国内英语新闻:China to give further support to small, micro-sized firms

China will also improve services for small companies by establishing 4,000 public service platforms for those firms, according to the statement.

The statement also said that China will faithfully implement financial and fiscal policies made in October 2011 by the State Council to help the country's cash-strapped small enterprises.

Those policies include raising the tax threshold for small firms paying corporate value-added taxes and business taxes, extending the policy of halved business income tax for small firms with low profits to 2015, forgiving banks' stamp tax on lending contracts with small firms for three years.

The State Council also required that banks should increase credit support for small businesses, while lending to small and micro-sized firms should grow at a rate no lower than the average loan growth of the country's banks.

Small financial institutions that meet the loan growth target for small businesses will be subjected to lower required reserve requirements than that for major banks, according to the State Council.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises create about 80 percent of the country's jobs, but they usually have difficulty in securing bank loans, as Chinese banks prefer to lend to larger companies, especially state-owned enterprises.