Short of employing yet another Great Terror, of which the world has its lamentable fill, economic reform, like politics, is the art of the possible; of adjusting destinations and deadlines to make the journey safely.
Reforming a banking system, on which a country's entire economic edifice rests, naturally demands particular patience and ingenuity - and this is especially true in China today, where citizens' bank deposits have essentially been extinguished to bankroll a decade of explosive economic growth.
The banking-sector 'assets' created with those funds - a dubious term to use in the circumstances since less than 50 per cent of loans are ever likely to be recovered - amounted to 186 per cent of China's GDP by June last year.
By comparison, reliance on equity and debt capital has been modest.
A study by investment banker Fred Hu of Goldman Sachs and researchers at Tsinghua University found that between 1992, when the stock exchanges in Shenzhen and Shanghai were established, and 2001, equity market financing in the form of new stock issuance totalled 776 billion yuan, while bank loans amounted to 8.6 trillion yuan - nearly 11 times more.
The rest, as they say, is history. Banks that acted as cashiers to party officialdom, providing blank cheques to fund grandiose development schemes and line the pockets of corrupt officers and intermediaries, are now being rescued from insolvency by government bailouts.
