但即使是这些仰慕者也不能不注意到中国的坏账问题。有些人认为，资本主义民主国家在制造不良贷款上的天赋无可匹敌，而如今他们应该把中国也考虑进去。数十年的管理不善致使90年代后期中国约有三分之一的贷款沦为呆坏账，它们大多出自那些半死不活的国有企业。收拾掉这个烂摊子展现了中国首屈一指的救市能力。1998年起，单单在五大国有银行，中国就注入了相当于4200亿美元的资金，超过美国问题资产救助计划基金的支出。中国进行的金融改革也旨在杜绝同类现象的发生。
但一些人害怕的事终于在最近毫无节制的信贷热潮后重演了。最让人担心的莫过于那些由地方政府牵头用于基础设施建设的贷款（约占未偿还贷款的六分之一）以及房地产泡沫下的房地产融资和抵押贷款（占总数的五分之一，其中部分与基础设施建设贷款重合）。中国的银行家称他们心情轻松，但一些投资者却寝食难安，眼见着官员贪污腐败，到处大修公路，商场无人光顾。
尽管这些坏账可能后果很严重，但还不至于打垮银行业的“北京模式”。即使大部分呆坏账最后都被一笔勾销，整个系统尚能消化由此带来的冲击。部分功劳属于今年一项出色的调控政策敦促各银行加紧筹集资金。若一切照计划进行，各行须将资本充足率升至约八分之一。但更大的“功臣”还是中国居高不下的储蓄率。大堆的超额存款使银行无须依靠多变的债券市场就能募集资金。银行也因此赢得了时间解决坏账问题，以高额贷款利润填补资金亏空。作为它们的坚强后盾，中国政府鲜有外债缠身，手持巨额外汇储备，绝对财大气粗。
较少中国特色的资本主义
诚然，只有一样东西能保证中国现行的银行制度寿终正寝：这一制度的成功。如果中国得以成功消化近来激增的贷款而不致陷入萧条，再通过减少投资、拉动消费实现经济的重新平衡，这些银行必然需要在他们的收支平衡表上为个人贷款和小企业贷款腾出空间。基础设施建设和国有企业繁重的融资任务将转移到债券市场。随着客户拥有更多的融资渠道，银行贷款的利润空间受到挤压，从而迫使其开展如承保等多元化的资本市场活动。与贷款相关，银行储蓄的缓冲作用也将减小，原因是储蓄利息降低，且人们将现金投入到回报更高的股票债券市场（在此过程中赚取银行手续用）。
最终，中资银行虽仍控制在国家手里，但将和其他地方的银行更为相像。虽然这个变化的过程是循序渐进的。以目前的增长速度，中国的银行每隔几年就需要一次资金注入。政府可能不胜其烦--今年政府参与股Shi融资时就有些心不甘情不愿--转而允许减少自己的股份。随着中资银行宣告它们理所当然的全球领袖地位，它们会发现，每当政府插手主导便很难同外国做成大宗买卖。中资银行的冉冉升起既令世人惊艳，又带来了一丝恐惧。然而，他们并不是市场经济下金融制度的送葬者，而只是这种制度的半成品。
China's banks：Great Wall Street
The rise of China's state-backed banks is stunning. But success will force the model to change
Jul 8th 2010
THERE is no more potent symbol of the relative decline of Western finance than the revolution in Chinese banking over the past decade. While American and European banks have been busy blowing up, China's have been transformed from communist bureaucracies crippled by bad debts into something resembling world beaters.
That metamorphosis has been completed by the flotation of Agricultural Bank of China, the last of the five big state-owned banks to list (see article). Even by Chinese standards it is colossal, with 320m customers, 441,000 staff and more branches than many Wall Street firms have desks. Four of the world's ten biggest banks by market value are now Chinese. In 2004 none was. Better-known (and more global) lenders such as Deutsche Bank and Barclays look rather puny by comparison. It's natural to wonder if more than just firms are being eclipsed: whether a freewheeling era is being superseded by a "Beijing consensus" of state-managed finance. Though neat, such a conclusion looks wrongheaded.
Whatever their colour, these cats catch mice
As all bankers know, league tables can mislead. Still, China's rise is more solid than that of Japan's banks in the 1980s. Finance has huge potential in China-less than 1% of AgBank's retail customers have mortgages. And the country's banks had a good crisis, largely because they never entirely left the government's embrace. So although they make money and have the trappings of public companies, the state owns a majority stake and the Communist Party appoints the top brass, whose pay is a fraction of that of their Western peers. Those bosses, with their dual role as party bigwigs and chief executives, are beholden to a higher authority than the stockmarket. Their regulators, meanwhile, wield supposedly crude tools to control banks, such as lending caps and reserve ratios, long dismissed by "light touch" supervisors elsewhere. And the system is pretty closed. Some foreign banks have minority stakes in Chinese firms. But foreigners' own operations on the mainland have a market share of less than 1% by profits, while Chinese banks make less than 4% of their profits abroad.
This patriotic model has done well. Rich countries tried to kick-start their economies by getting central banks to lend to banks, which, frustratingly, have hoarded the liquidity. As in 1999 after the Asian crisis, China's politicians just cut out the middleman and told the banks to supply more credit. Loans grew spectacularly, from 102% of GDP in 2008 to 127% in 2009, funding everything from motorways through paddy fields to yuppie flats in Pudong. Growth stayed strong and China won many admirers. In India and Brazil it is no longer retrograde to argue that state-controlled banks should help counteract the economic cycle. Even in rich countries with privately owned banks, supervisors are eyeing the tools used by China's regulators to control credit. Communist Party diktat has been relabelled as "macroprudential supervision".
Even admirers, though, cannot fail to spot China's bad-debt problem. Those who think capitalist democracies have an unrivalled talent for generating dud loans should consider the Middle Kingdom. After decades of mismanagement, by the late 1990s perhaps a third of all loans were sour, most of them owed by zombie state-owned enterprises. Cleaning that up left China a world leader in bail-outs. Since 1998 it has injected the equivalent of $420 billion into the biggest five banks alone, more than the outlays of America's TARP bail-out fund. China's reforms were meant to stop this ever happening again.
A repeat performance is exactly what some fear after the latest binge. Most worrying are loans to infrastructure projects sponsored by local governments (perhaps a sixth of outstanding loans) and, given a frothy property market, real-estate financing and mortgages (a fifth of the total, with some overlap with infrastructure loans). China's bankers say they are relaxed but some investors are kept awake by visions of corrupt officials, roads to nowhere and deserted shopping malls.
Although potentially severe, these bad debts will not be the downfall of the Beijing model of banking. Even if a chunk of the loans is written off, the system can absorb the hit. That is partly thanks to an impressive regulator, which has prodded the banks to raise capital this year-by about an eighth, if all goes to plan. But it is mainly because of China's high savings rate. With piles of excess deposits banks do not rely on fickle debt markets for funding. That buys them time to earn their way out of a bad-debt problem, using their high lending profits to replenish capital. As a backstop, China's government, with little debt and large foreign reserves, has deep pockets.
Capitalism with fewer Chinese characteristics
Indeed, there is only one thing that will guarantee the demise of China's present model of banking: success. If China manages to digest its recent lending boom without a slump and then rebalance its economy away from investment and towards consumption, banks will need to free up space on their balance-sheets for lending to individuals and small firms. The heavy lifting of financing infrastructure and state companies will shift to bond markets. As customers have more sources of finance, banks' lending profits will be squeezed, forcing them to diversify into capital-market activities like underwriting. Banks' buffers of deposits should also shrink, relative to loans, as the savings rate falls and as people move cash into higher-return shares and bonds (earning banks fees in the process).
China's banks could then end up looking a lot like banks elsewhere, although the state will still have control. Yet even that could change gradually. At current growth rates China's banks will need capital injections every few years. The government may tire of these shakedowns-its participation in this year's equity raisings has been a little grudging-and allow its stake to be diluted instead. And, as China's banks claim their rightful place among the global leaders, they will find doing big foreign deals is hard when the government has a hand on the steering wheel. The rise of China's banks is stunning and a little frightening. Yet they are not the pallbearers of market-based finance, just a work in progress.
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