The Structure and Evolution of China’s Green Finance Policy Instruments

China’s green finance policy system consists of many separate measures, and most studies examine them one at a time. This paper describes the system as a whole. It asks which instruments the system contains and how their relative weight changed between the 2016 Guiding Opinions on Building a Green Financial System and 2025. The instruments are grouped into five categories: green credit, green bonds, green insurance, green funds and carbon finance. The description rests on three public sources: green loan statistics from the People’s Bank of China, green bond issuance data from the Climate Bonds Initiative, and the text of the policy documents. Green loans grew faster than total loans over the period, and their share of total loans rose from 6.7% at end-2020 to 16.2% at end-2025. Green bond issuance peaked in 2022 within the period covered and was about 18% lower in 2024 than in 2023. Both patterns need to be read with care, because the green loan statistics were redefined in 2025 and the bond figures come from report editions with different database cut-off dates. Read together with the policy documents, the evidence suggests that direct financial support has been joined by project standards, institutional assessment and risk management requirements. Government direction, market development and risk control are used here as three organising ideas for interpreting that combination. The paper describes how the system is built and how it has changed; it does not estimate the effect of any single policy.