The last time the Chinese economy overheated, in 1993, economic supremo Zhu Rongji fired the central bank chief and reportedly threatened to chop off the heads of unruly local officials.
As the economy once again shows signs of red-lining, China's current leaders may wish they could use Zhu's methods but they have less freedom of action now, partly because they surrendered some of their authority over big-spending provincial governments over the past decade.
It took three years for the firm-handed Zhu to tame China's runaway inflation, which hit a Communist-era high of 22 percent in 1994. He cooled double-digit economic growth through a combination of strict credit curbs and tough administrative measures, backed with a fierce temper.
Zhu later became premier and was succeeded in that post last year by Wen Jiabao, who is leading a similar battle to rein in over-investment that has fuelled fears that the world's sixth-biggest economy may be in a pre-bust boom.
"There are many similarities: (growth is) led by the government and financed by bank loans with the involvement of the property sector," said Qu Hongbin, an HSBC economist in Hong Kong.
"This time around, the government is facing a more complicated situation and more difficulties in manoeuvring."
The economy expanded 9.7 percent in the year through the first quarter on the back of a 43 percent jump in fixed-asset investment, despite the government's moves to tighten credit.
And that is probably understating the problem. Goldman Sachs reckons the economy grew at an annualised rate of 16 percent between the two latest quarters.
Central banks usually control economic growth with monetary policy - adjusting the amount of money that banks have available for loans, which raises or lowers interest rates and sometimes exchange rates.
But China faces "limited room for manoeuvre and few policy tools", the Beijing Unirule Institute of Economics, an independent think-tank, said in a research report.
The central bank has tried three times in the past seven months to restrict credit by ordering banks to keep more money in reserve.
But it has shied away from the most direct method of slowing an economy, broadly raising interest rates, because that could send struggling state firms to the wall and destablise the yuan.
Chinese banks typically extend one-year commercial loans at about five to nine percent.
State media reported on Friday that the central bank would remove ceilings on lending rates, which would help curb investment, but the authorities have not moved to generally push up interest rates, as occasionally happens in other countries.
"The central bank has not opted to raise interest rates because it has faced some difficulties," Li Yang, a member of the bank's monetary policy committee, was quoted by state media as saying.
"An interest rate rise will spur speculative capital inflows" - money that speculators convert to yuan as a bet on revaluation from its pegged rate near 8.28 per dolllar, adding to demand for the currency and making it harder to hold down. Foreign money arriving in China through trade and investment also boosts the volume of funds that banks have available for lending, encouraging more investment.
China might solve this problem with a hefty revaluation or float of the yuan, but has resisted doing so because it is determined to maximise trade competitiveness, and fears its shaky financial system is unprepared for such a move.
The foreign exchange chief said in a newspaper interview on Thursday that China planned to link the yuan to a basket of currencies, instead of just to the dollar. He did not say that the currency would be revalued, however, or when the system would change.
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