Almost every commercial bank has made inquiring through this system part of the pre-lending assessment. Between January and November 2005, the monthly average of inquiries was about 1.44 million. In 2004, about 15,000 loan applications involving 94.1 billion yuan were rejected on the basis of inquiry, accounting for 2.9 percent of the loan application volume.
It is thus natural, and appropriate, that those of us involved in this process, both inside and outside government, have been focused on the details of one or another of these regulations. However, this necessary attention to details also places us at risk of losing sight of the broader reform picture.