Don’t call it “QE.” The Party doesn’t like that.

In a testament to ongoing concerns about the sustainability of what Chinese officials are still euphemistically calling a “recovery,” the PBoC doled out tens of billions of dollars in cheap loans to policy banks last month, data out this week showed.

Specifically, some CNY350 billion in cheap funding was mainlined into the Mainland system via the PBoC’s PSL facility in December.

It was the largest increase (indeed, the data suggests it was the only increase) since late 2022, when Beijing injected CNY630 billion in PSL funding over several months in a bid to support an economy laboring beneath COVID curbs which, by then, were hopelessly anachronistic.

The money appears to be a downpayment, housing pun fully intended, on an expected CNY1 trillion in central bank funding earmarked for the ailing property sector.

Although the PBoC statement made no mention of how the funds injected in December would be used, infrastructure and affordable housing are prime candidates.

As noted, you’re not supposed to call this QE, even though it resembles QE in some important ways. It also looks like a fiscal-monetary partnership. Participating banks are policy banks, which is to say tools of the Party. The PSL program entails those banks pledging their loans to the PBoC as collateral.

Of course, nothing else — RRR cuts, MLF cuts, LPR cuts and so on — has been especially effective, “so what’s left are only unconventional tools,” as Nomura’s Ting Lu put it back in November.

Although PSL is generally credited with putting a floor under the real estate market during a four-year period when outstanding program loans grew from CNY600 billion to CNY3.5 trillion in 2019, the initiative was also blamed for stoking a bubble in property prices.

The PBoC’s balance sheet is expanding at the briskest rate in nearly a decade.