Li Rongrong, director of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), said 64.2 percent of the SOEs and their subsidiaries had undertaken share-holding reforms, compared with 30.4 percent in 2002.

A number of large SOEs had gone public in both domestic and foreign stock markets. Of about 1,500 listed companies in China's A-share stock markets, more than 1,100 were wholly or partly state-owned, he said.

Seventy-eight centrally-administered SOEs were listed in Hong Kong, New York and Singapore stock markets.

Meanwhile, the country's state-owned economy was gradually converging into critical sectors that bore great significance to state security and the national economy.

Critical sectors such as oil, petrochemicals, power, national defense, telecommunications, transportation, and mining comprised about 83 percent of the total assets of centrally-administered SOEs, according to the SASAC.

These SOE giants had shouldered almost all the production of crude oil and natural gas and provided all the basic telecommunications and 55 percent of the country's power supply, while 82 percent of civil aviation services also came from those SOEs.

With deepening reforms, the number of China's SOEs were declining, but they were growing.

The country has 149 centrally-administered SOEs, down from 196 in 2003, and the number is expected to shrink to between 80 and 100 by 2010, through merger and restructuring, according to SASAC.

Though declining in numbers, the major SOEs accounted for 35.91 percent of total assets, 61.54 of sales revenues, and 63.25 percent of profits of all the SOEs in the country.

From 2002 to 2007, centrally-administered SOEs saw their assets rise by 1.5 trillion yuan (US$218.95 billion), sales by 1.3 trillion yuan, and profits by 150 billion yuan each year.