اصلاحات بازار محور برق چین : از انحصار مطلق تا انحصار نسبی

The market-oriented reform in electricity industry has become a global trend since 1980s. Although China's electricity industry has been reformed since 1978, the substantial reform has not been conducted until 1985. Before 1985, China's power industry had been absolutely monopolized by the central state-owned companies. The absolute monopoly has been broken since 1985, when the Chinese government opened doors for non-central state-owned investment entities and foreign investors in power supplies in order to solve the chronic power shortage. In 2002, the comprehensive electricity reform plan entitled Scheme of the Reform for Power Industry was enacted. However, implementation of this plan was delayed due to electricity supply shortages. Even worse, a new kind of monopoly has been developed under the background “the state advances, the private sector retreats” in late years. In some sense, the former absolute monopoly has transformed the current relative monopoly. We contend that the relative monopoly has reversed the market-oriented reform in China's electric industry. If the relative monopoly remains unchanged, it will be harmful to public welfare.

Market-orientated reform in electricity industry has become an international trend since 1980s. The market-oriented reform can be traced back to the Chile electricity reform in 1982. The Chilean model was generally perceived as a good example in bringing rationality and transparency to power pricing. The Chilean practice has influenced subsequent reforms in other countries' electricity industry. A landmark electricity reform took place in UK. The UK government restructured and privatized the stated-owned Central Electricity Generating Board to separate the ownership and operation from generation. The experiences of British were then used as a model or a catalyst for the deregulation of other countries (Thomas, 2006). Meanwhile, it also should be pointed out that the market deregulation in many of other countries occurred without the widespread privatization that characterized the UK model. For example, Norway electricity reform has maintained a dominantly public ownership and decentralized production structure (Midttun and Thomas, 1998). Although the institutions and market designs were in different deregulation procedures tend to be very different; the two principal underlying concepts are the same. These are (i) separating the contestable functions of generation and retail from the natural monopoly functions of transmission and distribution; and (ii) establishing a wholesale electricity market and a retail electricity market. The role of the wholesale market is to allow trading between generators, retailers and other financial intermediaries both for short-term delivery of electricity and for future delivery periods (Sioshansi and Pfaffenberger, 2006 and Woo et al., 2003). In this paper, we focus on discussion of market-oriented reform in the Chinese electricity industry. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a report of China's electricity industry and related studies. Section 3 investigates China's electricity reform from an absolute to relative monopoly. Section 4 discusses the effects of the relative monopoly. The conclusions are provided in the last section.

Before 1985, the Chinese power industry was an absolute monopoly. This absolute monopoly was broken in 1985, when the Chinese government allowed the local government, domestic enterprise, foreign and private investors to invest in generator sector in order to solve the chronic power shortage. In 2002, the landmark Scheme for the Reform of the Power Industry was enacted, which was aimed at developing market-oriented electricity system. However, the serious power shortage during 2003–2004 made expansion of generating capacity more important than market-oriented reform. With “the state advances, the private sector retreats”, the state-owned enterprises have become the biggest winners in expanding generation capacity. The Big Five control almost half of the national generation capacity. We contend that the former absolute monopoly has transformed the current relative monopoly. The Chinese electricity market-oriented reform has reverted to the starting point after thirty years' efforts of market-oriented reform. If the current trend remains unchanged, the relative monopoly will become more powerful, rather than less. The market mechanism will be further distorted. Ultimately, the relative monopoly will be harmful to public welfare.