A survey of corporate governance: international trends and China's mode

Purpose - The literature on corporate governance has experienced an explosive growth in the past decade and presented some new trends. One purpose of this paper is to make an exploratory survey of this. Since China is a typically emerging and transition economy, another purpose of this paper is to review some domestic studies with an intention to discover the evolution logic of corporate governance practices in China under a complicated and exclusive context, the third purpose is to provide future research directions. Design/methodology/approach - This paper surveys recent literature in the field of corporate governance, intending to find out the development trends and extract the main line of literature on and practices of Chinese corporate governance. Findings - In this paper, we find that recent literature on corporate governance provides some new insights into subtle characteristics of governance, governance effects of relational network, political connections, corporate governance evaluation and financial institutions governance. During the past decade, the literature on Chinese corporate governance has referred to some new areas during the transition process from administrative governance to economic governance. In addition to the above, we attempt to put forward an analytical framework and the proposition that Chinese corporate governance is in the transition process from administrative governance to economic governance. Research limitations/implications - The authors propose some research topics where future studies on corporate governance may prove valuable, especially putting forward an analytical framework which can be used for discussing and analyzing corporate governance in China. Originality/value - This paper reviews some new trends of literature on corporate governance and makes a contribution to corporate governance studies by providing fruitful directions, extracting the main line and analytical framework for China's mode during the transition process from administrative governance to economic governance.