Changing Patterns of Human Resource Management in Contemporary China: Wto Accession and Enterprise Responses

This study examines the challenges facing China’s increasingly complex human resource management (HRM) after its WTO accession and consequently the implications for further reform of government policy and enterprise-level HRM practices. The paper concludes that current HR practices are diverse between enterprises with different ownership, industry sector, location and history. The direction of future changes may depend on the level of involvement from external forces as well as internal strategies adopted by Chinese enterprises to survive. Bio-data Ying Zhu is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia Email: [email protected] Malcolm Warner is Professor and Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge and the Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1AG, UK Email: [email protected]