(Xinhua)China has finished at least half of the preparaTions for the local residents' direct investment in Hong Kong stock market, Zhu Min, vice president of Bank of China (BOC), said Saturday.

"The preparations go on smoothly, but there are still many technical problems yet to be addressed," Zhu said on the sidelines of the Inaugural Annual Meeting of the New Champions hosted by the World Economic Forum in China's northeastern coastal city of Dalian.

"It takes a lot of time to prepare new softwares and investors education and train staff members. However, we have no plan to delay it," he told Xinhua.

The State Administration of Foreign Exchange announced On August 20 the Chinese mainland individuals would be able to directly buy HK shares through BOC's Tianjin branch amid efforts to cut the country's huge forex reserve and excessive liquidity. "Tianjin is the only pilot city. It's hard to say if the program will expand to other cities in the future," Zhu noted in response to earlier media reports saying the program would be expanded to many other cities and be launched in early September.

"The program will not have big impact on the sales of qualified domestic institutional investors products as the latter have already been given go-ahead to invest in almost all the global equity markets," he said.