Chinese state-owned shipping companies have survived this prolonged financial crisis and come to life again.

Since the subsidies policy for scrapping industry was introduced by Chinese government to encourage domestic shipping enterprise to reengineer after scrapping, state-owned shipping enterprises like COSCO and SINOTRANS & CSC have gotten out of the state of paralysis.

Chinese government has always seen the shipping industry as a strategic important sector, while it is still no clear answer to how to solve the long-term challenges facing the reform of state-owned enterprises, so it is believed that the state-owned shipping enterprises should be no real anxiety of survival.

But what’s really worth to explore is not just survival, but whether state-owned ship owners have learned lessons.

Some Chinese insiders of shipping field think state-owned ship owners have immersed in the bureaucratismfor so long that it's hard for them to fight for a balance between risk and opportunity like the private owners. They explained that this is because of the structural corrupt custom in the governance of state-owned enterprises, which is difficult to tackle, rather than just the surface reason that policymakers are not fighting with their own money.

In the long run, the action that Chinese government designates top executives for state-owned enterprises is easy to trigger a mass of inappropriate huge investment. The key point is how the time nodes of appointing senior executive fit with the development cycle of the shipping industry, which is especially obvious in those highly cyclical sectors.