Europeans bought about 9% of a China Development Bank dim-sum bond and 8% of one sold by Beijing Enterprises Group, Dealogic said.
Beijing Enterprises, which is involved in everything from transportation infrastructure to the city's McDonald's franchise, is on most analysts' wish list, but its shares are already sky high.
Pan Wei, of Beijing University, says that even in stodgy state enterprises, the party is losing its grip.
Many of the Chinese companies involved are privately held, like Shuanghui, as opposed to the big state-owned enterprises that often act on behalf of Beijing on the international stage.
This allowed the new business, once local-government approval was obtained in China, to accept foreign private-equity money invested into the overseas holding company, while abiding by the letter of Beijing's restrictions on foreign investment in domestic enterprises.
This preferred borrowing venue provides major Chinese state-owned enterprises and banks intimately connected with the PLA and Beijing's security services with access to large sums of undisciplined, unconditioned and inexpensive cash.
The money comes partly through formal credit from state banks that gets washed through other state-owned enterprises but also from informal channels that seem to be out of Beijing's control.
The Beijing News yesterday also called for a "declaration of war" on "unscrupulous enterprises" polluting groundwater and urged the public to help protect the country's future supply of clean water.
In return, Beijing is getting engineering contracts to build port and road infrastructure, winning business for Chinese state-owned enterprises, and showing off what China is good at: building major infrastructure projects in record time.
Beijing recently announced that its top economic priority in the coming years was the overhaul of chronically inefficient state-owned enterprises.
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