Institutional Change, Credit Form

Market economy is a contact economy or credit economy in essence. Credit and contact make the basic of market economy operation. As the economy reforms deepening, especially after China's entrance into WTO, our finance system are opening to the outside world steep by steep. In this background, credit research is becoming more and more a significant field in the research of China Economy. Economists and Socialists are working in this field to help pointing out what we should do to take the opportunity of economic integration. Given the opportunity of such a large financing platform, local enterprises must pay attention to their credit to make good use of it.A great amount of papers in credit are being printed, which gives a clear sense to people. However, we have to admit that our acknowledge about credit is far away from maturity. Most of those papers focus in uncovering or criticizing the phenomenon of lack of credit, or introducing credit management experience in developed countries. There're also a few of them try to find out the origin of lack of credit from historical perspective. They put credit problem into the background of economic ethics, economic systems and legal issues. Pity is that those researches always could not get to the essence or only focus in a single aspect of credit, which makes us hard to have a holistic view of the problem.In this paper, I try to categorize those credit forms that were ever seen in China history. By describing its history, I hope that readers can have a clear understanding of credit in China. I would like to make a discussion between credit form progressing and institutions. There are two clues, one is that how institutions take part in this progress, the other is that how institutions influence this progress. Also I will give some of my opinions in the learning and researching credit. If this would bring some enlightenment to credit research, I should feel very honored and delighted.