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Hong Kong - Beijing may have averted a crisis in its stock markets with heavy-handed intervention, but the world's biggest corporate debt pile - $16.1trn and rising - is a much greater threat to its slowing economy and will not be so easily managed.
Corporate China's debts, at 160% of GDP, are twice that of the United States, having sharply deteriorated in the past five years, a Thomson Reuters study of over 1,400 companies shows.
And the debt mountain is set to climb 77% to $28.8trn over the next five years, credit rating agency Standard & Poor's estimates.
Beijing's policy interventions affecting corporate credit have so far been mostly designed to address a different goal - supporting economic growth, which is set to fall to a 25-year low this year.
It has cut interest rates four times since November, reduced the level of reserves banks must hold and removed limits on how much of their deposits they can lend.
Though it wants more of that credit going to smaller companies and innovative areas of the economy, such measures are blunt instruments.
"When the credit taps are opened, risks rise that the money is going to 'problematic' companies or entities," said Louis Kuijs, RBS chief economist for Greater China.
China's banks made 1.28 trillion yuan ($206bn) in new loans in June, well up on May's 900.8 billion yuan.
The effect of policy easing has been to reduce short-term interest costs, so lending for stock speculation has boomed, but there is little evidence loans are being used for profitable investment in the real economy, where long-term borrowing costs remain high, and banks are reluctant to take risks.
Manufacturers' debts are increasingly dwarfing their profits. The Thomson Reuters study found that in 2010, materials companies' debts were 2.8 times their core profit. At end-2014 they were 5.3 times. For energy companies, indebtedness has risen from 1.1 to 4.4 times core profit. For industrials, from 2.5 to 4.2.
