Andy Wong/Associated Press

SHANGHAI — When the World Bank and a Chinese research organization called on Beijing policy makers this week to scale back the power of state-owned companies, reform-minded economists offered praise. But not everyone is pleased.

View From Asia Dispatches on the economic landscape.

The 448-page report, “ China 2030 ,” urged China to rethink the government’s role in managing the economy and move toward a more market-oriented system. According to Tuesday’s online edition of The 21st Century Business Herald, a respected Chinese publication, the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission sharply criticized the report even before it was released to the public on Monday.

The commission, a powerful Beijing organization with oversight of some of the biggest centrally controlled state companies, sent a letter to the study’s authors arguing that reducing state involvement in the economy would be “unconstitutional” and effectively “subvert the basic economic system of socialism.”

A person who answered the telephone Wednesday at the commission’s headquarters in Beijing declined to discuss the report. On Friday, the World Bank declined to comment on opposition from the commission. And a spokesman for the Development Research Center, the Chinese organization that helped produce the study, could not be reached late Friday.

But one person with knowledge of how the report was produced confirmed that there was strong opposition from the commission.

The views expressed by the state group are similar to those held by Du Jianguo, an independent scholar who disrupted the World Bank press conference in Beijing on Tuesday by handing out pamphlets and declaring, “This report from the World Bank is poison!”



Photographs of the news conference show that Mr. Du, an editor at an environmental magazine, had to be forcibly removed. He is not a representative of any state-owned company, he said in a telephone interview.

But the episode — and the article in The 21st Century Business Herald — hints at a ferocious debate now playing out in China, as the country prepares for its once-in-a-decade leadership transition later this year.

With Chinese leaders jockeying for spots on the all-powerful nine-member Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party, various factions are staking out positions to determine which economic policies will take hold under the new administration.

Outsiders often assume that Beijing’s leaders are unified on major issues. But analysts say Chinese leaders fight as fiercely as members of the United States Congress, over everything from the size of government to tax policies and the operation of the banking system.

With so much at stake, that is only natural. Private entrepreneurs and multinational corporations are now pushing for Beijing to roll back the state’s influence over the economy, saying state-owned corporations have unfair advantages, like access to low-interest loans from state-run banks.

Meanwhile, state companies and their backers lobby against giving too much power to multinationals, which could impede the development of home-grown companies. They also argue that private companies would be less socially responsible.

Reports in the Chinese media reflect the divide, and the debate raging in China.

This week, Hu Shuli, the editor of the nation’s top business magazine, Caixin, or New Century Weekly, published an opinion piece striking back at state interests.

In an essay titled “The Limits of State Capitalism,” she wrote that too much state control over the economy leads to inefficient uses of capital and greases the wheels for corruption.

“The state’s heavy hand creates and sustains monopolies, stifles competition and undermines a fair market,” she wrote, concluding, “Without effective curbs, China’s state capitalism may well become crony capitalism.”