@zeixishuozhenxiang: Who Turned China into a Bad-Debt Nation? And Now Others Are Told to Bear “Lifetime Responsibility” This is Jersey’s News Commentary Channel. On April 15, the General Office of the State Council issued the Opinions on Deepening the Reform of the Investment Approval System. One line in the document has been widely picked up as a headline: “Implement a lifetime accountability system for decision-making on government investment projects. Leading officials and directly responsible personnel who make illegal or improper decisions causing major losses or severe negative impacts will be held strictly accountable.” At first glance, this sounds tough, righteous, and responsible. It gives the impression that from now on, those who launch projects on a whim, invest recklessly, and leave behind a mess will finally be held accountable—that their good days are over. But my first reaction to this statement was not encouragement—it was a strong sense of unreality. Because I have heard this kind of language too many times before. The document also reiterates that, unless otherwise required by the Party Central Committee, the State Council, or by law, all government investment projects must strictly go through the approval procedures of project proposals, feasibility studies, preliminary design, and investment budgeting. The problem is, none of this is new. As early as 2019, the Regulations on Government Investment had already clearly stipulated that government investment projects must prepare project proposals, feasibility study reports, and preliminary designs, and follow the proper approval procedures. Similar requirements existed even earlier. In other words, the procedures now being repackaged as “hard constraints” have been sitting there for decades. More than thirty years ago, I personally participated in drafting feasibility study reports for some government investment projects. The reports were written, the procedures were followed, every required stamp was stamped—so what? In practice, many government investment projects treat procedures as a façade, evaluation as decoration, and feasibility reports as a mere pass ticket. What people truly care about is not whether the project will generate real returns, whether it will create genuine value, or who will be held accountable if it fails. What matters is that the project gets approved first, funds arrive first, banks release loans first, construction begins first, and political achievements are secured first. As for how much is lost afterward, how much is wasted, or how much sits idle—none of that really matters. Because the losses are not borne by the market, but by public finance, banks, government financing platforms, and ultimately taxpayers. This is one of the most entrenched structural problems in China’s system: the soft budget constraint. Spend others’ money to gamble on one’s career. Success counts as political achievement; failure is blamed on the times; losses are socialized; risks are absorbed by the state. Precisely because of this, the new document adds an important clause: it strictly prohibits the use of state-owned enterprises or similar vehicles to disguise government investment projects as corporate projects in order to bypass approval procedures. This wording is effectively an admission that, in recent years, a large number of projects that should have been strictly regulated as government investments were repackaged, reshaped, and rerouted into platform projects, SOE projects, or quasi-corporate investments—to evade scrutiny, leverage more borrowing, and expand debt. Therefore, the real focus of this document is not the polished rhetoric about “improving scientific decision-making,” but a far more pressing reality: there are simply too many bad debts, and the scale of losses has become too large to ignore. When investment impulses collide with mounting fiscal debt, when land finance declines meet sunk infrastructure costs, and when slogans of “high-quality develop

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Friday 17 April 2026 14:39:31 GMT