China’s Private Sector in the 11th Five-Year-Plan

Soon after the National People’s Congress had passed the amended 11th Five-Year-Plan on March 14, 2006, the 14-sections outline of the plan was published on the internet by the Central People’s Government. The Chinese document was also made available by Xinhua News Agency — broken into 24 parts due to its size. An official English translation of the plan has yet to be found on the web.

To date, eight provincial governments have also published their 11th Five-Year-Plans on the Chinese internet. The five-year-plans are still the main development strategy papers of the party and the government for each region. These plans may thus be used to analyze the different focus and special emphasis put on certain industries, on private enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises, and business membership organizations.

A simple word frequency analysis of the different published provincial plans indicates the wide variety in the importance governments put on market forces, the private economy, chambers of commerce and business associations. Our table shows the total number of Chinese characters in the regional plans (tables, charts, boxes, indices etc. have been removed to increase comparability), and the word frequencies for “small and medium-sized enterprises” (中小企业), “non state-owned” (非公有制), and “chamber of commerce” (商会 or 工商联).