The writer is founder and chief economist of Enodo Economics and a senior fellow at Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis
When Xi Jinping’s speech on building a powerful financial country was published as formal Communist Party doctrine in January 2026, a predictable debate followed. Can the renminbi challenge the dollar?
The answer, almost universally, was no. The evidence was largely correct: the renminbi has only 1.9 per cent of global reserves, a share that has barely moved in a decade; China has a closed capital account; and Beijing has a credibility deficit earned through years of arbitrary regulatory intervention. Case closed. But this misses what China is actually doing, why it might matter even if the renminbi never becomes a reserve currency, and what the journey itself does to the cost of staying in the dollar system.