China’s state vs. private company tracker: Which sector dominates?

China’s state sector grew to 57.2 percent of the country’s largest listed firms in the second half of 2022, with the private sector’s share dropping 1.7 percentage points from 44.5 percent in mid-2022 to 42.8 percent at year-end.

This trend among the country’s 100 largest listed firms ranked by market value began in the second half of 2021, when the private sector’s share began declining from a mid-year peak then of 55.4 percent. Still, the private sector share remains higher than it was throughout the 2010s, when it rose dramatically from 8 percent at end-2010 to 36 percent at end-2019.

Building on our Working Paper published in 2022, this PIIE tracker informs on the trend in the dynamism of China’s private sector beyond the rhetoric in China and the United States. It focuses on the respective shares of state-sector and private-sector firms among China’s largest companies and thus provides a half-yearly market-based indicator of the private-state balance in Chinese business.

As in a previous update, the data at end-2022 suggest that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “corporate rectification campaign” started in the summer of 2021 has dealt a heavy but far from lethal blow to the country’s hitherto fast-rising private sector.

See related blog by Tianlei Huang and Nicolas Véron, “The private sector’s share of China’s largest listed companies continued to decline to 43 percent in the second half of 2022.”