CHONGQING, China -- As China continues to lurch toward its version of a market economy, officials are waking up to the fact they've been holding some of history's biggest bargain-basement sales.
The sales involve the still valuable assets of China's often-failing state industries, which increasingly are being acquired on the cheap by private and foreign investors.
In other cases, state assets simply have been siphoned off by local officials to finance local development. Some simply have been stolen.
Officials now estimate that undervaluation and theft of the assets of state enterprises -- often their land, buildings and machinery -- have cost China's government about $58 billion over the last decade.
That represents almost 20 percent of the total value of all of China's state industries, a loss that the deficit-ridden central government can hardly afford.
"Faced with the fast loss of state assets, people are heavy hearted and full of anguish. This is the lifeblood of the nation, the sweat and blood of the people!" an official newspaper, the Guangming Daily, complained.
To stem the losses, Beijing recently halted the sales of all state assets without approval, a step that represents a slowdown in China's efforts to restructure its state industrial sector and cleanse it of deadwood.
The central government also called for each region to appraise the value of its state-owned enterprises, appraisals that usually have not been done prior to previous sales, mergers or joint-venture deals.
Here, in Sichuan Province, Beijing's new orders have held up the planned offering this year of 33 state companies for sale to foreign investors.
But these directives follow the sale of the Chongqing General Knitting Factory, whose new owners now crow over their acumen in picking up the decrepit factory cheaply. Such entrepreneurs are the winners in the on-going collapse of many of China's state industries.
State workers -- who are forced to give up their "iron rice bowls," or guaranteed jobs -- often are the losers.
The bankrupt knitting factory, its run-down equipment and its 30 acres of prime land next to a planned expressway were purchased in 1992 by Chongqing's Overseas Group, an independent enterprise, for about $4.7 million.
Just the factory's land now is worth almost double its purchase price, according to Overseas Group officers.
