China will come under renewed pressure at this weekend's G7 meeting in London to ditch its fixed exchange rate regime and instead allow the yuan to float freely on the foreign exchanges.
The country is causing panic among European manufacturers as a flood of Chinese-made clothes and shoes has come into the EU since import restrictions were ended on Jan. 1. It emerged on Wednesday that imports of Chinese-made shoes into the EU rose nearly 700 percent in the first four months of this year.
Chinese Finance Minister Jin Renqing (
But the country's growing importance in the world economy -- it will overtake Britain in size over the next year or so -- means it cannot be ignored.
It is far from clear that Jin will be persuaded by any amount of ear-bashing to change the yuan's 10-year-old fixed exchange rate of 8.3 to the US dollar.
China considers the peg to be a domestic affair and many experts think that pressure from other countries to change or even abandon it could make the Chinese authorities simply dig their heels in further.
While Chinese officials have indicated that it would be desirable at some point to move to some sort of floating currency, they have resisted intense pressure, especially from the US, to announce an immediate revaluation of the yuan.
US Secretary of the Treasury John Snow has long maintained that part of the reason that the US has such an enormous trade deficit is that China is holding its currency artificially low by buying up huge quantities of dollar assets thereby making Chinese exports artificially cheap.
Indeed, Snow has given the Chinese a six-month deadline in which to revalue the yuan. Failing that, the US Congress is preparing to slap tariffs on Chinese imports.
US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan piled on the pressure on Tuesday, telling a conference in Beijing: "The issue of allowing flexibility in some form in the [yuan] strikes me as very much to the advantage of China and indeed it is something that I am certain they will take on reasonably soon."
His opposite number at the People's Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan (
Political pressure from other countries would not help, he said.
"This is not a favorable environment for China to put forward its reform and for its decision-making process," Zhou said, adding that each stage of the reform process would be consulted on with different groups in the country.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (
Nevertheless, financial markets across the globe are abuzz with speculation that the Chinese could be saying all this to keep any revaluation under wraps until it actually happens. Some economists expect some sort of change before Chinese President Hu Jintao (
That could be a small revaluation linking the yuan to a basket of currencies rather than just the dollar, or even a larger revaluation.
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