China’s state sector leaders embrace pay cuts of up to 60%
The corporate reporting season for China’s largest state-owned enterprises, which concluded last month, featured an unusual theme. Despite earning far less than their international counterparts, the men who steer the country’s largest companies welcomed recently announced plans to cut their pay.
“The biggest difference between China and western countries is that we pursue the goal of getting rich together,” Fu Chengyu, head of the country’s largest refiner, told reporters. “If you want to earn big sums, you should not be an SOE executive.”
As Sinopec chairman, Mr Fu earned Rmb863,000 ($141,000) in 2012, a paltry figure when compared, for example, with the more than $3m earned by Christophe de Margerie at the French oil major Total. The contrast in other sectors is even starker. The president of Bank of China, one of the country’s “big four” lenders, was paid Rmb997,000 ($163,000) last year – or less than 1 per cent of the $20m pocketed by JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon.
According to local media reports, leaders of the country’s top 50 SOEs will face pay cuts of up to 60 per cent as the government imposes an annual pay cap of Rmb900,000. President Xi Jinping announced plans to rein in executive pay in August, but the new guidelines have not yet been released by the ministries of finance and human resources.
In August Zhang Yun, president of Agricultural Bank of China, said he would “firmly support and strictly implement the decision”. Mr Zhang, who earned just over Rmb1m in 2013, faces a pay cut of at least 10 per cent.
Those who welcome Mr Xi’s initiative, which coincides with China’s most ambitious anti-corruption campaign, argue that it is misleading to compare SOE executives with their international counterparts, especially in industries that are protected from overseas and private sector competition.
“SOEs enjoy a lot of policy support from the government,” says Gao Minghua, a corporate governance expert at Beijing Normal University. “Those factors must be removed before you can compare SOE executives to multinational executives.”
The more important comparison, he adds, is between SOE executives and their own employees: “There is a large income gap in China that is having a negative impact on society. The salary gap between senior executives and average employees must be appropriate. If too small, it will lessen executives’ initiative. If too big, it will lead to social instability.”
According to a recent pay study co-authored by Mr Gao, senior executives at listed Chinese financial companies are paid 50 times as much as the average worker.
“It doesn’t make sense to benchmark Chinese SOE executives against western – and especially American – executives,” agrees Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard, director of Asia research at the Copenhagen Business School. “None of these guys are ever going to become the head of GE or a big American financial institution. They stay in China and move around as civil servants. In a Chinese context they are supermanagers.”
Mr Fu at Sinopec is a classic example of a Chinese supermanager. He had previously run China’s largest offshore oil company, Cnooc, and his transfer to Sinopec was decided neither by the refiner’s board nor by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
Better known as Sasac, the government commission is nominally charged with administering China’s largest SOEs; in fact, it is overshadowed by the Communist party’s powerful Organisation department, which both transferred Mr Fu to Sinopec and appointed his successor at Cnooc. “Sasac was supposed to manage and control these companies but it never really happened,” says Mr Brodsgaard. “Sasac was not authorised to receive dividends from these companies and doesn’t even appoint their chairman and chief executives.”
Sasac’s authority was further undermined last year by the arrest of its former head, Jiang Jiemin ; the former SOE oil executive was caught up in a larger investigation into his patron, Zhou Yongkang, who once sat on the Communist party’s all-powerful standing committee and ran China’s domestic security services.
Additional reporting by Wan Li