Many of those plants are decades old, and poorly managed. But they're also ran by state owned companies which means there's no market incentive towards efficien

Many of those plants are decades old, and poorly managed. But they're also ran by state owned companies which means there's no market incentive towards efficiency and a huge amount of politics regarding what you do. I worked almost 10 years ago for a European company doing district heating in China. In a smaller city in the north of China, they were able to replace the 19 existing coal plants with a single one.