An article that Duowei News published disclosed that the Central Administration is extremely dissatisfied with the slow reform progress that local governments are making. The article quoted a former Deputy Director from the Finance Office who spoke at the recent Lujiazui Forum in Shanghai (http://chinascope.org/wp-admin/edit.phpai). He claimed that in the past two years, the Central Administration has shifted its focus and made progress on financial crisis prevention. However, the efforts that the local governments and State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are making are sorely lacking. Examples he listed included some municipal entities that resist the deleveraging measures that the Central Administration has launched; some can’t even pay back the interest on their debt, where the total debt at the municipal level is 40 trillion yuan (US$6 trillion). Meanwhile the SOEs are slow in reducing their excess capacity.
Source: Duowei News, July 10, 2018
http://news.dwnews.com/china/news/2018-07-10/60069825.html