The Chinese define TVEs as a geographic phenomenon – that TVEs are businesses located in rural areas. The Western academic literature has an ownership understanding of TVEs – that TVEs are owned by townships and villages. How substantial is this gap in these two understandings of TVEs? Data from the Ministry of Agriculture show that as early as 1985, out of 12 million businesses classified as TVEs, more than 10 million were purely private. If we get the facts right, TVEs, as it turns out, are a huge private-sector success story.
