The Chinese government is leaning toward retaining local subsidies for electric vehicles after eliminating a proposal to scrap the funding, Bloomberg reported Monday. The newly amended policy is said to be in final stages of discussions to help sustain rising demand for so-called new-energy vehicles in China. After deliberating on the move to curb local aid to control state expenditures, policymakers are anxious that discontinuing local incentives would weaken the development of the new-energy vehicles sector, according to Bloomberg. Until last month, it was expected that the country would further cut subsidies for so-called new energy vehicles in 2018 and phase them out completely by 2020, according to China Daily, a daily newspaper that quoted Wu Zhixin, vice president of the China Automotive Technology and Research Center.