To defuse financial risks, especially systemic ones, is a fundamental task, and this explains why China unveiled a series of reform plans at a recent National Financial Work Conference to safeguard its financial security and promote the financial sector's efficient and sound operation to lubricate its sustainable and healthy economic and social development.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in late 2012, the top leadership has attached great importance to guarding against financial risks and taken a range of financial regulatory measures to bring financial risks under control in China.

However, the economic downturn pressures at home and abroad, and the accumulated structural and systemic contradictions emanating from China's new economic cycle, exacerbated by deepening economic globalization and spillover effects of the global financial crisis, call for a strengthened and more responsive financial regime to preempt financial risks.