Because China’s capital account is still largely closed and the cross-border movement of money remains tightly regulated, China’s savers have limited options for managing their personal finances. As a result, household deposits tucked away in banks have doubled during the last five years, and stood at 42.9 trillion renminbi, or about $7 trillion, as of May.

That trove — equal to 83 percent of gross domestic product last year — has been a low-cost source of financing for state-run banks, which they have tapped to issue loans, mainly to state-owned companies. At the current one-year benchmark rates set by Beijing, banks pay ordinary depositors a maximum of 3 percent annual interest on their savings, and — before the announcement Friday — were required to charge borrowers a minimum rate of 6 percent interest on loans. (Banks are allowed to offer a small premium on deposits, and before the floor was scrapped had also been permitted to give a discount on loan rates.)

Analysts said the tensions over interest rate overhauls highlighted a crucial aspect of China’s growth: The increased use of low-cost and abundant credit has bolstered state companies and fueled an unprecedented surge of investment, all made possible only by effectively holding ordinary Chinese savers hostage to low or even negative returns.

Measures to shift that balance in favor of ordinary savers — like doing away with the control of interest rates — are consistent with Mr. Li’s stated goal of getting China to switch from reliance on investment to a more consumer-driven growth model. But accomplishing this would require Mr. Li to take on powerful vested interests at the state-owned companies that dominate huge swaths of China’s economy.

Liberalizing interest rates is not just a matter of making the financial system more efficient, it represents ‘‘a path toward greater social justice," Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington who has been studying the Chinese economy since the 1970s, wrote in a March essay published in the China Economic Quarterly.

To emphasize his point, Mr. Lardy highlights how real average interest rates, or household deposit rates as adjusted for consumer price inflation, were negative for the decade that the President Hu Jintao and former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao were in power. In other words, Chinese savers effectively paid the banks to store their money, and the value of their wealth was eroded.

That situation needs to be reversed if China is to rely more on consumer demand for its growth, and the new leadership under President Xi Jinping and Mr. Li, who took office in March, appears to recognize the need to push through changes despite the opposition they are likely to encounter, Mr. Lardy said.