Don't issue credit cards to teenagers with no income and don't charge customers for cards they haven't activated.  China's banking watchdog ordered banks on Thursday to rein in their credit card marketing amid concern over a rise in late payments in a country where paying with plastic is growing fast from a low base.  The China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) told banks to stop offering clients gifts if they take out a credit card and to cease setting quotas for credit card sales staff.

Banks should also step up monitoring of card fraud at merchants and disclose more information to card holders, according to a notice on the Commission's website, www.cbrc.gov.cn.  The regulator's admonition follows the disclosure by the People's Bank of China last month that 4.97 billion yuan of credit card payments were at least 60 days late in the first six months, a jump of 133.1 percent from a year earlier.

The 60-day delinquency ratio in China was 3.0 percent at the end of March. By comparison, American Express ( AXP - news - people )'s's 30-day delinquency rate in June was 4.4 percent.

Cash is still king in China, and policymakers are keen to ensure that, if plastic does take off in the way banks tirelessly hope, there is no repeat of the sort of uncontrolled issuance that left as many as four million South Koreans earlier this decade unable to pay their card debts.

The number of credit cards issued in China reached 150 million at the end of March, up 42.9 percent from a year earlier, according to the central bank.  Purchases via cards last year totalled 1.1 trillion yuan, or 4.8 percent of total retail sales, the banking regulator said.