China's corporate debt a greater threat to its slowing economy

Hong Kong

BEIJING may have averted a crisis in its stock markets with heavy-handed intervention, but the world's biggest corporate debt pile - US$16.1 trillion and rising - is a much greater threat to its slowing economy and will not be so easily managed.

Corporate China's debts, at 160 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), are twice that of the United States, having sharply deteriorated in the past five years, a Thomson Reuters study of over 1,400 companies shows.