IN 1995, a 29-year-old Chinese young man named Wang Chuanfu bade farewell to his stable wages in a large state-owned company and started his own business in Shenzhen, a special economic zone in Southern China.
The new company, BYD, later grew into a global leader in electric vehicles, “It was an era of start-ups, and BYD was born right in that era,” said Wang.
Like many Chinese, Wang Chuanfu is hard-working, resilient and daring.

After spending eight years making rechargeable batteries, he ventured into car making in 2003. In less than five years, BYD introduced the world’s first plug-in hybrid electric vehicle with dual-model technology, freeing EVs from specialised charging stations, a crucial step toward the commercialisation of new energy vehicles. Then in 2020, the company launched the revolutionary Blade Battery, giving EVs more safety and an extended range. By 2022, the company, with less than 20-year history in automobile manufacturing, had seen its EV production exceed three million.

Numerous entrepreneurs like Wang Chuanfu have become the drivers of China’s modernisation. Today, the Chinese private sector accounts for over 50 percent of China’s tax revenues, more than 60 percent of its GDP, some 70 percent of tech innovations, above 80 percent of urban employment and over 90 percent of registered Chinese companies.
The rapid growth of China’s private sector would be impossible without the development of a fair and healthy market environment.

China set forth the objectives for developing a system of socialist market economy in the 1990s. Since then, it has carried out reforms in a number of areas, including pricing, finance, the fiscal and taxation system, and foreign trade. It has streamlined administrative approval procedures, lowered the threshold for market access, stepped up the protection of intellectual property rights, tackled unfair competition, and encouraged tech innovation and investment in research and development.

These reforms have benefitted many foreign businesses like Volkswagen, Apple, Nestlé, Starbucks, Walmart and General Electric, to name just a few, as well as private Chinese companies.

Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of China’s reform and opening-up policy, famously said that the fundamental task of socialism is to develop productive forces. To achieve that, China must reform its economic system and adopt a policy of opening up. In the same spirit, Chinese President Xi Jinping underlined that reform and opening up is the key reason why the CPC and the Chinese people have caught up with the times in big strides, and the only path to uphold and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics.

In July this year, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China held its third plenary session, deciding that reforms would go further and deeper across the board, to advance Chinese modernisation. The country will formulate a private sector promotion law, and do more to remove barriers to market access. Economic entities under all forms of ownership will have equal access to factors of production in accordance with the law, and compete equally in the market.

For foreign businesses, the plenum highlights safeguarding the lawful rights of foreign-funded enterprises in terms of market access, government procurement and licence application, and the laws and regulations for foreign investment will be improved.

The message from China is clear: the momentum of reform will continue and grow stronger. As China presses ahead with modernisation through reform, it will unleash enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs and businesses from China and across the world. It will also boost cooperation with other developing countries that are pursuing growth and rejuvenation. In this way, Chinese modernisation will inject strong impetus to modernisation of the Global South and of the whole world.