Yasheng Huang, at MIT, who has spent years poring through official Chinese data and documents on this issue, said when asked for his estimate of the size of the private sector: ‘The honest answer is that I do not know and I think many people do not know. This lack of knowledge itself is telling, and due to the fact that the private sector is still considered somewhat illegitimate.’ Although he did not arrive at an exact figure, Huang did reach one conclusion–the pure private sector in China at the end of the twentieth century, companies with no government ties or involvement at all, was
...more
