With a coal-heated stove and two iron woks among the most prominent features of Tuanshuitou's spartan banking hall, it is no wonder locals say they have lost faith in the local Rural Credit Co-operative.
Many peasants say the closest thing to a bank in one of northern Shanxi province's poor townships has so many bad loans it has gone bankrupt.
The sorry state of Tuanshuitou's co-operative underscores the huge challenge facing China as it tries to transform more than 30,000 of them into financially sound agencies able to help boost lagging rural incomes - an issue likely to top the agenda at this month's annual meeting of the National People's Congress or parliament.
Peasants' average monthly income in Tuanshuitou stands at just a few hundred yuan, a fraction of urban wages, meaning many rely on sales of home-grown crops, or earnings of relatives forced to find work in the cities.
"Only until the co-operatives are financially sound and sustainable can they reach out to vast number of farmers," said one Chinese financial expert.
"How can a shrinking, financially non-performing organisation serve poor farmers? In that sense it is critical".
China, worried a yawning income gap between rural and urban areas could spur social unrest, is desperately seeking ways to boost incomes in its vast countryside.
Mountains of debt plaguing the co-operatives are also proving a huge, and growing, burden on the state budget.
Outstanding co-operative loans stood at nearly $200 billion, state media reported late last year. The non-performing loan ratio is officially about 30 percent but is far higher according to unofficial estimates.
The co-operatives, along with China's Agricultural Bank of China, whose lending has increasingly focused on more profitable urban areas, are the mainstay of the shuttered rural financial system.
But loans to poor farmers, allowing them to find ways of boosting incomes, have almost ground to a halt, locals say.
"We believe the co-op has at least four million yuan in bad loans and that's why they can't give loans out as they used to," said one Tuanshuitou resident surnamed Li.
"It doesn't have the money or manpower to give loans to ordinary farmers. It's as good as bankrupt," Li said.
The inability of many such co-ops to lend to the poor has created a vacuum in the rural financial system, filled to a small degree by some 300 pilot micro-finance schemes helping a fraction of China's hundreds of millions of needy peasants.
Accounts by residents were at variance with the picture painted by one employee who said the co-op still gave many loans to the poor.
"We mainly give loans to ordinary peasants, not big enterprises," the woman said, declining to comment on the co-operative's financial health. "That's a secret".
Over-zealous lending to Township and Village Enterprises as they lost ground to the rising private sector in the 1990s has been one reason for the co-operatives' high debt levels, but unclear ownership structures and poor management also played a role.
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