China assigns officials to 100 companies in nation’s cradle of private enterprises in charm offensive to bolster confidence

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Alibaba, Dahua, Geely, Hikvision, Wahaha Group and dozens of the biggest private enterprises in Hangzhou will be assigned a government officer each

The officials, who will not exert any control or be involved in corporate matters, will act as bridges between the local authority and the enterprises, in a move designed to make it easier to do business

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West Lake in the Zhejiang provincial capital of Hangzhou on 20 November 2017. Photo: Simon Song

Xie YuandEcho Xie

Published: 8:30am, 25 Sep 2019Updated: 8:30am, 25 Sep 2019

Local authorities in Hangzhou, the hometown of Asia’s most valuable company and the traditional cradle of China’s private enterprises, have started a charm offensive to shore up confidence among the non-state businesses that play an outsize role in the nation’s economy, as growth sputters amid a year-long trade war with the United States.

The government of Zhejiang’s provincial capital has assigned civil servants to 100 of the biggest Hangzhou-based private companies, including this newspaper’s owner Alibaba Group Holding and China’s biggest non-state carmaker Zhejiang Geely Automobile Holdings, according to a list obtained by South China Morning Post.

The officials, who remain on the government’s payroll, will not exert any control over their assigned companies, but merely help bridge the gap between the corporate sector and authorities.The move was the result of a January dialogue in Beijing between Premier Li Keqiang and representatives of the country’s private enterprises, who gave their feedback on what ailed China’s economy.

“Sending government representatives to baby sit private companies is not an innovation,” the Renmin University’s professor Ma Liang wrote in a Sunday commentary published on Jiemian.com. “There are precedents [where] local governments tend to use this as a way to make up for inefficiencies in the system.”

Tongcheng, a city in Zhejiang’s neighbour Anhui province, dispatched 96 officials to the same number of companies last month to provide “help on government matters,” making the sixth such assignment in the city, according to local media reports. The deployed officials were instructed to avoid interfering in corporate matters.