In the report, which laid out the broad direction of reforms rather than specific policy actions, the bank said it would gradually let market forces play a bigger role in allocating capital, but it gave no timetable.
"We should liberalise the upper ceiling in a step-by-step way under the premise that urban and rural co-operatives perfect their pricing mechanism for loans to let them adopt differentiated pricing based on factors like credit risk and costs," it said on its Web site, www.pbc.gov.cn.
Allowing rates at co-operatives to rise abruptly "could intensify capital circulating outside the system and weaken the effectiveness of macro-economic controls", it said, without elaborating. Worried that heated investment and credit growth could unbalance the economy, Beijing has implemented a number of cooling measures such as forcing banks to hold more money in reserve rather than lend it out.
In the most dramatic step, China raised benchmark one-year interest rates last October by 0.27 percentage point to 5.58 percent, the first increase in nine years. It also scrapped a ceiling that had prevented commercial banks from charging more than 70 percent over that rate.
Co-operatives that cater mainly to hundreds of millions of rural residents were allowed to charge up to 2.7 times the benchmark.
A floor of 90 percent of the benchmark has remained in effect for all financial institutions.
The central bank also said it would study how to liberalise interest rates on deposits, simplify rates for small deposits of foreign currency and allow banks to issue long-term debt. It gave no timetables.