One in seven workers on the Chinese mainland was either self-employed or working with a private company last year, marking a rapid expansion of the booming private sector.

According to the latest survey by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), about 120 million people worked in domestically-owned private enterprises, up 9.5 percent from 2005.

Other key findings are:

The turnover of private and individual businesses rose 16.1 percent for companies and 9.4 percent for the self-employed.

About 1.32 million business entities run by the self-employed were registered in 2006, up 5.4 percent from 2005, bringing the total number of individual business to nearly 26 million.

More than 80 percent of individual businesses were in the service sector, mainly wholesale and retailing.

Privately owned firms paid about 349.5 billion yuan (US$45.21 billion) in taxes last year, 9.3 percent of the national tax revenue, up 28.7 percent from a year earlier.

The self-employed paid 119.5 billion yuan in taxes, accounting for 3.2 percent of the country's total.

In an earlier report, the SAIC estimated that the total economic output by the private sector accounted for 40 percent of the country's GDP last year.

"Such steady growth has alleviated the country's employment pressure," an SAIC statement said.

About 2.53 million laid-off workers found jobs in the private sector last year.

(China Daily May 8, 2007)