Director of the National Financial and Development Laboratory Zhang Xiaojing: There is no unified debt-to-GDP ratio that can predict crises.

On January 16th, the "2026 Bond Market Annual Forum" organized by the National Financial and Development Laboratory of the First Entrepreneurship and hosted by the Shenzhen First Entrepreneurship Bond Research Institute was held in Beijing. Zhang Xiaojing, director of the National Financial and Development Laboratory, stated that when analyzing China's debt risk, it can be generally controlled from an asset perspective. This is mainly based on three reasons: first, local governments hold a large number of high-quality state-owned enterprise equities listed on A shares, which are an important support in alleviating local fiscal problems; second, diluting equity or transferring part of the equity to introduce strategic investors can directly obtain a large amount of cash flow for debt repayment and new investments; third, advancing the securitization of existing assets. He made it clear that empirical research shows that there is no unified debt-to-GDP ratio that can predict a crisis.