China's busy consumers flock to easier credit

As the culture moves from one of personal savings to mass consumerism and heavy spending, economists say, they expect enormous growth in the amount of outstanding loans and credit-card debt. All this creates big business for banks, both international and domestic. Chinese banks are undertaking revamps and forming global alliances in preparation to compete.

"What is going to take place in China will dwarf anything we've ever seen," Elmer Funke Kupper, Asia-Pacific director for the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group told a conference in Shanghai in late October.

For Chinese consumers, who have little experience handling the new array of credit options, the changes open a new world of opportunity - and peril.

Traditionally, East Asian nations have personal savings rates of 40-50 percent of incomes, compared with just 20 percent among Western savers. While Chinese are still among the world's top savers with about $1.3 trillion in household saving, they are faced with taking on new weights of debt as prices rise and pressure mounts to buy with incomes that do not keep pace.

The country's leading consumer groups, which are affiliated with the central government, have not entered the banking and credit realms to offer consumer protection plans. Yet according to the Su Ning, the deputy governor the People's Bank of China, the nation's credit collection system now contains information about 80 percent of all outstanding Chinese currency loans.

The rush to hand out consumer credit exposes banks to risk as well.

"The growth in consumer credit, we believe, will lead some banks to fail," Mr. Kupper says, predicting that in three to four years, banks will start to lose some consumer loans.

So far, banking reform has generated most attention for its government bailouts ($45 billion and counting) of bad loans the state-run banks gave money-losing government operations under the communist system. According to estimates by Standard and Poor's Ratings Services, 31 to 35 percent of China's bank assets in 2004 were impaired.

But not all observers are concerned yet with the consumer lending being offered by China's banks.

Lawrence Yee, a China-based partner with the international law firm O'Melveney and Myers, said it is in the self-interest of banks and the Chinese government to place strict controls on lending.

"At the moment, I think banks are pretty careful about (consumer) loans," said Yee.

He pointed to recent central government rules that scaled back mortgages, allowing only 70 percent of the purchase price to be borrowed, rather than 80 percent. Still, recent studies show the moves have not cooled steeply rising housing prices or borrowing.

Mr. Su and others have promised rules and regulations that will assist banks and protect consumers.

Last month, the central bank announced it will combine credit records in seven cities in a central database to start the nationwide credit-check system.

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