'People say that in state-owned enterprises, one man works, one man watches and one man makes trouble,' former premier Zhu Rongji once quipped. He came up with a simple solution: get rid of two of the three.
But while Zhu, a reformist with a direct approach, had an undeniably dramatic impact on the mainland economy as vice-premier from 1991 and then premier from 1998, a glance at the numbers shows he was only partly successful.
Indeed, the restructuring of the state-owned industrial sector has slowed significantly since China gained entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
'The reforms of the previous decade, when Zhu took a scythe to state-owned enterprises, have been very absent in the last 10 years,' said Fraser Howie, managing director at CLSA Asia-Pacific, an independent brokerage and investment group, and co-author of the recent book Red Capitalism.
Referring to enterprises charged with advancing the nation's interests, he added: 'Instead, we have seen national-champion companies take on monopoly-type roles in many sectors, not as the result of competition, but by virtue of government edict and having access to artificially cheap input costs.'
On the face of it, today's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) appear far more profitable and competitive than any that were around 10 years ago. According to Ministry of Finance data, state firms booked a total profit of 283.38 billion yuan (HK$292 billion) in 2000. By 2010, that figure had risen sevenfold to 1.99 trillion yuan. The increase outpaced revenue growth, which rose fourfold to 30.33 trillion yuan over the same period.