A commodity trader has become China’s first state-owned enterprise to inflict losses on dollar bondholders in two decades, according to S&P Global Ratings, a new landmark in a rising wave of defaults, the Wall Street Journal reported. Chinese authorities are allowing more companies to renege on their debts, where once they would have found ways to engineer bailouts. So far defaults have mostly been concentrated in credit-starved private companies, but even some groups with state backing are now failing to repay creditors as promised.

China’s companies racked up some towering bills as they expanded, and the world’s investors and lenders rushed to offer them even more money. Now the bills are coming due, and a growing number of Chinese companies can’t pay up, in a sign that the world’s No. 2 economy is feeling the stress from its worst slowdown in nearly three decades, the New York Times reported.

Chinese leaders pledged stepped-up efforts to boost slowing growth, as they try to manage a downshift in a maturing economy and fallout from the trade war with the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reported. An economic blueprint, approved today by President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders at the end of an annual closed-door conclave, promised more fiscal and monetary measures with the aim of supporting everything from consumption to infrastructure investment and employment in the coming year—all to ensure that the growth rate will be kept stable.

The latest bond failure by a Chinese local government investment arm has rekindled concerns about a group of borrowers whose outlook is closely tied to Beijing’s shifting definition of its implicit backing, Bloomberg News reported. The debt woes faced by Hohhot Economic & Technological Development Zone Investment Development Group, a local government financing vehicle from Inner Mongolia, have sent chills among investors holding other such LGFV bonds, driving prices sharply lower for some.