远东经济评论：人民币跃升为“亚洲的美元”
2003年5月23日16:16 来源：[ 中国新闻网 ]＿
中新网5月23日电 最新一期《远东经济评论》载文称，中国的人民币正在成为“亚洲的美元”。
文章说，在香港和东南亚一带，人民币正在成为替代美元的第二货币。
文章指出，“随着中国的经济发展，人民币也在全亚洲作为企业间交易以及旅游观光的结算手段，其利用率正越来越高”。
香港贝尔斯登公司首席分析员库尔茨称，在雄厚的储备和精明的经济政策下，中国几乎不费吹灰之力就把人民币变成硬货币，这完全由市场力量主导。
旧金山市摩根士丹利顾问总监沃兹沃思预测：10-15年内，人民币将可成为世界四大主要货币之一。
原文：
CURRENCY: The Renminbi Zone
Driven by the country's economic success and with quiet support from Beijing, China's currency is more and more welcome across the region for business and tourism. And it could be on its way to a much bigger role in Asia
By Michael Vatikiotis/HONG KONG and Bertil Lintner/CHIANG MAI
Issue cover-dated May 29, 2003
SOMETHING SURPRISING is happening to China's currency. Although not fully convertible, the renminbi, the "people's money," is growing in use as a hard currency outside China--the first sign of its potential role as "Asia's money." In Hong Kong and along China's borders with Southeast Asia, an emerging renminbi zone can be traced, fuelled by burgeoning Chinese trade and tourism.
WHAT GIVES THE RENMINBI REACH
• The growth of China as a market and export base
• Beijing's drive to deepen its trade ties with Asia
• Growing renminbi use in areas bordering China
• Full convertibility is an eventual goal for Beijing
• Rising domestic demand
In Hong Kong, which has its own currency pegged to the United States dollar, the renminbi is used to buy goods at electronics stores in the busy shopping areas of Kowloon. At some automated teller machines in Hong Kong, customers already have the option of withdrawing renminbi or Hong Kong dollars. Mainland banks in Hong Kong issue renminbi-denominated credit cards. Fewer Chinese who travel exchange renminbi for foreign currency before leaving China--as they're supposed to. Instead, they do so at their destinations. The renminbi is, for instance, listed among exchange rates of hard currencies at Chiang Mai airport in northern Thailand. More than 16 million mainland Chinese went abroad in 2002. The renminbi is also increasingly used in commercial transactions across wide stretches of Southeast Asia close to the Chinese border.
"China is effectively managing a hard currency," says Michael Kurtz, chief analyst for Bear Stearns in Hong Kong. "The move is almost effortless, backed by solid reserves and wise economic policies." What's more, adds Steve Xu, a Chinese economist in Hong Kong, "this is all driven by market forces, not a deliberate policy."
The rise of the renminbi is a quiet result of the rapid growth of China's economy, and a conscious effort by the government in the past few years to deepen trade ties with the rest of Asia. The International Monetary Fund estimates that 40% of total trade within non-Japan Asia is intra-regional, and trade with China accounted for 40% of the increase in 2002. As well as reflecting China's growing economic influence in the region, experts say that Beijing is counting on the currency acting as a strategic tool to consolidate China's power and influence in Asia, possibly paving the way for the renminbi's debut as a regional reserve currency. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said recently that a strong and stable renminbi is good for Asia.
Annual growth rates in China of about 8%, boosting regional trade and tourist flows, seem to be achieving such an aim. Some experienced financiers worry that sceptics may be ignoring a dawning reality. A particularly strong advocate of the currency is John Wadsworth, an advisory director of Morgan Stanley based in San Francisco. "The renminbi will be free to trade, it will be a strong currency, Chinese banks will be dominant, and it is highly likely that there will be four major currencies in the world within 10-15 years," he says. Adds Edward Zeng, CEO of Sparkice, a leading Beijing-based electronic-commerce company: "It amounts to a gradual move toward convertibility."
The authorities in Beijing tentatively support this development. Guo Shuqing, a deputy governor of China's central bank and the chairman of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, told local media in March that the government's attitude "is both supportive and cautious" about the increasing internationalization of the renminbi.
Guo estimated the total amount of renminbi in circulation outside China at greater than 30 billion renminbi ($3.6 billion). "Not only in neighbouring countries, but even in the United States, there are places for the exchange of renminbi. The circulation of renminbi demonstrates confidence in the Chinese economy," Guo said.
China's membership of the World Trade Organization only accelerates the emergence of a strong, unified Chinese currency. This, in turn, will increase the desirability of a fully convertible renminbi, both as a way of smoothing the integration of China's economy into the world economy, and as a way for China to exercise its economic might more directly. Full convertibility is a stated goal, but no fixed timetable has been set.
The renminbi's gradual emergence is consistent with past Chinese experiments in economic and political reform. "Since China trade is becoming an important part of intra-regional trade, China will be happy to see the renminbi used," says Andrew Freris, chief economist at BNP Paribas in Hong Kong. "China turns a blind eye to all this and sees an upside in terms of acceptance of the currency," concurs a senior economic adviser at HSBC in Hong Kong.
This willingness to experiment could explain why a blind eye is being turned to the flouting of foreign-exchange restrictions normally applied to Chinese citizens travelling abroad (officially there's a limit of 6,000 renminbi each). The renminbi is already in wide circulation in the countries favoured by Chinese tourists in Southeast Asia, principally Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.
For its part, Hong Kong is open to increased use of the renminbi to buy goods and services. Joseph Yam, chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, says the city as an international financial centre in China should "capture any international financial intermediation activities denominated in renminbi." A spokesman for Hong Kong's Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau says: "The growing use of renminbi in Hong Kong is a natural development along with the financial integration between Hong Kong and the mainland." Economist Xu, a research fellow at the Hong Kong think-tank Civic Exchange, estimates that renminbi worth HK$30 billion-40 billion ($3.8 billion-5.1 billion) is in circulation in the territory.
Then there's the growing use of the currency in areas bordering on China that increasingly rely on cross-border trade. For now, the heart of this creeping renminbi zone is focused on some of the region's most marginal economies. The renminbi is the principle trading currency in northern Laos and northern Burma as far west as Mandalay and south to Kentung, just 150 kilometres from Thailand. It is also widely used for business in Cambodia and Vietnam. According to some reports, the renminbi is being hoarded as a hedge against inflation in Cambodia, alongside the dollar.
In Burma and Laos, the Chinese currency is a hard substitute for weak local currencies like the Burmese kyat and Laotian kip. The blackmarket rate for the kyat is as low as 1,000 to the dollar, from 250-300 in 1997. The official rate of the kip has slipped from 960 to 10,500 in the same period. More conveniently, the renminbi can be used for purchases and any kind of deal across the Chinese border.
Cross-border trade has increased in recent years. Consumer goods, machinery and fruit come in from China; timber, minerals and smuggled cars leave Burma, Laos and Thailand. All these transactions, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual value, are settled in renminbi--greatly helped by lax controls over carrying currency in and out of China. An official from the Yunnan provincial government told a recent Asia Society conference in Hanoi that more than a million people crossed the border with Vietnam in the previous 15 months.
Along the Thai banks of the Mekong River, Chinese traders from Yunnan do business without converting their renminbi into Thai baht. All over Thailand, an underground banking network enables traders to transfer funds in and out of the Chinese currency. A similar system works in the Pearl River Delta region connecting Hong Kong with Guangdong province. Says Marc Faber, one of Asia's most experienced financial analysts: "The renminbi is the strongest currency in Asia right now; the problem is there isn't enough of it in circulation."
It's a curious situation because the renminbi is still subject to rigid capital controls. Regional central banks will not hold the renminbi as a reserve currency, nor do they issue debt in renminbi because China keeps it to a de facto peg of nearly 8.28 to the dollar. The renminbi is not freely convertible on the capital account, and most analysts don't expect this to change for some years. The fear is that opening the country's capital account too soon will lead to huge outflows because of a lack of confidence in the banking system.
Of course, China has already used its currency to play a leading regional role. Pledges to maintain a stable renminbi were a key source of confidence for Southeast Asia during the 1997 financial crisis. China signed currency-swap agreements as part of an Asia-wide currency safety net under the Chiang Mai Initiative, designed to ward off future financial crises. China's $300 billion in foreign reserves are the second-largest in the world and will likely play a central role in a planned Asian bond market quietly backed by Beijing. China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have agreed to form a free-trade area within a decade.
In the longer term, these developments foreshadow what some experts see as the evolution of the renminbi into a regional currency floating against the dollar, euro and Japanese yen. A Chinese currency that becomes a regional currency would validate and facilitate China's emergence as a global economic power and reduce dependence on the dollar. It would also make possible renminbi financing throughout the region. Chinese official data show illicit capital inflows in 2002 instead of the usual drain, indicating new confidence in the Chinese currency.
Japan's latent banking and debt crisis makes the yen less suitable as a vehicle for wider Asian monetary integration, some experts believe. In turn, the mighty dollar could become relatively less important in an area dominated by trade links with China. So argue George von Furstenberg and Jianjun Wei of Indiana University, in a recent academic paper proposing that a fourth major international currency, after the dollar, euro and yen, will have to crystallize in continental East Asia. "If and when China's currency . . . develops into a major international denomination rivalling the yen, it could become one of the two pillars of a multilateral monetary union with most other East Asian (and some Southeast Asian) countries," they write.
Long-term trends lend support to this view. There is the growing size and importance of China's financial system, assuming sustained economic growth, and the fact that the relative importance of the U.S. market to China and Hong Kong is shrinking. "China is today a medium-sized economy with GDP equivalent to that of Italy," writes Jonathan Woetzel, a Shanghai-based director of consultants McKinsey & Co. in his new book Capitalist China. "What makes it distinctive is its growth. By 2010, it is expected to almost double in size to rival Germany. With continued growth it will surpass Japan by 2020."
There are signs that East Asia's combined real GDP could even exceed that of the United States if productivity growth and technology catch-up continue at a rapid pace. "Based on this outlook," argue the paper's authors, "we do not share the view that maintaining a U.S. dollar peg, particularly with the yen-dollar rate on the loose, would continue to bring the blessings of stability to a continental East Asian monetary area far into the future."
That's not to say the renminbi will emerge as the dominant Asian currency in the near future. After all, Japan tried and failed to build a yen-trading bloc in Asia at the height of its boom. But the needs of hungry Japanese corporations overseas meant that Japan's banks went on a lending spree that contributed to the weakening of the yen. And some analysts see an interim period during which China will rely more heavily on the dollar as it pulls in foreign direct investment, bolsters its reserves and stretches its trading wings farther afield.
For now, and perhaps the next few years, there are clear limits to the scope of the renminbi. The overwhelming majority of foreign-exchange transactions in the world involve the trading of shares, bonds and other financial instruments. Actual transactions involving goods and services amount to probably less than 10%. China's currency won't figure in financial-service transactions until full convertibility.
Even if 30 billion renminbi is circulating outside China, that's barely 2% of the total value of the currency in circulation. The dollar will likely continue to dominate the region because the U.S. is a net borrower. "The reason the yen and the euro are not as strong as the U.S. dollar is because both Japan and the European Union are net lenders, not net borrowers," says Freris of BNP Paribas. China is also a net lender with a total estimated foreign debt of $170 billion against its reserves of $300 billion--much of this denominated in U.S. treasuries.
While its spread across Asia presages a wider role, the renminbi's strength against the dollar and yen are far from assured. China may have another economic downturn, or a banking crisis that would puncture confidence. The renminbi also needs to secure legitimacy in the free, open market, rather than in shadowy corners of Southeast Asia's marginal economy. As Zeng of Sparkice points out: "It is only when China has surpassed Japan economically and Japan is bogged down in stagnation that the renminbi can acquire the position as a common currency in Asia."
Susan V. Lawrence in Beijing contributed to this article
2003年5月23日16:16 来源：[ 中国新闻网 ]＿
中新网5月23日电 最新一期《远东经济评论》载文称，中国的人民币正在成为“亚洲的美元”。
文章说，在香港和东南亚一带，人民币正在成为替代美元的第二货币。
文章指出，“随着中国的经济发展，人民币也在全亚洲作为企业间交易以及旅游观光的结算手段，其利用率正越来越高”。
香港贝尔斯登公司首席分析员库尔茨称，在雄厚的储备和精明的经济政策下，中国几乎不费吹灰之力就把人民币变成硬货币，这完全由市场力量主导。
旧金山市摩根士丹利顾问总监沃兹沃思预测：10-15年内，人民币将可成为世界四大主要货币之一。
原文：
CURRENCY: The Renminbi Zone
Driven by the country's economic success and with quiet support from Beijing, China's currency is more and more welcome across the region for business and tourism. And it could be on its way to a much bigger role in Asia
By Michael Vatikiotis/HONG KONG and Bertil Lintner/CHIANG MAI
Issue cover-dated May 29, 2003
SOMETHING SURPRISING is happening to China's currency. Although not fully convertible, the renminbi, the "people's money," is growing in use as a hard currency outside China--the first sign of its potential role as "Asia's money." In Hong Kong and along China's borders with Southeast Asia, an emerging renminbi zone can be traced, fuelled by burgeoning Chinese trade and tourism.
WHAT GIVES THE RENMINBI REACH
• The growth of China as a market and export base
• Beijing's drive to deepen its trade ties with Asia
• Growing renminbi use in areas bordering China
• Full convertibility is an eventual goal for Beijing
• Rising domestic demand
In Hong Kong, which has its own currency pegged to the United States dollar, the renminbi is used to buy goods at electronics stores in the busy shopping areas of Kowloon. At some automated teller machines in Hong Kong, customers already have the option of withdrawing renminbi or Hong Kong dollars. Mainland banks in Hong Kong issue renminbi-denominated credit cards. Fewer Chinese who travel exchange renminbi for foreign currency before leaving China--as they're supposed to. Instead, they do so at their destinations. The renminbi is, for instance, listed among exchange rates of hard currencies at Chiang Mai airport in northern Thailand. More than 16 million mainland Chinese went abroad in 2002. The renminbi is also increasingly used in commercial transactions across wide stretches of Southeast Asia close to the Chinese border.
"China is effectively managing a hard currency," says Michael Kurtz, chief analyst for Bear Stearns in Hong Kong. "The move is almost effortless, backed by solid reserves and wise economic policies." What's more, adds Steve Xu, a Chinese economist in Hong Kong, "this is all driven by market forces, not a deliberate policy."
The rise of the renminbi is a quiet result of the rapid growth of China's economy, and a conscious effort by the government in the past few years to deepen trade ties with the rest of Asia. The International Monetary Fund estimates that 40% of total trade within non-Japan Asia is intra-regional, and trade with China accounted for 40% of the increase in 2002. As well as reflecting China's growing economic influence in the region, experts say that Beijing is counting on the currency acting as a strategic tool to consolidate China's power and influence in Asia, possibly paving the way for the renminbi's debut as a regional reserve currency. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said recently that a strong and stable renminbi is good for Asia.
Annual growth rates in China of about 8%, boosting regional trade and tourist flows, seem to be achieving such an aim. Some experienced financiers worry that sceptics may be ignoring a dawning reality. A particularly strong advocate of the currency is John Wadsworth, an advisory director of Morgan Stanley based in San Francisco. "The renminbi will be free to trade, it will be a strong currency, Chinese banks will be dominant, and it is highly likely that there will be four major currencies in the world within 10-15 years," he says. Adds Edward Zeng, CEO of Sparkice, a leading Beijing-based electronic-commerce company: "It amounts to a gradual move toward convertibility."
The authorities in Beijing tentatively support this development. Guo Shuqing, a deputy governor of China's central bank and the chairman of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, told local media in March that the government's attitude "is both supportive and cautious" about the increasing internationalization of the renminbi.
Guo estimated the total amount of renminbi in circulation outside China at greater than 30 billion renminbi ($3.6 billion). "Not only in neighbouring countries, but even in the United States, there are places for the exchange of renminbi. The circulation of renminbi demonstrates confidence in the Chinese economy," Guo said.
China's membership of the World Trade Organization only accelerates the emergence of a strong, unified Chinese currency. This, in turn, will increase the desirability of a fully convertible renminbi, both as a way of smoothing the integration of China's economy into the world economy, and as a way for China to exercise its economic might more directly. Full convertibility is a stated goal, but no fixed timetable has been set.
The renminbi's gradual emergence is consistent with past Chinese experiments in economic and political reform. "Since China trade is becoming an important part of intra-regional trade, China will be happy to see the renminbi used," says Andrew Freris, chief economist at BNP Paribas in Hong Kong. "China turns a blind eye to all this and sees an upside in terms of acceptance of the currency," concurs a senior economic adviser at HSBC in Hong Kong.
This willingness to experiment could explain why a blind eye is being turned to the flouting of foreign-exchange restrictions normally applied to Chinese citizens travelling abroad (officially there's a limit of 6,000 renminbi each). The renminbi is already in wide circulation in the countries favoured by Chinese tourists in Southeast Asia, principally Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.
For its part, Hong Kong is open to increased use of the renminbi to buy goods and services. Joseph Yam, chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, says the city as an international financial centre in China should "capture any international financial intermediation activities denominated in renminbi." A spokesman for Hong Kong's Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau says: "The growing use of renminbi in Hong Kong is a natural development along with the financial integration between Hong Kong and the mainland." Economist Xu, a research fellow at the Hong Kong think-tank Civic Exchange, estimates that renminbi worth HK$30 billion-40 billion ($3.8 billion-5.1 billion) is in circulation in the territory.
Then there's the growing use of the currency in areas bordering on China that increasingly rely on cross-border trade. For now, the heart of this creeping renminbi zone is focused on some of the region's most marginal economies. The renminbi is the principle trading currency in northern Laos and northern Burma as far west as Mandalay and south to Kentung, just 150 kilometres from Thailand. It is also widely used for business in Cambodia and Vietnam. According to some reports, the renminbi is being hoarded as a hedge against inflation in Cambodia, alongside the dollar.
In Burma and Laos, the Chinese currency is a hard substitute for weak local currencies like the Burmese kyat and Laotian kip. The blackmarket rate for the kyat is as low as 1,000 to the dollar, from 250-300 in 1997. The official rate of the kip has slipped from 960 to 10,500 in the same period. More conveniently, the renminbi can be used for purchases and any kind of deal across the Chinese border.
Cross-border trade has increased in recent years. Consumer goods, machinery and fruit come in from China; timber, minerals and smuggled cars leave Burma, Laos and Thailand. All these transactions, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual value, are settled in renminbi--greatly helped by lax controls over carrying currency in and out of China. An official from the Yunnan provincial government told a recent Asia Society conference in Hanoi that more than a million people crossed the border with Vietnam in the previous 15 months.
Along the Thai banks of the Mekong River, Chinese traders from Yunnan do business without converting their renminbi into Thai baht. All over Thailand, an underground banking network enables traders to transfer funds in and out of the Chinese currency. A similar system works in the Pearl River Delta region connecting Hong Kong with Guangdong province. Says Marc Faber, one of Asia's most experienced financial analysts: "The renminbi is the strongest currency in Asia right now; the problem is there isn't enough of it in circulation."
It's a curious situation because the renminbi is still subject to rigid capital controls. Regional central banks will not hold the renminbi as a reserve currency, nor do they issue debt in renminbi because China keeps it to a de facto peg of nearly 8.28 to the dollar. The renminbi is not freely convertible on the capital account, and most analysts don't expect this to change for some years. The fear is that opening the country's capital account too soon will lead to huge outflows because of a lack of confidence in the banking system.
Of course, China has already used its currency to play a leading regional role. Pledges to maintain a stable renminbi were a key source of confidence for Southeast Asia during the 1997 financial crisis. China signed currency-swap agreements as part of an Asia-wide currency safety net under the Chiang Mai Initiative, designed to ward off future financial crises. China's $300 billion in foreign reserves are the second-largest in the world and will likely play a central role in a planned Asian bond market quietly backed by Beijing. China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have agreed to form a free-trade area within a decade.
In the longer term, these developments foreshadow what some experts see as the evolution of the renminbi into a regional currency floating against the dollar, euro and Japanese yen. A Chinese currency that becomes a regional currency would validate and facilitate China's emergence as a global economic power and reduce dependence on the dollar. It would also make possible renminbi financing throughout the region. Chinese official data show illicit capital inflows in 2002 instead of the usual drain, indicating new confidence in the Chinese currency.
Japan's latent banking and debt crisis makes the yen less suitable as a vehicle for wider Asian monetary integration, some experts believe. In turn, the mighty dollar could become relatively less important in an area dominated by trade links with China. So argue George von Furstenberg and Jianjun Wei of Indiana University, in a recent academic paper proposing that a fourth major international currency, after the dollar, euro and yen, will have to crystallize in continental East Asia. "If and when China's currency . . . develops into a major international denomination rivalling the yen, it could become one of the two pillars of a multilateral monetary union with most other East Asian (and some Southeast Asian) countries," they write.
Long-term trends lend support to this view. There is the growing size and importance of China's financial system, assuming sustained economic growth, and the fact that the relative importance of the U.S. market to China and Hong Kong is shrinking. "China is today a medium-sized economy with GDP equivalent to that of Italy," writes Jonathan Woetzel, a Shanghai-based director of consultants McKinsey & Co. in his new book Capitalist China. "What makes it distinctive is its growth. By 2010, it is expected to almost double in size to rival Germany. With continued growth it will surpass Japan by 2020."
There are signs that East Asia's combined real GDP could even exceed that of the United States if productivity growth and technology catch-up continue at a rapid pace. "Based on this outlook," argue the paper's authors, "we do not share the view that maintaining a U.S. dollar peg, particularly with the yen-dollar rate on the loose, would continue to bring the blessings of stability to a continental East Asian monetary area far into the future."
That's not to say the renminbi will emerge as the dominant Asian currency in the near future. After all, Japan tried and failed to build a yen-trading bloc in Asia at the height of its boom. But the needs of hungry Japanese corporations overseas meant that Japan's banks went on a lending spree that contributed to the weakening of the yen. And some analysts see an interim period during which China will rely more heavily on the dollar as it pulls in foreign direct investment, bolsters its reserves and stretches its trading wings farther afield.
For now, and perhaps the next few years, there are clear limits to the scope of the renminbi. The overwhelming majority of foreign-exchange transactions in the world involve the trading of shares, bonds and other financial instruments. Actual transactions involving goods and services amount to probably less than 10%. China's currency won't figure in financial-service transactions until full convertibility.
Even if 30 billion renminbi is circulating outside China, that's barely 2% of the total value of the currency in circulation. The dollar will likely continue to dominate the region because the U.S. is a net borrower. "The reason the yen and the euro are not as strong as the U.S. dollar is because both Japan and the European Union are net lenders, not net borrowers," says Freris of BNP Paribas. China is also a net lender with a total estimated foreign debt of $170 billion against its reserves of $300 billion--much of this denominated in U.S. treasuries.
While its spread across Asia presages a wider role, the renminbi's strength against the dollar and yen are far from assured. China may have another economic downturn, or a banking crisis that would puncture confidence. The renminbi also needs to secure legitimacy in the free, open market, rather than in shadowy corners of Southeast Asia's marginal economy. As Zeng of Sparkice points out: "It is only when China has surpassed Japan economically and Japan is bogged down in stagnation that the renminbi can acquire the position as a common currency in Asia."
Susan V. Lawrence in Beijing contributed to this article
