Imaginechina via AP Photo
American banks may be slow to return to normal lending, but China's banks are doling out loans like never before, filling a crucial role in the world's economic recovery. According to The Washington Post, Chinese lending in 2009 was triple the rate from the year before, with $1.3 trillion injected into the world economy by Chinese banks in just the first nine months of the year. While most of the loans are within China, analysts say about 11 percent of all new loans are to overseas companies, twice the amount of the previous year. "China's banking industry is operating well, without being affected by the crisis. In contrast, the banks in the West lost a lot, and therefore their capacity to make loans was influenced and became lower," Guo Tianyong, director of the Chinese Banking Research Center at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, told the Post.