Times have changed for Yu Xingzhi since China’s economic boom years. Despite the slowing economy, sales at Shanghai Caison Color Material Chemical are holding up. The trouble is, her customers — garment manufacturers and packaging producers buying her dyes and inks — are taking more time to pay for what they buy, the Financial Times reported. “Receivables are the unavoidable problem for traditional manufacturers. If you don’t accept receivables, you have no business. It’s standard industry practice, even though no one likes it,” says Ms Yu, the dyemaker’s general manager.

Instead of China fixing a corporate zombie problem threatening to overwhelm the world’s second largest economy, Beijing may be about to create a bigger one, The Wall Street Journal reported. That is the implicit warning in a new paper published by the International Monetary Fund late Tuesday. Authorities in China are just starting to tackle the systemic buildup of two decades of credit-fueled and state-directed growth.

One research firm, Gavekal Dragonomics, calls it “the magical debt-shrinking machine”. When the Chinese government first confronted a mountain of non-performing loans in the state-owned banking sector it came up with a seemingly ingenious solution, the Financial Times reported. Rather than write-off NPLs totalling Rmb1.4tn ($216bn), or almost 20 per cent of gross domestic product in 1999, specially created asset management companies bought them off the country’s “big four” state banks at full face value, paying with government-backed 10-year bonds.

Here's a growing list to further excite China bears this Thursday: Baoding Tianwei Group Co., China National Erzhong Group, Sinosteel Co., China Railway Materials Co. Ltd., Guangxi. These are the eight state-owned enterprises (SEOs) that have run into some sort of repayment problem this year, exacerbating already heightened concerns over the future of China's debt-fueled economy, Bloomberg News reported.

Just about the last thing China needs right now is another cement plant, The Wall Street Journal reported. Unused stocks have been piling up since the massively overbuilt real-estate market cratered in 2014. Demand will likely never fully recover; city skylines are dotted with cranes swinging idly atop half-finished apartment blocks. Alarmed, Beijing has declared that reducing overcapacity in industries like steel and cement is a national priority.

For Chinese banks, the decision to lend to companies like Bohai Steel was for years a no-brainer. Lenders took heart from its state backing, which appeared as solid as the millions of tons of steel pipes that rolled off its production lines each year, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. That ironclad image is now tarnished. Plunging demand and a worsening glut in production capacity have left Bohai Steel struggling to repay as much as $30 billion in debt. Worried creditors — more than 100 of them — are locked in negotiations with the company and local officials.

China etched in details of plans to help workers laid off from the bloated coal and steel industries, saying assistance would include career counseling, early retirement and help in starting businesses, among other measures, The Wall Street Journal reported. New guidelines released by seven Chinese ministries over the weekend build on previously announced commitments to restructure the coal and steel industries, whose excess production is dragging on the economy, and to take care of an estimated 1.8 million workers who will be displaced.

China and India are both grappling with escalating bad debt challenges lurking in their banking systems. Yet the two Asian economic giants are embracing markedly different strategies to clean up the mess, Bloomberg News reported. Impaired loans have reached a decade high in China and are at their most in 14 years in India, posing a threat to two economies that increasingly have fueled global growth. Troubled banking systems hurt economies by curbing new lending for corporate investment.

China Railway Materials Co., a government-backed company that halted trading of its bonds earlier in the week, said Wednesday it’s seeking to restructure its debt, Bloomberg News reported. The supplier of steel and cement for railways held a meeting with 19 lenders on April 5, according to a Wednesday company filing. China Railway reported on its operating and financial conditions in the meeting, the filing said, without giving details of the meeting result. As Premier Li Keqiang pushes through reforms, many bloated state firms have stumbled in the debt market.

Small investors, angry over lost savings, are emerging as a new security threat to Chinese authorities, who are watching warily as investors around the country hit the streets in protest and picket government offices to demand their money back, The Wall Street Journal reported. Protests have flared from Shanghai to the southwestern hub of Kunming to the ancient former capital of Xi’an. Crowds gathered outside the securities regulator’s Beijing offices after equity markets collapsed last summer.