Over the past six decades, China has experienced an institutional change from a planned to a market economy. During the same period, an in-depth change in the instruments and implementation of China’s monetary policy has occurred. However, until now, China’s monetary policy retains considerable differences compared with that of developed market economies. During the planned economy period, China adopted a mono-banking system and a highly centralized credit management system. Under a mono-banking system, the People’s Bank of China (PBC) could directly control the issuance volumes of cash and bank transfers by means of the cash plan and the credit plan to adjust monetary aggregates. During the economic transition period, China gradually abandoned the mono-banking system. However, the PBC still did not become a truly independent central bank because it retained part of its direct financing operations in support of non-financial agents’ development. Although the PBC began to employ indirect levers to adjust monetary dynamics, it continued to implement the monetary policy principally by means of direct adjustment instruments. Since China’s accession into wider economic reforms in 1994, a truly independent central banking system was established and eventually improved in 1998. The PBC has exclusively exercised the functions of a central bank and implemented its monetary policy principally by means of indirect adjustment instruments; however, it did not fully abandon the use of direct administrative controls over credit aggregates. Out of fear for rising financial leverage and high indebtedness (in particular of non-financial corporations), since 2014 China’s monetary authority gradually enhanced the monitoring of shadow banking activities, and thereby the centralization and effectiveness of monetary policy.