China’s Communist Party Centralizes Power Over Finance and Pollution Control<br />The plan unveiled on Tuesday calls for merging the China Banking Regulatory Commission and the China Insurance Regulatory Commission.<br />By KEITH BRADSHER and CHRIS BUCKLEYMARCH 12, 2018<br />BEIJING — The Chinese government said on Tuesday that it planned to overhaul supervision of the country’s debt-ridden financial sector, its environmental regulators<br />and other essential government agencies in a broad move intended to further consolidate the Communist Party’s hold on official levers of power.<br />Mr. Xi did create a lightly staffed financial supervisory commission last summer, which Mr. Liu<br />is expected to take charge of in the coming days, that oversees all the regulatory agencies.<br />At the same time, both agencies would relinquish some of their broad policy responsibilities to China’s central bank, which<br />would acquire an even greater role in preserving financial stability in what is now the world’s second-largest economy.<br />Liu He, President Xi’s right-hand man in overseeing the economy<br />and financial system, outlined the party’s central role in the reorganization in a lengthy statement published on Tuesday morning in People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party.<br />But the China Securities Regulatory Commission needed to stay separate from the new banking and insurance agency, they suggested, because its role involves overseeing markets, in which customers know<br />that they are taking a risk that they may not recover their investments.<br />Premier Li Keqiang asked the National People’s Congress, the country’s legislature, to approve a plan<br />that would combine China’s banking and insurance regulators in an effort to bolster their ability to monitor financial institutions.
