He said that his company's rival had been trying to orchestrate its downfall, and finally it had succeeded. Complaining about it publicly, though, and with the government involved trying to find a non-disruptive solution, Zhao Qiang soon found himself detained by the police. As Executive Vice President of Qixing Group, an aluminum smelter in China's Shandong province, news of Zhao's and Qixing's trouble in early 2017 didn't cause much widespread attention.
This was unlike what had happened several years before. Late in 2013, for the first time in its modern economic history there were rumors China's government was going to allow defaults in the country's rapidly growing corporate bond market. Like GSE's in the US, there had always been assumed some sort of implicit backstop, though rarely ever put to any serious test.
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