CRI听力:China Unveils Plan for Streamlining SOEs

Latest measures announced by China's State Council are targeting a series of specific problems with SOEs, such as redundancy in employment, the overlap of corporations and their administrators, as well as eliminating an oversized cluster of subsidiaries.

However, they all have one major goal: In order to be healthier, SOEs must lose weight.

One of the main goals is to reduce SOE's overcapacity, especially in steel and coal sectors.

China's top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, already announced plans to cut steel capacity by more than 100 million tons, and coal capacity by around 500 million tons by 2020.

Under this broader goal, a new short-term target has been set for China's SOEs.

Zhang Xiwu is an official with the State Council's department which supervises China's state-owned assets.

"We're going to cut SOEs capacity by 10 percent in steel and coal production by the end of next year."

Deepening administrative reforms are also a major goal in the government's current five-year plan.

While this reform is primarily aimed at improving the efficiency of all levels of government, SOEs are being targeted specifically.

Currently, most SOEs in China have anywhere from 5 to 9 levels of administrators.

The plan is to reduce this to 3 to 4 levels within the next 3-years.

Li Jin is the chief analyst with the China Enterprises Research Institute.

"We need to re-calibrate centrally-administered SOEs toward centralized production, toward key and core industries. This will help to promote efficiency and maintain growth."

It's estimated the new move to streamline the administrations will end up generating revenues of more than 15 billion US dollars for SOEs by 2017.

Around 350 large and medium-sized Chinese SOEs are said to be struggling financially at the moment.

The State Council is now planning to shut down one-third of them over the next 3-years.

For CRI, this is Ding Heng.