China is building a comprehensive legal framework for its management and supervision scheme for State-owned assets, the director of the commission in charge said Thursday.

A whole set of rules is expected to be released to explain the details of the guidelines established in the provisional Regulation for the Supervision and Management of Corporate State-owned Assets issued earlier this month.

Li Rongrong, director of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, said Thursday that the commission would design more specific rules on the function of the State-owned asset supervisory agencies as investors in State-owned enterprises, the responsibility system of State-owned asset management and the exact standards for choosing, examining and removing enterprise executives.

The central headquarters of the commission, together with its newly established local branches, will play the investor role on behalf of the government in the more than 174,000 State firms across the country.

That will formally separate the government's public management functions with those of an investor in the enterprises. This will mark a breakthrough in China's State-owned asset management system and economic restructuring.

The drafting of the new rules has just started, said Li.

Many of the old rules will be abolished and amended, he said.

China now has more than 200 departmental regulations. These have been enacted by different government departments but are mostly administrative and sectoral regulations.

In the near term, Li said one of the top priorities is to adopt a strict and scientific liability system for the operation of State assets, along with the creation of a smooth exit channel for under-performers.

He urged the 196 largest State firms under central government control to adopt a modern enterprise system by 2006. All State companies and mines facing bankruptcy should be driven out of the market within five years, he said.

Li said it should take three to five years for China to launch a new comprehensive framework for the State asset management scheme.

The mature scheme will be based on a proposed State-owned assets law, which has been on the agenda for the National People's Congress for a decade but still has not been issued.

The newly enacted provisional regulation on State assets deals only with the non-financial assets of enterprises. These assets accounted for only about 55 per cent of overall State-owned assets as of the end of 2002.

A law will be more comprehensive and more authoritative than a regulation, said Li.

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