China's SOE reform in slow lane as Party keeps its hands on the wheel

Beijing

WHEN China announced with resolution that it was reforming its state-owned enterprises (SOEs) more than four years ago, many were hoping the government would finally address the sensitive issues of their vested interests, inefficiency and cheap miss-allocated credit by banks that had been weighing on the Chinese economy as a whole.

Four years after China's trumpeted announcements, some leeway has been made, but all in all China's tens of thousands of SOEs remain debt ridden, inefficient and still very much state-owned.