100 Yuan 60th Anniversary of Rural Credit Cooperation

Rural credit cooperatives (农村信用合作社) were first established in China in the early 1950s as the Communist Party moved to collectivize agricultural finance and displace private moneylenders in the countryside. By 2011, the network had become the single largest rural lending institution in the world by branch count, underpinning agricultural credit in regions commercial banks largely ignored. The 60th anniversary issue marks an institution that survived collectivization, the Cultural Revolution's administrative chaos, and multiple rounds of central government restructuring — none of which is obvious from the coin itself.