Chinese Soon to Be Swamped with Credit Card Offers

The United States ideology of living the dream, spending more money than what you ever possible could make.  The ideology which starts at the top with the US gov and works its way down to the bottom to consumers and their plastic credit cards.  Now this ideology is preparing to infiltrate the Chinese.  A country whose government has limited Western Financial Institutions ability to tap into the credit market. 

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Citigroup (C) is set to become the first global bank to issue its own credit cards in China. The financial giant said Monday that Chinese banking regulators have given the company the green light to begin issuing credit cards in the country.

Although credit cards are fairly new to China (local banks introduced them to the mainland only in the mid-1980s), the market is growing fast. Some 268 million credit cards are in use in China (compared with more than 1 billion in the U.S.), roughly five times as many as were in circulation on the mainland as of 2006. Amid persistent economic weakness in the industrialized world, large Western financial institutions are eager to tap the country's enormous market.
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