The status of Haier was symbolic of the central problem surrounding business in China. There is little dispute that the private sector in China has grown from an almost negligible part of the economy in the late seventies–so small that official statistics were not kept on it–to the prime engine of new job creation, if not economic output, thirty years later. But nobody knows, or at least can agree on, the true size of the private sector, because of the difficulty of defining who owns what in the first place.
