This is true.
The world’s third largest producer of televisions as of a few years ago was a state company in China. That is right. A state company. A socialist enterprise. According to modern economic dogma, all state enterprises are automatically “inefficient” (whatever that means) and are all doomed to fail. All state enterprises would be better run if they were in private hands. No state company anywhere can possibly compete with private companies.
Yet here we have a state company, owned by the Chinese government, as the third largest seller of TV’s in the whole world.
How did this come about?
I would argue that it is competition. If state companies are forced to compete on the international market, it’s sink or swim. They will either get efficient and productive or they will die. This Chinese company, exposed to the rigors of competition, has opted to compete or die. They competed with the rest of the world and they won, no doubt beating out many capitalist firms. They must continue to compete successfully against any up and comers or they will go down.
This company is actually formally owned by the Chinese workers who work in the enterprise. The firm employs ~1,000-1,500 workers and the workers are the actual owners of the firm. However, 95% of the firm’s profits must be plowed back into the enterprise by law. The remainder may then be distributed among the workers as wages.
There have been many calls by economic liberals and of course the international capitalist media to reform this Maoist anachronism (Yes, the super-evil Mao Zedong gave all Chinese workers formal ownership over their work enterprises, in one of his ultimate evil moves), but nothing has happened yet. I would not like to see this one go. It’s great to have the company formally owned by its workers. That’s one of the greatest things that Mao did.
The question that must be directed at economic liberals though is that if all state enterprises automatically fail and area automatically inefficient compared to capitalist firms, how is it that this state firm is the #3 producer of TV’s on Earth?
