The private sector’s share of the top 100 listed Chinese companies by market value continued to rise in the first half of 2025, reaching 37.2 percent by the end of June, up from 33.1 percent at mid-2024 and 34.4 percent at end-2024. While the state sector still dominates, the private sector’s share now appears to have bottomed out after a three-year decline from its mid-2021 peak of 55.4 percent (accounting for the fact that the tracker is only updated half-yearly).
The PIIE tracker is based on the methodology defined in our 2022 PIIE Working Paper. It uses a strict definition of the private sector, limited to firms with less than 10 percent state ownership. The state sector includes both mixed-ownership enterprises (MOEs), in which the state holds between 10 and 50 percent, and majority state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The tracker reflects the relative shares of aggregate market capitalization among the top 100 mainland Chinese companies ranked by market value, regardless of whether they are listed in China or overseas. As such, it filters out general market trends that affect private and state firms equally.
Our tracker appears to corroborate a gradual return of market confidence in the prospects of China’s private sector after years of regulatory crackdowns. In the second half of 2024, the Chinese authorities launched a series of monetary and fiscal stimulus measures to support the ailing economy. The January 2025 debut of DeepSeek, a privately owned Chinese artificial intelligence company, provided a morale boost to China’s tech sector. In February, President Xi Jinping appeared at an event with a group of private entrepreneurs including Jack Ma, whose public criticism of China’s regulatory system in 2020 had triggered the state’s multi-year crackdown on the private tech industry; this event was interpreted by some analysts as a symbolic end to that era of repression. In another notable move, China’s national legislature passed the country’s first-ever Private Economy Promotion Law in April 2025, after an unusually fast-track legislative process. While the law largely reiterates existing policies and contains little that is substantively new, its passage was intended to send a strong political signal of support to the private sector. With these developments in mind, what looked like a blip in January might now herald a medium-term trend of renewed growth in the private sector’s share.
For the latest update on China’s state vs. private company shares, please visit the series page.
Authors' note: Research assistance by Zhuowen Li is gratefully acknowledged.