Chinese entrepreneurs are rewriting rule book

The number of State-owned companies, meanwhile, has fallen by almost half since 2004. And though these companies are far more productive than they were a decade ago, their increase in output is a fraction of that of the private sector.

By 2013, while total revenues at State-owned companies had risen just over sixfold from 2000, those in the non-State sector had risen more than 18 times. Profits jumped even more over the same period, up nearly seven times for State-owned companies, but up nearly 23-fold for non-State ones.

Today, the private sector accounts for at least three-quarters of China's economic output.

Chinese entrepreneurs have thrived, in part, because they created companies able to change as China changed. Many of them first set up businesses when the economy was still dominated by the State. They survived the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. They fought off competition from the flood of foreign companies that arrived after China entered the World Trade Organization in the 2000s. And they rode out the worldwide downturn that followed the 2008 global financial crisis.

China's entrepreneurs have created an economy largely outside the direct control of the government. They are answerable primarily to the customers who consume the products and services their companies offer. They are typically energetic, imaginative and often idiosyncratic. They are extraordinary individuals in their own right, especially when you consider that they have created successful businesses with little official backing within a traditionally risk-averse culture that reveres authority and conformity.

Many of today's most successful Chinese entrepreneurs had no experience in business when they started their companies. They had to learn things as they went along through a continual process of trial and error. They were "crossing the river by feeling the stones", as late leader Deng Xiaoping characterized his approach to economic reform.

Among those who started businesses in the period from the 1980s through the early 2000s, not one could have foreseen the China of 2014. Yet these are the people who have played the single biggest role in creating the wealth that exists in China today.

Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at Washington DC-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, estimates that privately controlled companies now account for two-thirds of all urban employment－meaning that almost all of the growth in urban employment since 1978 can be attributed to the private sector.

The Chinese entrepreneurs have almost all developed their businesses from the ground up. They built their companies by meeting the needs of their customers, often in businesses that no one else saw as feasible.

These business leaders know that they are riding and contributing to a historic wave of economic activity. As creators of the fastest-growing enterprises in the fastest-growing economy in the world, they recognize that they have immense potential influence.

Running companies that have grown even faster than the Chinese economy, they are establishing the rules that all companies in China will have to follow. Despite having had almost no formal business training, they are moving rapidly to compete with the same companies from whom they were drawing inspiration just a few years ago, both in China and internationally.

In the process, they will rewrite the rules of global management.

The author is the founder and chief executive officer of Gao Feng Advisory Co, a global strategy consulting firm based in China.