MOSCOW, August 25 (RIA Novosti) - Executives at Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) could suffer salary cuts of as high as 70 percent, as part of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption efforts, Beijing-based Caijing magazine reported.
If Xi’s salary reform is approved by China’s Central Leading Group for Overall Reform, the upper limit for the annual salary of Chinese SOE and bank executives would be set at 600,000 yuan ($97,532), according to Caijing magazine.
The Central Leading Group for Overall Reform, headed by Xi, is the main government body responsible for approving and implementing new reforms according to the blueprints laid out at larger Communist Party meetings.
Xi’s salary reform is part of a broader reorganization of management at the country’s SOEs.
Most of the current top SOE executives in China carry a vice-ministerial or ministerial-level rank that comes with a number of privileges. Many of the executives are paid several times more than their fellow government officials, according to the South China Morning Post.
More than 50 executives and managers at Chinese SOEs have been removed from their posts since Xi’s anti-corruption drive began in 2012.
Xi wants to replace the government-appointed executives with private sector managers who would be paid in line with international standards. In an August 18 speech to the Central Leading Group for Overall Reform, the Chinese president called for central SOEs and banks to have “proper” and “reasonable” salary structures and said “unreasonably high and excessive incomes,” which have increasingly become a source of public discontent in China, must be regulated.
According to Caijing, top executives at China’s four state-owned banks earned more than 1 million yuan, or more than $160,000, in 2013.
