"So what this is reporting is that employment in state enterprises declined sharply - which everyone knows already - but that other forms of employment (i.e., a growing capitalist labor market) rose dramatically. Total employment was up 50%, which is a long way from nothing."
is right, then Patrick's point is 180 degrees wrong. We started arguing about whether the *capitalistically employed* workforce in China had grown. If the state-employed workforce shrunk, that in itself tells us little about the expansion or not of capitalism. If the private sector workforce grew at the expense of the public sector workforce, then that would definitely show that there was not only growth in China, but that it was extensive growth, not the displacement of living labour by machinery, implying no rise in the organic composition of capital.