How the other half lives. Far away from the "gold-rush" markets of Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangdong, China's northeast rustbelt is sagging under the weight of its own Communist legacy. China's government will soon launch a major investment drive to pump capital into the region, which has the country's highest unemployment rate. How? Fuzzy "creative accounting" from the big 4 state-owned banks, as usual. By now, even Beijing apparatchiks realize that the banks badly need to restructure bad loans written to finance previous major investment drives, and to stop using banks to finance corrupt political posturing. But these Enron-like changes in the banks' capitalization are still merely cosmetic and will only delay the inevitable choice. China's banks must genuinely reform or they'll drag the rest of the economy down with them.