Hopes that monopolies will be curbed, after numerous minor attempts, are running high as the State Administration of Industry and Commerce (SAIC), the country's top anti-trust arbitrator, has been promoted to ministerial level after being merely a bureau for decades.

The SAIC is launching a major campaign to check practices that block competition and harm consumers' interests.

With the Anti-Unfair Competition Law in hand, the SAIC may succeed in checking violating practices such as dumping and cartel pricing.

However, the SAIC, consumers and consumers' societies may soon find that the weapons in hand are far from enough to break administrative and State monopolies.

The State owns huge monopolies in utilities such as post and telecommunications, railways, insurance and banking.

China does not have an Anti-Monopoly Law, nor a supreme arbitrator such as the United States' Federal Trade Commission.

Drafting of the Anti-Monopoly Law was started in the late 1980s but legislation was slow due to lack of consensus on how to define administrative monopoly, who should finally be the top arbitrator, and when to put the law into effect.

Utility sectors in China remain highly State-controlled despite the 22 years of reform and opening up. Individuals with private capital are barred from the sectors although limited sums of foreign investment are permitted in minor sections.

The central government is apparently facing a dilemma in handling the monopolies. To foster competition, it should break the State hold and open service sectors to private capital, including foreign investment.

But opening up quickly is likely to weaken the State's dominant position in the economy. A fear is that yielding to private capital, including that from financially and technologically strong Western nations, will prompt a fast rise of the burgeoning private economy.

To break the monopoly this way also contradicts the government's set principle that privatization should not be an alternative as it would dramatically alter the property ownership mix on which the socialist market economy is built.

A lawmaker in the Financial and Economic Committee of the National People's Congress said he did not believe the draft, after many revisions, would become a law within the next three years.

Most industry administrations were dismantled in March to help foster competition. However, experts pointed out that ministries such as the Ministry of Information Industry and the Ministry of Railways remain.

A wide break-up of State holdings will not really come until the country enters the World Trade Organization which will set free trade rules.

And in-depth restructuring of the country's economic and political systems will be the key to ending State monopolies to greatly benefit consumers and optimize the economy.