Document No. 892 of the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology explicitly requires local governments at all levels and their development and reform and industry and information technology authorities to strengthen project management in industries with severe overcapacity, and not to approve or file new capacity projects in industries with severe overcapacity under any name. This should have two meanings: first, project management should be strengthened; second, new projects should not be approved.

　　Strengthening project management should mainly refer to the management of early-stage project work. According to the 2004 Decision of the State Council on Investment System Reform and the Notice of the State Council Forwarding the Opinions of the National Development and Reform Commission and Other Departments on Suppressing Overcapacity and Redundant Construction in Some Industries and Guiding the Healthy Development of Industries (Guofa [2009] No. 38), for energy-intensive and highly polluting industries such as steel and cement, the total volume must be resolutely controlled and overcapacity suppressed. For projects in (cement) overcapacity industries that are truly necessary to build, they must be submitted to the National Development and Reform Commission for demonstration and approval.

　　Controlling the total volume, in practical terms, means controlling the number of projects. To launch a project, early-stage work must first be done; only after early-stage work is done can a project application report be submitted to the government and enter the approval procedure; only after approval can the project (legally) begin construction. Localities are also very active in early-stage work for industrial projects and pursue it tightly. Once a project is established, investment comes. Once the project is completed, GDP appears. This is what has created local enthusiasm for attracting investment, the zeal for formulating local early-stage project work plans for investment amounts at various levels, and the impulse to favor ever-larger project investment amounts.

　　The news item was titled "Yunnan Xiangyun County Cement Clinker Project Is Carrying Out Early-Stage Work" (the original text was "Yunnan Xiangyun County Achieves Industrial Output Value of 6.6 Billion Yuan from January to May This Year"). The report said that, according to statistics, Xiangyun County implemented 23 key industrial projects in 2013 with a total investment of 4.988 billion yuan, among which projects such as Jianyun Company's 2×4,500 t/d new dry-process cement clinker production line and Building Materials (Group) Company's 3,000 t/d cement clinker production line are carrying out early-stage work.

　　Three cement clinker production line projects in Xiangyun County, Yunnan, are carrying out early-stage work, with a total cement clinker capacity of 3.82 million tons. Not long ago, among the warnings issued by the China Building Materials Federation to relevant local governments and enterprises against new cement capacity, there was one in April 2013 concerning the serious situation of newly built lines in Yunnan's cement industry. The Federation sent a letter to the Yunnan Building Materials Industry Association (Zhongjiancailian Chanhan [2013] No. 32), asking the association to exert its strength and urge relevant government departments to stop cement production lines under construction and planned for construction.

　　Once early-stage work has been carried out, a project becomes a proposed project in the general sense. Although a project inherently has two possible outcomes, feasible or infeasible, if approval is hopeless within (a period of time), then spending manpower, materials, and financial resources on early-stage work is ineffective work, or wasted effort. If construction starts without approval, it becomes a non-compliant project. At present, there are cement projects for which even preliminary design has been completed but approval has still not been obtained, leaving them "hanging" there; some projects (or parts thereof) are questioned by local investment authorities demanding a "statement" on the early-stage work. At this point, no one is comfortable!

　　If it is clearly known that a project will not be approved no matter how much effort is expended, then there is absolutely no need to push forward early-stage work. Investors should be firm in their "stance" and should not be excited by the "guarantees" made for the project by individual local leaders often encountered, nor should they be swayed by the "investment attraction" conditions offered by the project location.

　　Curbing new cement capacity requires concrete action. In this information-rich era, proposed new capacity projects in overcapacity industries (most of them) can be discovered at any time, and investment authorities and industry organizations can take measures at any time to curb them. There is no need to wait until projects take shape or are about to take shape before mobilizing a large force to stop them as if assigning blame and punishing "crimes."