HONG KONG — When the United States started insuring customer deposits, the government wanted to instill faith in the country’s financial system, which had been broken by a string of bank runs and failures during the Great Depression.

China wants to do the opposite.

With the introduction of deposit insurance on Friday, Beijing is looking to shake the public’s faith, namely the long-held belief that the government will bail out troubled banks. In short, China is trying to introduce risk into the system.

As China moves to restructure its state-run economy, such banking reform is considered critical. To help bolster consumer demand and wean itself off growth fueled by cheap credit, China needs banks to take a more market-driven approach. That means making smarter loans to companies and individuals — and accepting the consequences when they don’t work out.

“The reality in China was that the deposits of the proletariat have always been de facto backed up by the central government,” said Jim Antos, a banking analyst in Hong Kong at Mizuho Securities Asia. Formal deposit insurance is “the first step in a process where maybe we can have some way to deal with the resolution of financial problems in banks in China, something like a bank failure.”