China Guangfa Bank Disburses Over 480 Billion Yuan in Loans for Guangdong's County-Town-Village Project

Promoting coordinated development between urban and rural areas is an essential requirement for Guangdong to advance Chinese-style modernization. In December 2022, the Second Plenary Session of the 13th Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China reviewed and approved a decision to implement the "Hundreds, Thousands, and Tens of Thousands of High-Quality Development Project" (hereinafter referred to as the "Hundreds, Thousands, and Tens of Thousands Project"). The Provincial Committee further clarified that this project would be promoted as the top priority for coordinating urban-rural development, covering all 122 counties (cities, districts), 1,609 townships (sub-districts), and 26,500 administrative villages (communities) across the province.

The year 2026 marks a critical juncture for the project as it transitions from "initial results in three years" to "significant changes in five years." Advancing this top-priority high-quality development project requires the precise and robust support of financial resources.

CGB's Strategic Role

China Guangfa Bank (CGB) is the only national joint-stock commercial bank headquartered in Guangzhou with full coverage of institutions and business across all "9+2" cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Anchored to its strategic positioning as the "main bank serving the Greater Bay Area," CGB leverages its unique advantages of being "backed by China Life and rooted in the Bay Area." The bank has made serving the "Hundreds, Thousands, and Tens of Thousands Project" a key initiative for deepening its presence in the Bay Area and expanding into county-level markets.

CGB has formulated a special action plan outlining 15 key tasks across six major categories:

• Increasing resource investment in agriculture, rural areas, and farmers
• Supporting county-level industrial development and transformation
• Promoting urban and rural consumption upgrades
• Supporting urban and rural infrastructure construction
• Consolidating poverty alleviation achievements
• Strengthening financial service channel development

The bank has created an inclusive financial product matrix combining "headquarters-standardized products + branch-specific projects," developing tailored agricultural projects to precisely match the differentiated financing needs of county-level industries. To date, CGB has cumulatively disbursed over 480 billion yuan in loans for the "Hundreds, Thousands, and Tens of Thousands Project."

Financing Rhythm for County-Level Industries: The Mooncake Example

During the golden autumn season, China's Farmers' Harvest Festival coincides with the Mid-Autumn Festival. In Maoming, western Guangdong, mooncake production is at its busiest time of the year. Following the "one county, one industry; one town, one specialty" industrial layout, CGB has built a specialized product shelf targeting characteristic industrial clusters in western Guangdong, including mooncakes, lychees, longans, and Citri Grandis. Through mechanisms such as special credit plans, green approval channels, and dedicated performance incentives, financial resources are precisely injected into all links of the industrial chain.

Maoming, known as the "Kindhearted City" on the coast of the South China Sea, boasts over 1,300 years of mooncake-making history. It has earned the title "China Mooncake Famous City," with its industry scale ranking among the top prefecture-level cities nationwide for consecutive years. The city is home to:

• Over 250 mooncake production enterprises
• Approximately 150,000从业人员 (employees)
• An annual output value exceeding 5 billion yuan

Leveraging the "five trees, one fish, one table of dishes" characteristic agricultural cluster, local producers process agricultural products such as lychees, longans, and Citri Grandis into fillings, creating an industrial chain from field to factory and transforming "small mooncakes" into a "big industry" that enriches the people and revitalizes villages.

The peak season paradoxically places greater pressure on mooncake enterprises' capital turnover. Traditional one-year working capital loans may not fully cover the operating cycle from stocking and production to sales collection. CGB Maoming Branch proactively extended the term of single working capital loans to up to three years. One beneficiary is a "Guangdong Time-Honored Brand" that started as a neighborhood bakery and now sells products nationwide and overseas. At the most critical moment of bulk raw material procurement, a 60 million yuan working capital credit facility was disbursed on schedule.

The extended loan term better aligns the financing rhythm with the "small mooncake" production cycle. Last year, CGB Maoming Branch proactively engaged with and provided advance services to:

• A provincial-level intangible cultural heritage mooncake-making leading enterprise, approving 100 million yuan in credit for modern workshop renovation
• Another mooncake enterprise recognized as both a "Guangdong Time-Honored Brand" and provincial-level intangible cultural heritage, approving 60 million yuan in credit focused on intangible heritage technique inheritance and brand upgrading

These "financial fillings" planted last year have now materialized into golden, fragrant mooncakes on the Mid-Autumn Festival market, with Maoming mooncakes spreading from western Guangdong to broader horizons.

The lesson from a mooncake's capital turnover is clear: the financing needs of characteristic industries do not always follow the standardized one-year borrowing and repayment cycle. For industries with distinct production and sales seasons, financial services must follow the industry's timeline. This applies to mooncakes, lychees, and Citri Grandis alike. CGB has developed exclusive products such as "Lychee Loan," "Pineapple Loan," and "Agarwood Loan" for "Guangdong-brand" agricultural products, ensuring that the pace of financial services follows the industry's seasonal rhythm. A mooncake, a lychee, or a piece of agarwood—each represents the most vibrant consumption pulse of the Bay Area's county-level economy and the most concrete industrial expression of the "Hundreds, Thousands, and Tens of Thousands Project" on the land of Lingnan.

Monetizing Credit for Specialty Industries: The Ocean Example

Guangdong is a major maritime province, with the longest mainland coastline in China. Building a modern marine ranch is a key pathway for Guangdong to practice the "big food concept" and promote high-quality marine economic development. The Guangdong Province Modern Marine Ranch Development Master Plan (2024–2035) proposes to fully establish the "Yuehai Granary" by 2035, creating a marine fishery powerhouse with international influence.

For asset-light industries such as marine ranching, CGB has partnered with policy-oriented guarantee institutions like Guangdong Agricultural Financing Guarantee Co., Ltd. to establish a risk-sharing mechanism integrating policy guarantees, agricultural insurance, and special loans. This approach makes the concept "no collateral does not mean no credit" a reality in county-level industries.

Raoping County in Chaozhou City is a major marine county in Guangdong and a key county for CGB's vertical assistance under the "Hundreds, Thousands, and Tens of Thousands Project." Marine ranch construction is a critical lever for leveraging local marine resources and promoting rural revitalization.

For aquaculture farmers and enterprises, the operational risks of seawater aquaculture are difficult to quantify. Natural environmental risks are unpredictable, and business entities are often asset-light, lacking fixed assets for collateral. Traditional credit methods struggle to cover such enterprises. Additionally, the pronounced seasonality of industrial cycles and capital needs makes standardized credit assessment challenging.

One local aquaculture leading enterprise was stuck precisely on the "asset-light, collateral-deficient" issue. CGB Shantou Branch broke through traditional logic by incorporating rights certificates such as sea area use rights, aquaculture permits, and insurance policies, along with industrial operational data, into the credit assessment system. This made previously unquantifiable "implicit credit" explicit, tailoring a 10 million yuan special credit loan for the enterprise.

Simultaneously, CGB Shantou Branch collaborated with Guangdong Agricultural Financing Guarantee Co., Ltd. to provide policy guarantees at preferential rates, combined with special loan interest rate discounts and embedded policy-based seawater cage aquaculture insurance. This created a full-chain service system of "guarantee fee reduction + interest rate preference + risk mitigation." To date, CGB Shantou Branch has provided 29 million yuan in special loan support for Raoping's marine ranch aquaculture industry, covering the full-cycle needs of seedling procurement, feed storage, eco-friendly cage upgrades, and infrastructure construction, promoting the application of "wood-to-plastic" eco-friendly cages and deep-sea gravity cages.

This exemplifies CGB's unique advantage of being "backed by China Life" at the county level. Leveraging the comprehensive financial strengths of the China Life Group, CGB collaborates with China Life's insurance division to provide integrated "insurance + credit" products based on policy-based agricultural insurance credit enhancement. Insurance first covers natural risks, and then banks follow with financial support. This bank-insurance linkage provides robust support for county-level industrial financial services.

While aquaculture faces challenges of insufficient collateral and financing accessibility, agricultural processing enterprises bear different pressures. A seafood enterprise in Zhelin Town, Raoping County, processes white shrimp from the high-quality sea areas of Zhelin Bay and Dacheng Bay. Its products are included in Guangdong's "Yue-brand" agricultural product list, covering hotpot catering, prepared foods, and supermarket fast-moving consumer goods channels. The harvest season for white shrimp in southeastern Guangdong is concentrated from May to July and September to November. When the season arrives, enterprises must quickly purchase shrimp in bulk and store them at low temperatures to fulfill annual orders. However, the enterprise operates asset-light without large fixed-asset collateral, and its funding gaps are "short, fast, and urgent," making traditional credit difficult to match with the actual rhythm.

CGB Shantou Branch conducted a multi-dimensional comprehensive assessment based on the enterprise's actual cash flow, operational data, and credit history, ultimately approving a 5 million yuan credit line with preferential interest rates, precisely supporting the enterprise's peak-season needs for bulk shrimp procurement and fresh-keeping storage.

The "credit monetization" approach extends beyond the sea. In Huizhou, the Luofu Mountain Butterfly Valley Farm is transitioning into an "eco + leisure" cultural tourism complex, also constrained by being asset-light and collateral-deficient. CGB Huizhou Branch collaborated with Guangdong Agricultural Financing Guarantee Co., Ltd. to customize a "Leisure Agriculture Guarantee Loan," combined with Boluo County's full guarantee fee exemption policy, opening financing channels for the project's transformation. Guangdong is currently accelerating the construction of the South Kunlun Mountain–Luofu Mountain County-Town-Village High-Quality Development Leading Zone. Whether each cultural tourism complex can "turn around" tests the financial system's adaptability to new county-level industrial forms. In Meizhou, an electrical manufacturing enterprise faced funding gaps for heavy asset investments such as new factory construction and equipment procurement. CGB Meizhou Branch conducted detailed operational research and provided 150 million yuan in comprehensive credit support through a combination of "working capital loans + domestic letters of credit + forfaiting."

From marine ranches to cultural tourism farms, and from county-level processing to manufacturing upgrades, "asset-light entities can also obtain credit support" is becoming a common practice for CGB in serving Bay Area county-level industries. As the dimensions of financial assessment expand from single fixed assets to operational data, industry prospects, and insurance credit enhancement, enterprises in counties, towns, and villages gain more opportunities to be recognized.

The Depth of Financial Services: Following the Chain

Why can CGB continuously serve these county-level characteristic industries? An important reason is that financial services do not stop at providing loans to enterprises but continuously move closer to the specific operational links of the industry.

Products Follow Industries. CGB's "Hundreds, Thousands, and Tens of Thousands Project" special agricultural product shelf precisely matches the full-cycle capital needs of planting expansion, cold chain storage, processing chain extension, and brand operations. In the marine economy sector, CGB has also introduced "Marine Carbon Sink Loans," using the future trading revenue rights of carbon emission reductions from aquaculture algae and shellfish as collateral. The scale of modern marine ranch loans continues to grow, with business coverage spanning cities including Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Zhanjiang, Yangjiang, Shanwei, and Chaozhou.

Services Reach Down to Counties, Towns, and Villages. CGB has established 30 county-level branch outlets in eastern and western Guangdong, dispatched a total of 50 financial assistants and financial village officials, and expanded services to more towns and villages through inclusive financial specialty branches, "agriculture, rural areas, and farmers" mobile financial service teams, and farmer service stations. For county-level enterprises, financing difficulties sometimes stem not just from a lack of funds but also from banks' "insufficient understanding." CGB accesses provincial big data tools such as Yuexinfen, combined with data laboratories and risk models, to enrich county-level enterprise credit information, assisting banks in risk identification and credit decision-making. Simultaneously, through mechanisms such as special credit plans and green approval channels, CGB provides differentiated financial support for county-level industries.

From "Financing" to "Financing + Intellectual Support." In 2022, CGB became the designated service bank for Guangdong Province's special rural revitalization bonds, assisting the Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in drafting and launching the nation's first rural revitalization special bond reserve plan. CGB has signed issuance advisory cooperation agreements with 15 cities, conducted over 40 training sessions and project communication meetings, and provided on-site research and consulting for over 1,000 projects. The radius of financial services is not limited to enterprise projects. CGB Zhanjiang Branch provides targeted assistance to Beipo Village, Baisha Town, Leizhou City, donating special funds for rural greening improvement. To date, approximately 400 seedlings have been planted, and 2,400 meters of new green roads have been added, contributing a touch of green to the ecological construction of beautiful Guangdong through practical actions of town and village assistance.

In the Bay Area's counties, towns, and villages, the tentacles of financial services are extending inch by inch along industrial chains, road networks, and tidal patterns.

Looking Ahead

The "Hundreds, Thousands, and Tens of Thousands Project" is driving new changes in Guangdong's urban-rural development landscape. As the project continues to advance in depth, how finance can better play its role in resource allocation and inject sustained momentum into county-level economic development will become an important lens for observing Guangdong's high-quality development. CGB will continue to explore more possibilities for financial services in county-level industries, channeling financial resources into the Bay Area's counties, towns, villages, and land-sea industrial belts, continuously empowering Guangdong's high-quality urban-rural development, and contributing to Guangdong's efforts to take the lead in advancing Chinese-style modernization. (CIS)