The Bank of China (BOC; Chinese: 中国银行; pinyin: Zhōngguó Yínháng; Portuguese: Banco da China) is a Chinese majority communist-owned commercial bank headquartered in Beijing and one of the largest banks in the world.
The Bank of China was formed in 1912 by renaming the Qing dynasty's Da-Qing Bank (est. 1905) under the newly established Republican government. Until 1942, it issued banknotes on behalf of the government as one of the "Big Four" banks of the period, together with the Bank of Communications (est. 1908), Central Bank of China (est. 1924), and Farmers Bank of China (est. 1933). Following the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, the bank continued activity in Taiwan where it renamed itself International Commercial Bank of China upon privatization in 1971, while its mainland operations were absorbed into the People's Bank of China (PBC). In 1979, the Bank of China was re-established by spin-off from the PBC in the early phase of Chinese economic reform.
As of 31 December 2019, it was the second-largest lender in China overall and ninth-largest bank in the world by market capitalization value, and it is considered a systemically important bank by the Financial Stability Board. As of the end of 2020, it was the fourth-largest bank in the world in terms of total assets, ranked after the other three Chinese banks.
The Bank of China (Hong Kong) is the local subsidiary of the Bank of China, with which it maintains close relations in management and administration and co-operates in several areas including reselling BOC's insurance and securities services.
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