governments—own varying degrees of the firm's listed shares alongside foreign and private shareholders. The result has been a highly diffuse form of public ownership where state-owned enterprises are owned by various different government entities, agencies and other state-owned enterprises. This makes gauging the true size and scope of the state sector difficult, particularly when SOEs with mixed ownership structures are taken into account. In 2013, the public sector accounted for 30% of the number of firms in China, but 55% of assets, 45% of revenue and 40% of profits. In 1996, China implemented a comprehensive series of industrial reforms termed "Grasping the large, letting go of the small". These reforms involved closing unprofitable state enterprises, merging smaller enterprises and privatization of other small-to-medium enterprises. Centrally owned SOEs were reformed into joint-stock companies with the aim of delegating more authority to SOE managers. SOEs at all levels shifted their primary focus to profitability and shed their social welfare function of providing social services and benefits to their workers in what was known as the "Iron Rice Bowl" system. The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) was formed in 2003 to oversee the management of the large centrally owned state enterprises. Modern SOEs are operationally very different from those in the 1990s. SOEs are much larger in size and fewer in number, with central government-owned SOEs clustered in "strategic sectors" including banking, finance, mining, energy, transportation, telecommunications and public utilities. By comparison, provincial and municipal level SOEs number in the thousands and are involved in almost every industry including information technology and automobiles design and production. State sector reform is an ongoing process in China. As of 2017, the CCP has rejected the Singapore model of Tamasek-style state investment companies for China's SOEs, where SOEs operate solely to maximize profits on a commercial basis. In particular, China maintains that centrally owned SOEs also pursue national and industrial policy objectives. As a result of recent reforms to increase profitability and unload debt, the government reported the profits of central government-owned SOEs rose by 15.2% in 2017. Despite becoming increasingly profitable, SOEs in China have not paid dividends to the state, causing some analysts question the rationale for public ownership in the first place. As part of SASAC's ongoing reforms, SOEs will now be encouraged and required to pay a higher portion of their profits as dividends to the state, with some state-owned