The central bank and the banking regulator on Wednesday issued guidelines outlining measures that could spur consumption in promising fields such as health care.

Chinese stocks opened higher on Wednesday, with the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index up 0.73 percent, at 2,941.22 points.

 SHANGHAI banks conducted offshore yuan lending of 66.1 billion yuan (US$10.2 billion) last year, a surge of 119 percent year on year, as they tapped financial reforms to transact more cross-border business, the city’s banking regulator said yesterday.

“The expansion of the offshore business paid off after the city pushed forward the pilot free trade zone and encouraged the building of an international innovation and technology center,” Liao Min, head of the China Banking Regulatory Commission Shanghai Office, told a media conference with other financial regulators in Shanghai.

Another piece of good news is that the banking sector’s non-performing loans and the bad-loan ratio fell, Liao said.

Shanghai’s banking sector posted a fall in the bad-loan ratio to 0.87 percent at the end of February, he said. The figure was lower than 0.91 percent at the end of December and an average ratio of 1.67 percent among lenders countrywide.

Assets under management by Shanghai banks totaled 12.98 trillion yuan at the end of 2015, almost two times the scale five years ago.

Liao said the major task during the 13th Five-Year (2016-2020) Plan is to ensure sufficient liquidity in the real economy as well as managing systemic and regional risks.

“Shanghai’s banking regulator will tighten risk management and strengthen precautions on fundraising, bill financing and commercial property services,” Liao said.

He also said no bank employees in Shanghai were involved in illegal fundraising last year.

“We plan to establish a risk prevention system with securities and insurance regulators to crack down on any violation in the industry,” Liao said. “That would help to prevent risks transferring from one sector to another.”

Profits of China's major industrial firms rose 4.8 percent year on year in the first two months of 2016, reversing the downward trend of last year, official data showed Sunday.

Profits at industrial companies with annual revenues of more than 20 million yuan (about 3.1 million U.S. dollars) totaled 780.7 billion yuan in the Jan.-Feb. period, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.

The profits registered a 4.7 percent year-on-year fall in December and a 2.3 percent annual decrease in 2015.

He Ping, an official with the NBS Department of Industry, attributed the latest profit growth to increased sales and a milder decline in factory product prices.

In the first two months, revenues from the firms' primary business climbed 1 percent year on year, improving from a 0.6 percent drop in December 2015 and a 0.8 percent increase for last year.

In the Jan.-Feb. period, China's producer price index, which measures prices of goods at factory gate, slipped 5.1 percent year on year, narrowing from a drop of 5.9 percent in December and 5.2 percent for 2015.

Despite the recovery, part of the industrial profit growth was a result of the lower base in the same period of last year, He noted.

Industrial profits dipped 4.2 percent year on year in the Jan.-Feb. period of 2015, NBS data showed.

Compared with the same period of 2014, the Jan.-Feb. industrial profits of this year only inched up 0.4 percent, said He.