We investigate the choice problem in the massive Chinese restructuring campaign that has been described as “grasping the large and letting go of the small,” in which a third of the million or so Chinese state-owned enterprises were either corporatized or privatized. Corporatization differs from privatization in the Chinese context, as in the former case the state remains a large shareholder, whereas in the latter case it has little or no ownership. Using a panel of provincial level statistics, we show that greater local employment pressure, less local fiscal pressure, and a more corrupt local business environment all lead to a lesser likelihood that privatization will be chosen over corporatization. Privatization is found to yield consistent efficiency gains over corporatization in terms of employment and firm profitability. Our evidence is supportive of the theoretical framework of Boycko, Shleifer, and Vishny (1996), who model privatization as an endogenous decision in which politicians trade off employment pressure against public fiscal interest.