In Xi Jinping’s China, any state-owned enterprise “reform” that diminishes a powerful national champion in favour of private sector or consumer interests has long seemed like a pipe dream.

On the Chinese president’s watch over the past seven years, SOE reforms have focused instead on taking two or more massive state companies and mashing them together to form an even more massive entity.

In one classic example, China’s two largest railcar manufacturers — each an international giant in its own right with huge economies of scale — had for years undercut each other on domestic and overseas tenders, offering prices that their overseas peers could only marvel at. So China CNR and CSR Corp, which had originally been pitted against each other precisely in order to provide more competition, merged in 2014 to create CRRC.