Banks in mainland China are becoming an increasingly important source of international bank credit, at the same time as international banks scale back their own lending to Chinese entities. The BIS Quarterly Review for June 2016 discloses new data from official sources in China, covering the second half of 2015, which may help reshape understanding of international capital flows.The analysis highlights a US$114 billion decline in cross-border lending to China from global banks during the final quarter of last year."This was the second quarterly drop in a row and pushed the annual growth rate down to negative 25 per cent," the BIS stated.This trend is continent wide, with cross-border bank credit to emerging Asia excluding China down by US$31 billion during the final quarter of 2015, "with all major economies in the region sharing in the decline," the BIS said. The BIS added that "new data published by China confirms that they are an especially important source of US dollar credit."  Their cross-border dollar assets totalled US$529 billion at the end of December 2015.The State Administration of Foreign Exchange, a public sector agency, is the source for improved BIS data on the international business of banks in China.The future inclusion of China in the BIS statistics "will result in a three per cent increase in reporting banks' aggregate cross-border assets and a four per cent increase in cross-border liabilities," the BIS said.China's banks were the tenth largest creditors in the international banking system, with cross-border assets of US$722 billion, the BIS review noted, and "an especially important source of US dollar credit."Unlike the other large countries that are creditors in the international financial system, such as Germany and Japan, the banking sector in China "is a net debtor in the international market," the BIS said."At end-2015, the cross-border liabilities of banks on the mainland amounted to US$944 billion, which was US$222 billion more than their cross-border assets."This net debtor position is partly explained by the offshore listings of several of the largest Chinese banks, the BIS said.The BIS provided "another explanation for the relatively large size of Chinese banks' liabilities" via the "channelling of offshore renminbi deposits to the mainland - for example, renminbi deposits placed with banks in Hong Kong, which are in turn deposited with banks on the mainland."The BIS said that "at end-2015, mainland banks reported that their renminbi-denominated liabilities to non-residents totalled US$436 billion, whereas their renminbi-denominated claims on non-residents were only US$58 billion."The BIS Review observed that the new data "helps to shed light on potential channels of contagion from economic and financial developments in China. Foreign banks' exposure to China has increased rapidly since the late 2000s, to US$694 billion at end-2015 on a consolidated ultimate risk basis."A US$26 billion drop in cross-border lending to banks accounted for most of the fall. Cross-border lending to Chinese Taipei saw the second largest quarterly contraction on record, again led by a fall in interbank activity. The US$17 billion contraction reduced the outstanding total to US$105 billion,