OVER the past 15 years striking corporate headquarters have
transformed the great cities of the emerging world. China
Central Television's building resembles a giant alien marching
across Beijing's skyline; the 88-storey Petronas Towers, home to
Malaysia's oil company, soar above Kuala Lumpur; the gleaming
office of VTB, a banking powerhouse, sits at the heart of
Moscow's new financial district. These are all monuments to the
rise of a new kind of hybrid corporation, backed by the state
but behaving like a private-sector multinational.  State-
directed capitalism is not a new idea: witness the East India
Company. But as our special report this week points out, it has
undergone a dramatic revival. In the 1990s most state-owned
companies were little more than government departments in
emerging markets; the assumption was that, as the economy
matured, the government would close or privatise them. Yet they
show no signs of relinquishing the commanding heights, whether
in major industries (the world's ten biggest o