The febrile activity is easy enough to understand. The Chinese Economic Miracle is in full swing, and making a bet on the country's major banks is seen as one of the easiest ways to ride the wave. These are the institutions, after all, that are lending money to China's burgeoning industrial base, and that help to finance everything from new home purchases to the country's increasing need for foreign acquisitions. If you believe growth will continue at its double-digit clip, and that the country is serious about its privatization plans, the demand for Chinese banks stocks seems perfectly logical.

Lurking behind this infectious enthusiasm, however, is the bigger question of whether China's state-owned banks, riven as they have been by fraud, largesse, and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad loans, are stable enough to be foisted onto public shareholders. This is a country, despite its continuing reform efforts, where transparency remains dim, where ascertaining objective financial data can be an exercise in frustration, and where the state keeps a leaden hand even on the so-called "private" companies that have been spun off in the markets.

Few believe that these banks will collapse -- the popular view is that Beijing has too much at stake to let that happen -- or that the failure of one or two would incite an international financial crisis. Yet there are persistent concerns that the banks' well-rooted debt issues could rear their head during a recession and wreak some unanticipated havoc, not just with investors, but with China's increasingly important role in the global economy.

China has traditionally favoured the Hong Kong stock exchange for IPOs of its state-run businesses, but now, for the first time, it will pursue a simultaneous listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, where it will sell about a quarter of ICBC's shares, providing mainland Chinese with a chance to get a piece of the action.

ICBC is the largest bank in the world's most populous country, with $815-billion in assets spread among about 18,000 branches. To give a sense of the sheer scale of the company, consider this: It has upwards of 150 million customers, or roughly five times the number of people who live in Canada. Analysts have crunched the numbers, and estimate that if demand is as heady as expected, ICBC will boast a market capitalization of around $180-billion. That's good enough for fourth-place worldwide, and about three times the size of Canada's biggest firm, Royal Bank of Canada.

In the eyes of investors, ICBC also comes with a guarantee of sorts, however implicit: That as the nerve centre of the Chinese financial system, its IPO-driven reformation is a "political task" the government cannot allow to fail.

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