China’s Bank Lending Falls to Lowest Level Since 2018

The evidence strongly and consistently supports the statement's truthfulness. Multiple highly authoritative and relevant primary sources, including major international news agencies like Reuters and Bloomberg, directly corroborate the claim. The headlines themselves state that China's new loans have fallen to their lowest level in seven years or, more specifically, the lowest since 2018. The articles provide specific data points, noting that new yuan loans for the most recent full year (hypothetically 2025 in the sources) totaled 16.27 trillion yuan, explicitly identifying this as the lowest figure since 2018. Furthermore, the information is attributed directly to China's central bank, the People's Bank of China (PBOC), which is the definitive source for this data. The inclusion of data providers like Trading Economics and the OECD, which aggregate official statistics, further strengthens the claim by indicating that the underlying data is verifiable. There is no contradictory evidence among the provided sources; the lower-relevance sources either provide context for the trend or are not directly related to the specific data.