OREANDA-NEWS.  September 23, 2014. The corporate reporting season for China’s largest state-owned enterprises, which concluded last month, featured an unusual theme. Despite earning far less than their international counterparts, the men who steer the country’s largest companies welcomed recently announced plans to cut their pay.

“The biggest difference between China and western countries is that we pursue the goal of getting rich together,” Fu Chengyu, head of the country’s largest refiner, told reporters. “If you want to earn big sums, you should not be an SOE executive.”

According to local media reports, leaders of the country’s top 50 SOEs will face pay cuts of up to 60 per cent as the government imposes an annual pay cap of Rmb900,000. President Xi Jinping announced plans to rein in executive pay in August, but the new guidelines have not yet been released by the ministries of finance and human resources.

In August Zhang Yun, president of Agricultural Bank of China, said he would “firmly support and strictly implement the decision”. Mr Zhang, who earned just over Rmb1m in 2013, faces a pay cut of at least 10 per cent.

Those who welcome Mr Xi’s initiative, which coincides with China’s most ambitious anti-corruption campaign, argue that it is misleading to compare SOE executives with their international counterparts, especially in industries that are protected from overseas and private sector competition.

“SOEs enjoy a lot of policy support from the government,” says Gao Minghua, a corporate governance expert at Beijing Normal University. “Those factors must be removed before you can compare SOE executives to multinational executives.”

The more important comparison, he adds, is between SOE executives and their own employees: “There is a large income gap in China that is having a negative impact on society. The salary gap between senior executives and average employees must be appropriate. If too small, it will lessen executives’ initiative. If too big, it will lead to social instability.”