Most of the debts, it could be argued, are between different Chinese state entities – for example, owed by local-government financing vehicles or state-owned enterprises to state-owned banks. The Chinese authorities could therefore deal with emerging solvency problems, as they did in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with some combination of write-offs, bank recapitalization, transfers of liabilities to the central government balance sheet, and debt monetization.