The Big Four and the Development of the Accounting Profession in China

This volume provides a history of the domination of the Big Four in the Chinese accounting industry, explaining why China was unable to keep the market for its own accounting firms. The book details how easy access to U.S. capital markets led to major accounting scandals, and a clash between U.S. and Chinese regulators.

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Drawing upon established academic theory, the study argues that the Big Four, as part of a globalizing transnational capital class, has dominated indigenous firms by bringing to China an ideology that came to be accepted as normative. By winning this battle of ideology, the Big Four gained access to the coercive power of the State, and to the power of transnational institutions that have subsumed part of the power of the State. Indigenous firms have pursued a counter-hegemonic strategy of undermining the ideological superiority of the Big Four through the infiltration and modification of institutional arrangements following what the academic literature calls "the long march through the institutions.