When someone dies in China, the family often does not know where the money is. Which banks held deposits, whether there was insurance, whether there are wealth products or government bonds outstanding — until now finding out meant collecting certificates from civil affairs, the police and the health authorities, then going to each bank and each insurer in turn. Hangzhou Wang describes the result plainly: it took time and effort, and things could be missed, so an estate might never be inherited in full.
On 21 August the general offices of three central bodies — the National Financial Regulatory Administration, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Justice — jointly issued a notice extending nationwide what Zhejiang province and the city of Qingdao have been piloting. China News Service, citing the regulator's website, frames it as carrying out the State Council's instruction to make a whole category of business doable in one go, and as removing the blockages in finding out what a dead person's financial assets were.
What the two pilots built is a single counter. Working off their own government service systems, Zhejiang and Qingdao set up a joint-handling platform for what they call the personal after-death matter, pulled several departments into one service, and folded the financial side into it. From there a family can make a one-stop query of the deceased's bank and insurance holdings, and withdraw small qualifying deposits without a separate procedure. Hangzhou Wang says the query reaches deposits, government bonds, accumulated gold, wealth-management products and commercial insurance.
The notice does not switch this on everywhere at once. It encourages places with established data-sharing between government departments and stronger cross-department coordination to copy the model first, and sets requirements on how the work is organised and on data security, so the rollout is orderly. The three bodies say they will guide local departments to adapt it to local conditions.
Why it is on the board
Fourth on Baidu's hot-search list when we collected, two days after the notice was issued.
The two accounts divide by distance from the document. China News Service reports the notice — who issued it, what it instructs, what happens next. Hangzhou Wang, published in one of the two pilot regions, spends its first paragraphs on the problem the notice is answering: the family that does not know which bank to ask. One is the announcement; the other is why anyone searched for it.
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