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Good to see that China is coming face to face with their biggest weakness: innovation. Only time will tell if they will succeed, but the fact that they are placing proper incentives in place is promising.

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I worked with Chinese SOEs in the power and industrial sector. This won't succeed. Guarantee it. Chinese SOEs, always take the cheap politically correct course. They never admit failure and rarely course correct. They are also incredibly lazy. At Chinese power plants I would point out small issues for them to correct and they would never do it. They don't maintain things, preferring to buy new in order to have a constant supply of replacements in order to have a revenue source for graft. But only for budgeted items. If something needed to be replaced that wasn't budget they would just find a way around it. Example at a power plant in Changchun one of the probe we supplied was run over and broken off by a fork lift. Well things happen so replace the probe, that's what would happen in the U.S. Not in China. They could have welded the probe also, not as good but cheaper. They didn't do either. What they did was use the probe which gave them an incorrect signal for the amount of air going into one duct for the pulverizer. This is critical measurment. And they manipulated it to make it LOOK correct. So that plant wasted lots of coal and created unnecessary amount of NOx due to inattention. At another plant I went to in Shanghai, the plant had problems with dust preventing measurement. No problem, we had a device for that but they didn't want to solve that problem. I also noticed they didn't have enough probes to get a good measurement. Here again, no interest to fix the problem. Finally I noticed the probes were in the wrong way. No problem, during a plant shutdown take the probes out and shift them 90 degrees on this square duct. Drill new holes, weld over the old holes, reconnect the signal lines. Easy. Would take 1/2 day at most per duct. Get a better measurement and save a lot of money, except this was a Chinese SOE who are basically allergic to work. They just left the probes in the wrong way. In theory China wants to do a lot of things, at the working level though implementation is always terrible. The only real way to get these problems sorted out is for the SOEs to be in a JV with a foreign company that takes over some of the management of their operation which will never happen in China. I have worked with SOEs in other countries like Taiwan. Also screwed up, but not THAT screwed up and way less lazy.

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