A slow evolution

China’s banks are trying to resolve their colossal non-performing loan problem, and are implementing credit scoring techniques across their sizeable branch networks, writes Nick Sawyer

The Chinese banking system is a mass of contradictions. At its centre is the struggle between communist ideology and the budding commercialism now explicitly encouraged in the state-owned banking sector. This is all the more apparent since the country’s accession to the World Trade Organisation late last year. With foreign banks setting their sights on China’s vast domestic customer base in 2006, Beijing’s central government is keen to clean up the banking sector and create a fleet