Three quarters of Communist China's economy will be non-state-owned by the end of this decade, state media reported Friday, citing the nation's top think tank. The figure is up from last year, when 65 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) was produced by private or semi-private entities, the China Daily said, quoting an annual report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
"The non-state sector is projected to contribute three fourths of China's GDP in five years, when at least 70 percent of the country's firms will be privately owned," the report said, according to the newspaper.
The report was vague about the exact definition of private ownership, not making clear if it included a large gray zone of companies categorized as non-state-owned despite being under varying degrees of government influence.
Even so, it appeared to confirm a trend for an ever smaller role for the state in the nominally socialist country.
In the period from 2000 until 2005, state-owned enterprises cut 15 million jobs, while in net terms private companies created 57 million new jobs, the report said.
Private companies are also big tax payers, with their payments rising 40 percent a year since 2000, compared with annual increases of less than seven percent for state companies, the newspaper said.
"In many local regions in China, tax revenue generated by the private sector accounts for over 80 percent of local government revenue," the China Daily quoted the think tank as saying.
The report comes a month after the National Bureau of Statistics announced that only 220 of the top 500 manufacturing companies in China were state-owned.
China's frequently-amended constitution, a barometer of social change in the populous nation, was changed in 1999 to upgrade the private sector to an "essential part" of China's economy.
Another constitutional amendment in 2004 consolidated the private sector's status, saying that "legally obtained private property of the citizens shall not be violated."
