We hate you guys.” This was how Luo Ping, a senior official at the China Banking Regulatory Commission, vented his frustration at the US in 2009. He and others in China believed that, as the US Federal Reserve printed money to resuscitate American demand, the value of China’s vast US Treasury bond holdings would plunge along with the dollar. “Once you start issuing $1tn-$2tn . . . we know the dollar is going to depreciate so we hate you guys – but there is nothing much we can do,” Mr Luo told a New York audience.
These frustrations have been catalysts of great change. The authoritarian rulers of 1.3bn people felt an imperative to reassert control. Imbued with the resentful narrative of a “century of national humiliation”, they felt the prospect of the US squandering Chinese wealth was an indignity too far. In response, Beijing decided to hasten the promotion of the renminbi as a global currency. That way China’s exporters could earn “redbacks” rather than greenbacks, allowing their revenues to be invested at home rather than recycled into US Treasuries – the only pool of dollar liquidity big and safe enough to absorb significant investments from China’s reserves (which rose to $3.95tn at the end of March).
Therefore, the genesis of renminbi internationalisation, which will be a key theme during the UK visit this week of Prime Minister Li Keqiang, is indivisible from China’s aspiration to blaze its own trail rather than integrate into a Pax Americana in whose creation it had no say.