Taizhou's sustained efforts to promote reform in financial services for small and micro businesses have bolstered its fast economic growth.

In 2016, the city in East China's Zhejiang province was designated a candidate to be a national pilot zone for the reform and innovation of financial services for small and micro businesses.

In the past five years, the local authorities have rolled out a slew of measures to facilitate such reforms, which have injected great vitality into the real economy.

To tackle financing difficulties facing local small and micro enterprises, a credit guarantee fund has been set up by Taizhou, the first city on the Chinese mainland to do so. To date, 23,265 enterprises have applied to the credit fund.

Taizhou has also inaugurated a financial service credit information sharing platform which has accumulated credit information of more than 680,000 market entities in the city.

Taizhou has also taken a leading role in permitting financing by pledging the right to exclusive use of trademarks.

The city to date has handled 2,185 trademark pledge registrations, with a total financing amount of 15.06 billion yuan ($2.24 billion), ranking first in China. 

Official data shows that 236,200 market entities have been registered in Taizhou over the past five years. By the end of September, the loan balance of small and micro businesses in the city was 417.587 billion yuan, up 23.37 percent year-on-year. There were 59 listed companies in Taizhou, ranking fourth among prefecture-level cities in China.

Ye Weizeng, head of the Taizhou Municipal Finance Office, said that the city is striving to be a model city in reform of financial services for small and micro businesses in Zhejiang as part of the province's campaign to become a shining example of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics in the new era.