Communist party organizations in Chinese firms

The defining feature of corporate governance in China is political control. Control is exercised by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organizations inside firms. It is political authority, not equity ownership per se, that constrains decisions. We review post-2015 legal changes, including the 2023 Company Law, on CCP presence in firms, and analyze a corpus of ∼3,000 corporate charters for the 100 largest listed firms (2010–2025). Using a reproducible machine-based classification, we separate symbolic references to Party presence from decision authority such as pre-deliberation by the Party committee before the board and management over major matters. We develop an ownership–control framework that distinguishes state ownership from embedded political control and derive testable predictions for investment, monitoring and agency conflicts. The framework explains the non-convergence of Chinese firms with Western governance and supplies measures for empirical work on political embedding, not ownership labels.