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)