CHINA GOVT WARNS OF POSSIBLE REBOUND IN NON-PERFORMING LOANS.

AsiaPulse News, September, 2004

BEIJING, Sept 17 Asia Pulse - Government officials and scholars have recently again warned that China's banking sector should keep alert to prevent rebound of non-performing loans (NPLs) rate.

High rate of non-performing loans used to disturb Chinese banks for a long time. But the banks made major progress in their campaigns to reduce non-performing assets from last year to the first half of this year. Statistics released by China Banking Regulatory Commission, the watchdog for the banking industry, show that last year, the non-performing loans of China's banking industry according to the five-category classification standard dropped 7 percentage points to account for 17.8 per cent of all loans by the end of 2003. In the first half of this year non-performing loans at...