The People's Bank of China (PBC), the country's
central bank, is soliciting opinions from the public on a
nationwide database for personal credit information. The bank
released its draft regulation concerning database management on
Wednesday.
The database has been in trial operation since last year,
linking seven cities from Beijing in the northeastern part of the
country to Chongqing in the southwest. The PBC plans to extend it
to cover the entire nation by the end of the year.
The database stores personal information including identity,
employment, address, credit history and other data pertaining to
creditworthiness, according to the PBC.
The seven-chapter regulation includes clauses on how banks will
report and retrieve personal credit information, how citizens may
apply to correct information in the database and how privacy and
security will be protected.
Banks will be banned from access to the database and fined
10,000 to 30,000 yuan (US$1,209 to 3,627) if they use the
information for purposes other than loan management.
Wednesday's China Youth Daily quoted Han Ping, director
of PBC's Business Administration Department, as saying that the
central bank is also working on setting up a blacklist for
individuals with poor credit to which all database-linked banks
would have access.
(Xinhua News Agency March 17, 2005)