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中国希望重塑国际金融体系

Beijing is making clear its desire to build a new international economic order.

Mao Tse-Tung着名的美国美国。在20世纪50年代,作为一只纸虎,武装不匹配的军队,但无法有效地挥动其力量。近年来,中国可以在经济和经济上说同样的。该国的Breakneck产业发展产生了巨大的贸易顺差,使北京能够建立一个前所未有的外汇储备池。然而,在大多数情况下,中国当局一直不愿意行使他们的金融区。分析师可能会推测中国中国迁离美元的潜在可怕后果,但政府继续购买大量美国财政部和机构证券。在其财务政策中,北京似乎遵循前领导者邓小平的最大值:“保持凉爽的头部并保持低调。永远不要拿领先,但旨在做大事。“

然而,最近,中国似乎正在脱落它的沉默。In March, People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan grabbed the attention of global policymakers when he called for a dramatic overhaul of the international financial system that would eliminate the dollar as the global reserve currency and replace it with special drawing rights — a basket of currencies that serves as the accounting unit of the International Monetary Fund — that would include the Chinese yuan. Such a move, he contended, would end U.S. financial hegemony, foster greater currency stability and reduce the frequency and cost of financial crises. Although Beijing hasn’t formally embraced the proposal as official policy, the government has begun allowing a small number of companies to price their exports in yuan, a key step toward making the Chinese currency convertible and moving to an SDR system.

中国也试图增加其影响力side the international financial institutions. In June, Beijing announced that it was considering buying $50 billion worth of IMF bonds denominated in SDRs as the country’s contribution to a $500 billion increase in IMF resources that was agreed to at the Group of 20 summit meeting in April. Analysts say that by offering to buy bonds rather than contributing directly, as the U.S. and European countries are doing, China was sending a clear signal that it disapproves of the fund’s governance. China’s voting stake in the IMF — currently just 3.66 percent — is far smaller than the country merits as the world’s third-largest economy, just behind Japan.

Such initiatives indicate a new willingness by China’s top officials to exercise the country’s economic power in the national interest, including safeguarding its giant reserves and securing greater access for Chinese companies to overseas markets. Beijing isn’t angling to supplant the U.S. as the dominant power of the global economy — at least not yet. But officials do want to accelerate a shift from the so-called Washington Consensus, under which the Clinton and Bush administrations set the agenda for global trade and financial liberalization, to a multilateral arrangement in which China and other emerging economic powers have much greater influence.

“I believe it is a historical responsibility for China to have a bigger voice globally,” asserts Li Jiange (see related article, "Interview: China Getting Closer To Making The RMB Convertible, Says Cicc’s Li“)。Li, a senior official, helped design the reforms of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s and today serves as chairman of China International Capital Corp., a major Chinese investment bank, and as vice chairman of Central Huijin Investment, an arm of sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp. that holds controlling stakes in Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank and the Bank of China.

李承认,美元将留下初级储备货币未来,但要坚持认为,考虑到美国的份额下降世界经济,主要政府需要开始向新系统的过渡准备。“All nations must sit down to talk about a new global currency-reserve system,” he told Institutional Investor recently in an exclusive interview — the first he has given to a foreign publication — at CICC’s offices in the SK Tower in Beijing’s central business district. “As a responsible, large nation, China must bring this topic up. This is a direction we must all move toward.”

自20世纪90年代以来,中国可能一直在迅速发展。该国拥有世界上最大的货币储备金,第二季度增长了1.78亿美元,达到了2.13万亿美元。据野村国际分析师称,它也是美国最大的债权人,拥有估计的7.76亿美元的美国美国国债和4.90亿美元,以4.90亿美元的弗雷迪MAC和其他机构证券。根据世界贸易组织的据世界贸易组织,中国今年是世界上最大的出口国的追踪德国,并于2010年由2010年取代日本。由于政府大规模的4万亿元(5850亿美元)刺激计划,中国的增长率从第一季度的低6.1%反弹至第二季度,其第二季度为7.9% - 与美国和欧洲的弱点形成鲜明对比。

“The pecking order is changing,” notes Hwa Er-cheng, global chief economist at CCB in Beijing.

该国的蓬勃发展的经济力量必然会导致某些时候增加自信。毕竟,中国近年来又在美国举办了对人民币的升值。经济危机的事实减少了美国的形象和声誉,同时加强了中国的中国官员为中国官员提高了他们的声音。

“China isn’t going to put up with lecturing from Washington and instead wants to tell Washington what to do,” says Laurence Brahm, a Beijing-based American lawyer who advised Li and former premier Zhu Rongji on state-owned enterprise reform and counsels the ruling State Council on foreign affairs. “For the first time, instead of being on the defensive and being told what it must do with its financial reforms, China has put the U.S. Treasury on the defensive” (see related article, "不变的中国“)。

中国has also spoken bluntly of its concerns about U.S. economic policy, something that would have been unheard of a decade ago. “We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States,” Premier Wen Jiabao said in a March press briefing in Beijing. “I request the U.S. to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets.”

到目前为止,策略似乎正在工作。美国财政部长Timothy Geithner,他在3月份在北京举行闹钟铃声,当时他告诉大会,奥巴马政府认为中国正在操纵其货币,自从采纳了更多的外交线。在六月的第一次正式访问中国,盖特纳保证了该国美国国债的持有人安全的官员,并致力于减少赤字。美国官员甚至没有在7月份提出货币问题,当时巴拉克•奥巴马总统和国务卿希拉里·克林顿在华盛顿收到了中国副总理王岐山和戴秉国,为两国的战略和经济对话。

“当你拥有一个国家的债务时,你对他们有很大的权力,”亚马克国际亚洲股市战略家保罗·舒尔德队“。

The Obama administration has sent mixed signals on the idea of an SDR reserve currency. Asked about Zhou’s proposal immediately after it was published, Geithner said he was “quite open” to increased use of the SDR. But after his remarks caused a slide of more than 1 percent in the dollar, he quickly reverted to the Treasury’s standard line that a strong dollar was in America’s interest, adding, “I think the dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency.”

一些西方分析人士欢迎更多使用SDR,审议货币等级必将随着全球经济权力的转变而变化。“中国已经在全球金融体系的改革中发挥着重要作用,”哥伦比亚大学经济学家罗伯特蒙德尔(Robert Mundell)赢得了诺贝尔奖,他在货币上赢得了诺贝尔奖。“通过简单地提出各种想法,它正在建立全球议程和辩论。”

中国还利用储备汇款问题来水解其在新兴经济大国负责人的地位。Although the topic wasn’t on the agenda of the Group of Eight meeting in Italy in July, the five guest nations — Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa — jointly called for a “diversified and rational international reserve-currency regime.”

The inclusion of a wider range of countries in global decision making is a paramount goal for China’s leadership, says Li, who holds the title of minister at large. “The G-8 is no longer sufficient to determine the rules of the game,” he tells II. “What is critical is that we have a system or a mechanism that includes the interests of many nations.”

Beijing hasn’t formulated a detailed list of what it seeks, and what it’s willing to offer, as part of a new financial order. This reticence reflects competing interests and conflicting views inside China.

Consider the reserve-currency issue. China, like many other nations, resents the primacy of the dollar in global finance and the freedom it gives the U.S. to conduct its economic policies with little heed to the consequences for others. China’s big Treasury holdings arguably make it a hostage to those policies — since it would suffer from a sharp decline in the dollar — rather than putting it in a position to dictate to Washington.

Shifting to another reserve currency — the SDR proposal or the yuan itself — would greatly reduce China’s vulnerability to dollar weakness. But such a move would require making the yuan freely convertible, and that carries risks of its own. Doing so would expose the country to the danger of large capital inflows and outflows, a major factor in the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Convertibility would also make it much harder for the authorities to control the exchange rate and could lead to a rise in the value of the yuan that would hurt the country’s export competitiveness and growth. In response to U.S. pressure, the authorities did allow the yuan to appreciate gradually, by roughly 21 percent against the dollar between 2005 and 2008, but they reverted to an effective fixed rate in September 2008 in a bid to insulate China from the global economic crisis.

The government remains committed to making the renminbi convertible. (The renminbi is the formal name of the currency, whose unit is the yuan.) Premier Wen told European Union business leaders at a Beijing meeting in 2007 that China would be “gradually enabling capital account convertibility.” Officials are mindful of the economic cost Japan paid when it allowed the yen to rise sharply in the 1980s, however, and they are determined to guard against economic instability by making any changes to the renminbi at a careful pace, officials and analysts say. “The Chinese government is no longer so insecure about capital flight,” notes Li. “I don’t think it will take 20 years for the RMB to be convertible, and it may be not much longer than ten years, but exactly how long I’m not sure.” Once convertible, he adds, the renminbi should be included in the SDR, whose current composition is 44 percent dollars, 34 percent euros and 11 percent each yen and British pounds.

在促进沃思的一步中,7月的政府开始允许选择400名中国公司的集团在元价上价格。此前,此类交易主要是在美国美元兑换,正在通过香港和五个大陆城市成立的账户进行。根据野村国际的估计,第一年的人民币定居点可以达到700亿美元,或者在香港与五个城市进行的年度交易中占2400亿美元的近30%:上海,深圳,广州,东莞和珠海。

“如果the experiments are successful, it is highly possible that about half of China’s annual $2 trillion worth of global trade will be settled in renminbi in the long term,” asserts Yifan Hu, Hong Kong–based global chief economist for Citic Securities International, the international arm of Beijing-based Citic Securities Co.

中国对国际货币基金组织内部更大的声音和世界银行的需求不会很快遇到。去年,国际货币基金组织同意谦虚地增加中国,墨西哥,韩国和土耳其的投票权。它不是由于进入2011年的另一个调整,并且目前在机构上持久地持有的小型欧洲国家是不愿意的。

中国, whose average representation in the four agencies that compose the World Bank group is about 2 percent, believes it deserves a share closer to Japan’s 7 percent. “We should get a bigger stake that is equivalent to the size of our GDP,” insists CICC’s Li. “We should have more senior Chinese staff at both the World Bank and the IMF.”

In another sign of its growing confidence, the government is beginning to promote yuan settlement through bilateral currency swaps with trading partners. China has signed six swaps totaling 650 billion yuan with Argentina, Belarus, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea since the outbreak of the financial crisis.

中国的新自信延伸到贸易。李说,中国将继续购买美国国债,以帮助美国财政刺激措施,但在交换中,政府将在美国公司购买更多的进入中国公司。

CIC,该国2000亿美元的主权财富基金,希望在去年的华尔街银行支撑资本的资本支撑摩根斯坦利的9.86%的股权,但美国政府阻止了经历的交易李索赔,而不提供更多细节。摩根最终以90亿美元的价格向日本三菱UFJ金融集团销售了21%的股份,稀释了CIC的股权为7.86%。在摩根斯坦利和美国财政部的发言人拒绝发表评论,但有知识的来源称,该银行纯粹出于商业原因与三菱UFJ一起参加。CIC于6月份花了12亿美元,将其股权恢复起来,达到9.86%。

“中国公司在美国有玻璃天花板,”李说。“我希望美国人民能够停止将中国视为威胁。在美国的中国投资更多为美国。“

中国’s ambitions risk inflaming tensions with its trading partners, though. Australian and U.S. officials have criticized the country for its handling of a dispute with Rio Tinto Group. State-owned Aluminum Corp. of China agreed in February to pay $19.5 billion to double its 9 percent stake in the Australian mining company and help it finance debt, but Rio Tinto rejected the offer after a surge in its stock price enabled it to make a $15.2 billion rights issue. In what many Western executives suspect was retribution, China in July arrested four employees of the Australian company on charges of bribing executives of Chinese steel companies to get sensitive information related to ore-price negotiations. The arrests “are of great concern to U.S. investors and multinational companies from around the world that have projects here,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said during a visit to Beijing in July.

American officials are also prodding Beijing to open up its markets. In March the Chinese Ministry of Commerce rejected Coca-Cola Co.’s $2.4 billion acquisition of privately held China Huiyuan Juice Group, contending that the deal would violate antimonopoly laws and lead to higher beverage prices.

Although China’s leaders are brimming with confidence, the country has its weaknesses. Victor Shih, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says China’s stimulus program, which is being channeled through bank lending, could push the country’s percentage of nonperforming loans from about 5 percent currently to as high as 30 percent. “This will involve painful fixes, and China’s international influence will not be as strong as it is at this moment,” he notes.

中国可能无法完全得到它想要的东西。但该国的新自信,就像其经济权力一样肯定会增长。“一个人为13亿人:我们不容忽视,”CICC的李先生。“我们太安静了太久了。”

See related article, "高盛与中国银行".

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