In part, that means reining in the country’s sprawling state-owned enterprises, which for the past decade have grown increasingly reliant on cheap and plentiful credit to fund their expansion. At the same time, the government needs to ensure that China’s private companies, which typically struggle to get loans from state-owned banks, can gain access to the money they need to continue growing and creating more jobs.

The goal for the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, which is widely regarded as one of the institutions at the forefront of the country’s effort to liberalize the economy, is to experiment where it can with looser rates.

China’s ceiling on savings deposit rates, for example, remains in place. This helps ensure that commercial banks do not erode their profitability by raising rates in competition for deposits and that they retain an ample supply of cheap money to lend to state-owned enterprises.

China’s money markets, by contrast, do not have the same direct impact on ordinary savers. Instead, it is banks in need of short-term funding — or those engaging in the so-called shadow banking activities of risky, off-balance-sheet financing — that are most vulnerable to swings in money-market interest rates.

“The interest rate environment is kind of a means to an end,” said Arthur Kroeber, the Beijing-based managing director of GaveKal Dragonomics, an economic research firm. “Broadly speaking, the central bank would like to see rates somewhat higher than they were previously as a way of slowing the rate of growth of credit and also redirecting it from the state to the nonstate sector.”