Overview

The People's Bank of China (officially PBC and unofficially PBOC) is the central bank of the People's Republic of China. It is responsible for carrying out monetary policy as determined by the PRC People's Bank Law and the PRC Commercial Bank Law.

The PBC was established in 1948 as the bank serving areas of mainland China under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control and became China's sole central bank after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. From 1969 to 1978, the PBC was demoted to a bureau of the Ministry of Finance. The PBC was extensively reformed during the 1990s, when its provincial and local branches were abolished, instead opening nine regional branches.

In 2023, these reforms were reversed as when the regional branches were abolished and the provincial branches restored, and new arrangements essentially ended the PBC's longstanding role in financial supervision.

The PBC is the 25th-ranked of 26 ministerial-level departments of the State Council. The PBC lacks central bank independence and is required to implement the policies of the CCP under the direction of the party's Central Financial Commission, which is currently led by premier Li Qiang. The PBC is led by a governor assisted by several deputy governors and a CCP Committee Secretary. Since 2023, the roles of governor and CCP Committee Secretary have been held jointly by Pan Gongsheng.

Mao era

The bank was established on 1948–12-1 by merger of three of several regional CCP-run financial entities, respectively the Huabei Bank (華北銀行, active in North China), Beihai Bank [zh] (in Shandong), and Xibei Farmers Bank [zh] (in Northwestern China). The new bank was first headquartered at the former Huabei Bank head office in Shijiazhuang, then moved to Beijing in 1949.

All other mainland Chinese banks were either liquidated or nationalized in the early 1950s, so that between 1955 and 1978 the PBC was the only bank in the PRC's single-tier banking system and was responsible for all central banking and commercial banking operations. All other banks within mainland China such as the Bank of China were either organized as divisions of the PBC, or were non-deposit-taking agencies.

During the Cultural Revolution, the PBC suspended its commercial banking service. In June 1969, the State Council approved the consolidation of PBC's headquarters as a bureau within the Ministry of Finance. In that context, the PBC's head office was downsized to no more than eighty staff. Local PBC branches were correspondingly merged into local government finance departments.

Early reform era

The institutional demotion of the PBC was reversed in March 1978 as it was separated from the Finance Ministry and granted ministerial ranking.

By then and with the exception of special allocations for rural development, the monolithic PBC dominated all business transactions and credit. In 1979, China initiated a transition from that single-tier banking system to a two-tier system, which was largely completed by 1984. In March 1979, as part of the reform and opening up, the State Council split off state-owned banks from the PBC, first the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) and the Bank of China (BOC).

The People's Construction Bank of China, which had been run separately under the Ministry of Finance, was also made autonomous (and later renamed China Construction Bank in 1986). In January 1984, the PBC's own commercial banking operations were spun off as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). In September 1983, the State Council had promulgated that the PBC would function exclusively as the central bank of China and no longer undertake commercial banking activities.

Modernization efforts continued in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1990, the PBC moved into its new head office building, prominently located on West Chang'an Avenue. In 1991, Vice Governor Chen Yuan spearheaded the creation of the Electronic Interbank System (EIS), the PBC's first state-of-the-art financial market infrastructure. In 1992, however, the PBC had to reluctantly concede the spinning off of its securities regulatory duties to the newly established China Securities Regulatory Commission, whose first chair was former PBC vice governor Liu Hongru.

21st century

In 2003, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress approved an amendment law for strengthening the role of PBC in the making and implementation of monetary policy for safeguarding the overall financial stability and provision of financial services. That year, the long overdue restructuring of China's banking sector made major progress with the creation of Central Huijin Investment, a PBC-managed fund that allowed the PBC to take the lead from the Ministry of Finance on the restructuring process and from the CCP Central Organization Department on the appointment of senior bank executives.

That same year, however, the PBC reluctantly lost its direct authority over banking supervision with the creation of the China Banking Regulatory Commission.

In 2005, the PBC elevated its branch in Shanghai to the status of "second head office", in a move intended to mirror the prominent market-facing role of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York within the US Federal Reserve System. In 2006, the PBC established the Credit Reference Centre to provide financial credit reporting. In 2008, the PBC lost the direct ownership stakes it had built up in much of China's financial sector as the ownership of Central Huijin was transferred to the China Investment Corporation (CIC), a newly created sovereign wealth fund.

During the Great Recession, the PBC helped address bank liquidity crisis by signing swap agreements with numerous other countries to provide them with liquidity based on the renminbi. As of 2021^([update]), China has swap agreements with 40 countries.

Operations

The PBC is a cabinet-level executive department of the State Council. The top management of the PBC are composed of the governor and a certain number of deputy governors. The governor is nominated by the premier of the State Council, who is then approved by the National People's Congress or its Standing Committee and appointed by the president.The deputy governors of the PBC are appointed to or removed from office by the premier.

The PBC adopts the governor responsibility system under which the governor supervises the overall work of the PBC while the deputy governors provide assistance to the governor to fulfill his or her responsibility. The current governor is Pan Gongsheng. Deputy governors of the management team include: Zhu Hexin, Zhang Qingsong, Xuan Changneng, Lu Lei, and Tao Ling. The PBC does not have central bank independence and is required to implement the policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It operates under the direction of the CCP's Central Financial Commission.

The CCP committee secretary of the PBC is the most powerful position in the bank and can hold more sway than the governor.

The PBC Monetary Policy Committee is an advisory body chaired by the PBC governor. It typically includes the directors and deputy directors of other financial agencies, as well as a few influential academic economists.