At the current First Session of the 10th NPC, Wang, chairman of the board of the Yongyou Software Co., Ltd., one of China's top software manufacturers, said "some private business people referred to me that they could hardly find any access to local elections."

He reminded organizers of local elections to pay heed to this matter, saying that the people from private sector might regard their legitimate voting rights as being overlooked.

Zhang Yanli, vice-chairperson of the Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal People's Congress, cited this somewhat impeded avenue in local elections to complex procedures involved in compliance with the Law on Election, which specifies that all voters have to exercise their voting rights only once either in their registered permanent residential areas or at their working places. For this reason, Zhang added, migrant workers are not entitled to voting unless they would be certified with documents from the relevant authorities.

Along with rapid economic growth in the Chinese capital, Zhang noted, the number of migrant people has been on the rise for the past two decades, making it more and more difficult for the job to organize the election. And Zhang would ask local legislatures to attach still greater importance to this issue.

By the year 2001, there had been 24.23 million registered individual self-employed businesses in China including approximately 2 million private firms, with a combined work force of more than 70 million. Over the past two decades, private sectors' contribution to the country's GDP has risen tremendously from less than one percent to over 20 percent. And 55 self-employed entrepreneurs have been elected deputies to the First Session of the 10th NPC.

(Xinhua News Agency March 11, 2003)