A Bank of China branch in Beijing. (Photo: IC)

The Bank of China ramped up credit support for key fields and weak links of the economy in the first half of this year, strengthening financial support for infrastructure construction, better serving the green transition and increasing financial supply to stabilize foreign trade, said senior executives of the bank.

As of the end of June, the large State-owned commercial lender's renminbi loans and advances to customers totaled 13.78 trillion yuan ($2 trillion), an increase of 1.02 trillion yuan or 8 percent compared with the prior year-end.

Specifically, technology finance loans grew by 17.21 percent, loans granted to strategic emerging industries rose 67 percent and manufacturing loans went up 15.64 percent from the end of last year. The balance of its domestic green credit reached 1.73 trillion yuan, according to the bank's 2022 interim report.

Its outstanding inclusive finance loans granted to micro and small enterprises reached nearly 1.11 trillion yuan, up more than 25 percent from the beginning of this year, said Liu Jin, president of the bank, at a news conference on Wednesday.

"The Bank of China will make greater efforts to realize a higher year-on-year growth of domestic RMB loans in the second half and for the full year," said Lin Jingzhen, executive vice-president of the bank.

"We will ramp up financial support for major infrastructure projects in the areas of transportation, energy, water conservancy, new infrastructure and China's new-type urbanization, and allocate more credit resources to projects that are in line with the nation's policy orientation, including carbon emissions reduction, technology innovation, logistics and green development projects," Lin said.