立完整的工业体系,是解释民营企业创业和发展独特性的关键变量;已有的由国有企业和科研院所组成的工业体系,从市场机会、技术能力和组织资源等方面塑造了民营企业的创业选择和发展路径。所以,中国民营企业的快速发展不是仅凭自由市场就会自动出现的普遍现象,而是在市场条件下充分利用工业体系提供的技术和市场条件才得以出现的特殊现象。

Industry System and the Rise of Private Enterprises: Evidence from 252 Largest Private Manufacturing Enterprises in China

Since the private enterprise appeared during the late 1970s and early 1980s in China, forty years has passed. Although growing from very low level and experiencing unfriendly industrial policy,private sector nowadays has grown into one of the most important economies in China and the world. It is absolutely an economic miracle of China's development. But how to explain the phenomena of its rapid and large-scale rise? This academic task has not been completed well. Mainstream economists attribute the large-scale rise of private enterprises in China since Reform and Opening-up to the natural results of entrepreneurship and comparative advantage in the free market economy. But these explanations fail to explain the "puzzle" that private enterprises in China almost entered into every industry quickly and widely as soon as they were born, especially in those capital-and technology-intensive industries. It is these widespread but neglected phenomena that make the traditional explanations questionable. Their problems are that they mainly care about the market and its incentive effect,but never pay too much attention to the sources of knowledge, experience and skills which are extremely important for those newly born private enterprises in a developing country like China. Based on the analysis of the macro industry history and the historical data of 252 largest private manufacturing enterprises in China,this article brings back the "industry system" which is a very important but almost neglected academic concept and historical phenomenon, and for the first time puts forward a structural explanation for the unique development phenomenon of Chinese private enterprises. Though searching and understanding where the 252 largest private manufacturing enterprises and their founding entrepreneurs came from, and how they got the indispensable technological capability and market demands for their entry and growth, we challenge the traditional explanations from the mainstream economists, especially Marketism, New Institutional Economy and Comparative Advantage perspective. This article finds that:the complete and independent industry system inherited from the Planned Economy Age is the key but neglected explanatory variable for the unique phenomenon of private enterprises in China; The pre-existing industry system which is mainly composed of state-owned enterprises and public research institutes shaped the entrepreneurial choice and development path from three main aspects including market opportunity, technological capability and organizational resource. Therefore, when the private manufacturing enterprise entered into the market-oriented economy,what they actually faced is not the state of poverty and blankness as the textbook always told us, but an industrial economy with diversified industries which contains different kinds of market opportunities and technological capabilities. These new-born private enterprises actively embed themselves into the industry system through formal and informal ways, and then took full advantage of what the industry system already have. Therefore, the rapid development of private enterprises is not an universal phenomena which could automatically appear in any free-market economy, but an exceptional one which actually come up only by taking good advantage of the resource base of industry system in China. Even though some shortcomings of the evidence and research methodology exit, this paper's conclusions strongly call on the academic circle to re-investigate and re-explain the economic miracle of the rise of private industrial enterprises in China.