Business leaders in China may not be familiar with Edmund Blackadder, but they will know what the British character, played by Rowan Atkinson, meant when he said that he felt like a pelican because “whichever way I turn I still have an enormous bill in front of me”. Unpaid bills, in the form of accounts receivable, are rising fast in China.

Chinese companies that have so far produced third-quarter updates have seen accounts receivable rise on average by 60 per cent in the past year and nearly a third in the last quarter, according to S&P Capital IQ data. There is nothing wrong with that necessarily. Accounts receivable should grow in line with expanding sales. Trouble is, revenues only grew by a quarter and a tenth respectively over the same periods. For seasoned analysts, that would normally set lights flashing red.

Of course, customers always try to delay paying bills in a downturn. But rising accounts receivable relative to sales is the accounting equivalent of raising hope over reality. And it is hard to know whether companies will be paid because credit quality in China is so opaque. In spite of the slowdown, the proportion of bad loans among China’s biggest banks is roughly stable. But that has only raised the suspicion that poor bets have been rolled over. Unpaid bills are harder to hide so the rise in accounts receivable points to a problem.