[citation needed] With aid from the Soviet Union, the shares of private enterprises and with them industrial output followed a similar path, forming a Soviet-style planned economy.

[6]: 38 The institutional demotion of the PBC was reversed in March 1978 as it was separated from the Finance Ministry and granted ministerial ranking.

[5]: 62 By then and with the exception of special allocations for rural development, the monolithic PBC dominated all business transactions and credit.

In 1990, the PBC moved into its new head office building, prominently located on West Chang'an Avenue.

[12]: 47  In 1991, Vice Governor Chen Yuan spearheaded the creation of the Electronic Interbank System (EIS), the PBC's first state-of-the-art financial market infrastructure.

The bank's profile was greatly raised by the appointment of Zhu Rongji as its governor in 1993, simultaneously as his role as Vice Premier in charge of economic and financial affairs.[5]: 125 .

Its central bank status was legally confirmed on March 18, 1995, by the 3rd Plenum of the 8th National People's Congress, and was granted a higher degree of autonomy than other State Council ministries by an act that year.

[14] The nine branches were located in Chengdu, Guangzhou, Jinan, Nanjing, Shanghai, Shenyang, Tianjin, Wuhan, and Xi'an, complemented by a sub-provincial network of city-level and county-level sub-branches.

[citation needed] That year, the long overdue restructuring of China's banking sector made major progress with the creation of Central Huijin Investment, a PBC-managed fund that allowed the PBC to take the lead from the Ministry of Finance on the restructuring process and from the CCP Central Organization Department on the appointment of senior bank executives.

[16]: 33  These measures retroactively recognized the legal status of online third-party payment platforms like Alipay.

[18] Meanwhile, in 2017, the PBC was tasked with the secretariat of China's newly established Financial Stability and Development Committee chaired by Vice Premier Liu He.

Deputy governors of the management team include: Zhu Hexin, Zhang Qingsong, Xuan Changneng, Lu Lei, and Tao Ling.

[25] The PBC does not have central bank independence and is required to implement the policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

[23] The CCP committee secretary of the PBC is the most powerful position in the bank and can hold more sway than the governor.

[28] The head office building of the PBC, on West Chang'an Avenue, was constructed in 1987–1990 on a design by a team of architects led by Zhou Ru.