An Effective Way to Increase Employment. A Report on Beijing's Self-Employed Sector

We recently conducted an overall survey of individual (private) industry and commerce in Beijing. The survey was done in three stages. The first involved determining the aim, scale, and method of our survey. On this point, we came to the conclusion that the self-employed sector, an important component of China's economic life, is multifaceted and can be studied from many angles, including economic and sociological angles. We elected to study it from the angle of employment as one possible solution to Beijing's placement problem. That is, we wanted to find out the composition of the people involved in such undertakings, their modes of production and operation, as well as how such individual operations could develop further, and how more young people could be drawn into them. Because there were large numbers of such individual small businesses in Beijing, which were scattered and quite unorganized, we decided to collect our information mostly through sending out questionnaires combined with personal interviews. The second stage was the actual survey, in which we first did some interviews, on the basis of which we wrote up the questionnaires. The questionnaires contained forty questions in three major categories: personal data on the people operating the businesses, facts about their operations, and the views they held about their operations. We hoped, through the answers, to understand three things: (1) What types of people were engaged in individual businesses in Beijing? What were their objectives? (2) How were they doing? (3) How could they do a better job, and how could more people, especially young people, be attracted?