China's SASAC: spurring the shift to privatization or holding on?

Last week, the chairman of the State-owned Asset Supervision and Administration Committee (SASAC), Li Rongrong, started a whirlwind tour of China's three northeastern provinces, previously China's heavy industry base, but now mired in high levels of unemployment and poverty. The visit has raised a typically subtle set of issues about the role of an entity, set up last year to bring order to what was becoming a pell-mell sell-off of state assets in the more independent provinces. …