彼得森国际经济研究所官网今年五月份发表署名Martin Chorzempa和Lukas Spielberger的标题为Significant, but Not Systemic: The Challenge of China’s Efforts to Rival Western Financial Predominance（《重大但非系统性：中国努力对垒西方金融主导地位所引发的挑战》的文章，提出中国人民币虽然在短期内尚不构成对美元甚至是欧元的实质性挑战，但西方对中国正在采取的有效提升人民币国际结算地位的措施应予足够重视并组织有效应对。
以下是PIIE官网配发的摘要，及作者原文。为免累赘，删去原文Reference部分，有兴趣查阅文章的参考文献者可上网浏览网站。摘要、引子和结论三部分附中文译文供参看。
Abstract: Despite worldwide concerns about the US dollar, the Chinese renminbi is not yet ready to be a serious contender for leading international currency status. This Policy Brief examines three of the most important Chinese approaches to increasing the renminbi’s role as an international settlement currency: promote bilateral swap agreements between the People's Bank of China and other central banks; create international payment systems that do not involve the dollar, most notably the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System; and develop a central bank digital currency for alternative payment infrastructures. The authors find that Beijing’s efforts fall short of posing a systemic challenge to the dollar or to infrastructures like SWIFT. Nevertheless, these approaches have enabled China to use its currency for bilateral foreign policy. US and European policymakers should consider countering or attenuating these efforts, even though they have had limited success in increasing renminbi usage.
摘要：尽管世界各国对美元感到担忧，但人民币尚未准备好成为国际主导货币地位的有力竞争者。本政策简报研究了中国提升人民币作为国际结算货币地位的三大重要举措：推动中国人民银行与其他央行签订双边本币互换协议；建立不涉及美元的跨境支付体系（尤其是人民币跨境支付系统CIPS）；以及研发央行数字货币以构建替代性支付基础设施。研究认为，中国政府的举措尚不足以对美元或SWIFT等国际支付体系构成系统性挑战，但这些措施已使中国能够将人民币作为双边外交政策的工具。尽管中国在提升人民币使用率方面成效有限，美国和欧洲的政策制定者仍应考虑采取反制或削弱这些举措的对策。
INTRODUCTION
Despite warnings for over a decade that the US dollar’s preeminence could fade into a more multipolar international currency order that includes the Chinese renminbi, the international financial system remains centered on Western currencies and financial infrastructures. By any measure of a currency—medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account—the dollar widely leads other currencies. As of March 2025, the dollar share was 47 percent of global payments, followed by the euro at 22 percent (the renminbi is fourth at 4.7 percent). Over half of all official foreign exchange reserves are in dollars. Far more world trade is invoiced in dollars than the US share of exports (Boz et al. 2020). Meanwhile, the global standard for payments between banks outside of Russia is the Belgium based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network, no matter the currency.
The US dollar remains dominant in the global economy not because of any formal mandate, but because of the decentralized decisions of countless traders, exporters, importers, and financiers. Powerful network effects reinforce itsdominance (Gopinath and Stein 2021): The more widely the dollar is used, the more beneficial it becomes for others to use it too. Most of the world’s trade is invoiced and settled in dollars, and a large share of global finance is conducted in dollars as well. This widespread use increases demand for dollar-denominated assets and for access to US-based payment systems, which are often cheaper and more reliable than alternatives because they are so liquid. As a result, the dollar is more convenient and less risky to use than other currencies. This self reinforcing cycle brings major advantages to the United States, including lower borrowing costs, higher asset prices, and safe-haven status during global crises (Eichengreen 2011). Even China’s Belt and Road Initiative often relies on dollar denominated lending rather than the renminbi (Kodres, Shen, and Duffie 2022).
Yet recent headwinds related to policy predictability, Federal Reserve independence, and the fiscal situation, among other issues, are adding to longstanding concerns about US dollar dominance that could benefit China. For years, countries and firms have explored alternatives that would insulate them from US influence and sanctions, though so far with limited success (Greene 2023). Former US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has argued that increasing “weaponization” of Western-based financial infrastructures risks “sanctions overreach” that creates incentives to de-dollarize for countries that might be on the receiving end. The powers the dollar bestows on the United States have sometimes been a source of even transatlantic tension. Disunity was at its height when re-imposition of sanctions during the first Trump Administration forced Europeans (and SWIFT) to cut ties with Iran and led to failed European attempts to work around the dollar. At other times, dollar sanctions contributed to European security as part of a unified front against Russia in 2022. Despite a commitment to strengthen the international role of the euro (Spielberger 2025), EU policymakers have not matched China’s attempts at currency promotion.
Concerned it may one day be on the receiving end of sanctions, China hoped to erode the United States’ leverage over Chinese trade in goods, services, and finance not only with the United States, but with much of the world. Beijing has promoted internationalization of the renminbi with strategies that include partial liberalization of capital flows, promotion of central bank swap lines, creation of parallel payment systems, and a digital currency. It has also ordered state owned companies to boost the renminbi use in cross-border activity. Beijing’s efforts have borne fruit: Between 2016 and 2022 the renminbi nearly doubled, going from one side of 4 percent of global transactions trading one currency for another to 7 percent, but that rise has come at the expense of other currencies. The dollar’s dominance, on 88 percent of such transactions, is untouched.
If China were in a position to capitalize on the dollar’s woes to usher in a new multipolar currency order with a prime role for the renminbi, the economic and geopolitical ramifications would be profound. For one, the United States, the European Union, and other allies may lose some of their sanctions’ bite, as sanctioned countries could transition away from the dollar or euro to adopt the renminbi. Other nations might bow to China’s increased financial power in various ways to avoid being shut off from renminbi needed for trade. As an historical precedent, the dollar’s rise to international currency status was similarly transformative (Eichengreen and Flandreau 2008).
Yet even with worldwide concerns about the dollar, the renminbi is not yet ready to be a serious contender for leading international currency status.
This Policy Brief examines three of the most important Chinese approaches to increasing the renminbi’s role as an international settlement currency and finds that Beijing’s efforts fall short of posing a systemic challenge to the dollar or to infrastructures like SWIFT. Nevertheless, they have enabled China to use its currency for bilateral foreign policy. US and European policymakers should consider countering or attenuating these efforts, even though they have had limited success in increasing renminbi usage.
问题之缘起
尽管过去十多年间屡有警示，称美元的主导地位可能逐渐让位于包含人民币在内的多极化国际货币秩序，但国际金融体系至今仍以西方货币和金融基础设施为核心。无论以何种货币指标衡量——交易媒介、价值储藏和记账单位——美元都遥遥领先于其他货币。截至2025年3月，美元在全球支付中的占比达47%，欧元以22%位居第二，人民币以4.7%位列第四。全球半数以上的官方外汇储备以美元形式持有。用美元计价的世界贸易额远超美国出口总额（Boz等，2020）。此外，除俄罗斯以外银行间跨境支付全球通用标准是总部位于比利时的SWIFT系统，无论交易使用何种货币皆通过该网络进行。
美元之所以能保持全球主导地位，并非基于任何正式授权，而是源于无数交易商、进出口商和金融机构自发性选择。强大的网络效应不断巩固其主导地位（Gopinath和Stein，2021）：美元使用范围越广，其他人使用美元的获益就越大。全球大部分贸易以美元计价结算，国际金融活动也有相当比例通过美元进行。这种广泛使用推高了美元计价资产的需求，并促使各方接入美国支付系统——得益于高度流动性，这些系统通常比替代方案更经济可靠。因此美元使用起来比其他货币更便捷、风险更低。这种自我强化的循环为美国带来显著优势，包括降低借贷成本、推高资产价格，以及在全球危机中享有避险货币地位（Eichengreen，2011）。就连中国的"一带一路"倡议也常依赖美元贷款而非人民币（Kodres、Shen和Duffie，2022）。
然而近期在政策可预测性、美联储独立性及财政状况等方面遭遇的逆风，正加剧人们对美元主导地位可能使中国受益的长期担忧。多年来各国和企业始终在探索能规避美国影响与制裁的替代方案，但迄今收效有限（Greene，2023）。美国前财长杰克·卢曾指出，西方金融基础设施日益"武器化"可能导致"制裁过载"，这将促使可能遭受制裁的国家推动去美元化。美元赋予美国的权力甚至曾引发跨大西洋关系紧张——特朗普政府重启对伊朗制裁时，强制欧洲（及SWIFT）与伊朗断绝往来，导致欧洲绕开美元的努力付诸东流，将这种矛盾推向顶峰。而在2022年联合对抗俄罗斯时，美元制裁又成为维护欧洲安全的手段。尽管欧盟承诺强化欧元的国际地位（Spielberger，2025），其政策制定者在货币推广方面仍不及中国积极。
中国担忧未来可能成为制裁目标，希望削弱美国不仅在中美贸易金融领域，更在全球范围内对中国商品、服务及金融的制约力。北京通过部分开放资本流动、推动央行货币互换协议、建立替代性支付系统及发展数字货币等策略促进人民币国际化，还要求国企在跨境活动中增加人民币使用。这些努力已初见成效：2016至2022年间，人民币在全球货币交易中的占比从4%攀升至7%，增幅近倍，但这是以其他货币份额下降为代价。美元在此类交易中88%的统治地位并未动摇。
若中国能利用美元困境推动建立以人民币为核心的新多极货币秩序，必将产生深远的经济与地缘政治影响。一方面，美欧等盟国的制裁威力将减弱，受制裁国可转而使用人民币替代美元欧元；另一方面，各国可能因中国金融实力增强而被迫妥协，以确保获得人民币贸易融资。历史上美元崛起为国际货币的经历同样具有变革性（Eichengreen和Flandreau，2008）。
然而尽管全球对美元存在担忧，人民币尚未做好挑战主流国际货币地位的准备。本政策简报审视了中国提升人民币国际结算地位的三大举措，发现北京的尝试尚未对美元或SWIFT等基础设施构成系统性挑战，但已实现将货币作为双边外交工具的目标。美欧政策制定者应考虑遏制或削弱这些努力，即便当前人民币国际化成效仍属有限。
CHINESE FINANCIAL STATECRAFT AND THE INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM
For over 15 years, Chinese policymakers have stated their ambition to internationalize the renminbi and potentially rival the dollar. People’s Bank of China (PBoC) policymakers first argued in 2006 that “the time has come for promotion of the internationalization of the yuan.” Motivations for this policy ranged from economic objectives such as increased competitiveness to “enhanc[ing] China’s international status” and a “rise in power standing” (Cohen 2017). Although the 2008 global financial crisis made clear that excessive reliance on the dollar brought economic risks, the internationalization of the renminbi was also seen as a geopolitical project from the beginning.
Although China became the world’s largest exporter in 2009 and the second largest economy in 2011, international usage of the renminbi underperforms China’s economic heft. While dollars and euros already circulated widely as international currencies, the renminbi could mostly be used only for trade with China, and unlike the dollar and the euro, the renminbi was not freely usable due to controls on capital flows in and out of China. Trying to loosen these controls and be more competitive with incumbent currencies proved tricky after currency and stock market instability in 2015 revealed the fragility of Chinese financial markets and temporarily halted renminbi internationalization (Amighini and García-Herrero 2023). After more than a decade of Chinese currency promotion, in 2023 the renminbi became the fourth-most widely used currency for international payments and overtook the euro to be the world’s second-most used currency in trade finance. Pressure on the renminbi from US tariffs led China to tighten controls further, underscoring its emphasis on domestic stability over the convertibility that would be needed to present an alternative to the dollar.
Rather than rely on market forces alone, the Chinese government has resorted to active policy measures to promote its currency. Its efforts can be considered “financial statecraft” (Armijo and Katada 2015), a “national government’s use of monetary or financial regulations or policies to achieve foreign policy ends.”
The Chinese approach has revolved around a two-track strategy (Subacchi 2010). First, it has sought to foster the renminbi’s role as an international store of value by promoting offshore renminbi holdings—notably by supporting Hong Kong as a financial center. Second, it aimed to increase the renminbi’s role as an international means of payment through three strategies this policy brief focuses on. One has been to promote bilateral swap agreements between the PBoC and other central banks. The second has been to create international payment systems that do not involve the dollar, most notably the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS). Third, China has been developing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for alternative payment infrastructures.
To appraise the impact of these policy initiatives, it is important to set expectations. Currency competition is not a matter of exclusive dominance (Schindler et al. 2024); most jurisdictions will continue to engage with both Western and emerging Chinese financial infrastructures. What matters is the relative importance that China can play within international financial networks and its ability to offer an alternative to the dollar. Moreover, even if the systemic impact of Chinese financial statecraft remains limited, the relative size of many countries’ direct trade with China and their need for external financing may still allow Chinese financial statecraft to make a difference at the bilateral level. Chinese currency promotion may be more significant than market shares suggest.
INCREASING RENMINBI ATTRACTIVENESS THROUGH SWAP LINES
In 2008, the PBoC opened its first bilateral swap line with the Bank of Korea. Scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations (Steil, Harding, and Zucker 2024) estimate 40 credit lines with other central banks have followed, which could draw on a combined total of over half a trillion dollars. This tool would seem to place the PBoC ideally to promote renminbi usage. Figure 1 shows PBoC’s bilateral currency swap lines as of 2021. Operationally, the PBoC’s credit lines resemble swap lines that the European Central Bank (ECB) and, most notably, the Fed have set up since the global financial crisis. The lending central bank extends a loan in its own currency, which is secured against the currency of the borrower. Yet the intention and usage of Chinese and Western swap lines differ.
The Fed and the ECB maintain swap lines with few systemically relevant central banks that can be used to respond to international liquidity shortages in dollars and euros, respectively. The Federal Reserve extended nearly $600billion in credit through these facilities during the 2007–09 financial crisis and provided close to $500 billion during the early 2020 market turmoil linked to the pandemic. The ECB’s credit lines were smaller but still helpful for countries in the EU’s periphery.
Chinese swaps were initially intended to support the renminbi’s role in trade invoicing. If an importer in, say, Malaysia wanted to buy Chinese widgets in renminbi, the Central Bank of Malaysia would be able to furnish renminbi against the Malaysian ringgit to settle the trade. However, this usage of PBoC swaps never took off, as political economist Daniel McDowell argued in 2019, and many credit lines have sat unused.
However, PBoC swaps proved useful in individual cases, notably Russia, which has repeatedly used its swap as it shifted to renminbi-denominated trading following Western sanctions in 2015. Since some major Russian institutions were excluded from SWIFT in 2022, Russia has paid for most of its imports from China in renminbi. This suggests that the PBoC’s swap program may not suffice to challenge the dollar’s systemic role, but in individual cases it enables China to support its allies by using its currency for bilateral trade.
Another way in which the PBoC swaps have been used poses more of a challenge to the global financial order. Since 2012, the PBoC has lent out over $170 billion to other central banks as a financial bailout to countries facing balance of payments crises or sovereign default (Horn et al. 2023). Recipients have used the borrowed renminbi to shore up their foreign exchange reserves or service other debts. For instance, Argentina drew on its PBoC swap between 2014 and 2020 to service foreign debts while undergoing a sovereign debt restructuring. The National Bank of Ukraine tapped the PBoC swap in 2015 to strengthen its foreign exchange reserves during Russia’s first invasion.
The PBoC’s readiness to lend to countries in financial distress distinguishes its swap lines from those of the Fed and the ECB. Indeed, with few exceptions, such as Chile and Hungary, the emerging market recipients of PBoC swaps do not maintain parallel credit arrangements with the Fed or the ECB. China’s use of swaps for financial assistance rather than liquidity provision or trade settlement places the PBoC among other financial institutions that China uses to challenge the international financial safety net built around the International Monetary Fund and create bilateral financial dependencies. The PBoC’s swaps pose a challenge for transatlantic cooperation in financial diplomacy, while its challenge in international payments comes from attempts to re-center cross-border settlement systems.
THE CHALLENGE OF ALTERNATIVE PAYMENT SYSTEMS
The United States’ ability to condition access to essential Western-based financial infrastructures on factors like compliance with sanctions has motivated Chinese efforts to build an alternative financial order. The United States can sanction hostile entities directly, but it can also impose “secondary sanctions” on foreign entities aiding sanctioned entities. When the United States threatened secondary sanctions against financial institutions aiding sanctioned Russian entities in December 2023 and June 2024, large Chinese banks reportedly pulled out of Russia-related business to avoid being sanctioned. China hopes to be ready with alternatives to maintain trade and investment with other countries if it faces major US sanctions.
To do so, China would need its own messaging system to communicate payments between banks as well as systems for transferring value (clearing and settlement). While SWIFT, the dominant standard global messaging system, is in Europe, it has dropped US sanctioned entities to avoid secondary sanctions.
To achieve its internationalization and sanctions-proofing goals, China has become more tightly integrated with SWIFT while developing new infrastructures that could reduce reliance on SWIFT. China’s CIPS, launched in 2015, provides a wider scope of services than SWIFT because it goes beyond messaging to move money through clearing/settlement, a full stack that reduces the need for participants to execute payments through dollar infrastructures. But it cannot replicate SWIFT’s core function yet because non-Chinese banks are mostly “indirect” participants in CIPS who still rely on SWIFT to send payment messages for CIPS payments, while direct participants (mostly Chinese banks) can send messages through China’s proprietary system (Eichengreen 2022). This pattern illustrates the efficiency of having one global infrastructure, leading Beijing to embrace SWIFT despite the risk of sanctions.
As of March 2024, CIPS had 140 direct participants and 1,371 indirect participants, which would imply that around 90 percent of CIPS participants are sending messages through SWIFT. Figure 2 shows that CIPS has grown its daily volume of payments by more than 75 percent since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from less than 400 billion renminbi to 689 billion renminbi per day over around 31,000 transactions by March 2024. Compared to the 47.6 million transactions communicated through SWIFT daily in 2023, however, CIPS remains peripheral.
About a third of the increase in use of the renminbi represents Russian attempts to work around the dollar. Yet the remaining two-thirds indicate increasing interest in non-dollar payment channels as insurance against future US sanctions, even among countries not currently threatened with sanctions. Three-quarters of China’s trade is still denominated in currencies other than the renminbi (Greene 2024). CIPS and China will be more sanction-proof if more non Chinese institutions become direct participants and thus do not rely on SWIFT for messaging, though they could still be impacted by secondary sanctions.
CENTRAL BANK DIGITAL CURRENCIES
A strategy for working around the dollar further in the future is the worldwide interest in CBDCs, digital forms of central bank money often based on distributed ledger or blockchain technology that may enable new payment infrastructures. If new technology makes payments faster, more efficient, and less risky, these systems that could be less reliant on the dollar could gain market share in payments between banks, as privately issued digital “stablecoins” have begun to do for retail payments.
All the world’s major central banks, including the Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Bank of England, and others are researching CBDCs, and many have pilot programs exploring whether hypothetical cross-border payment systems based on CBDCs could improve on today’s systems. The PBoC was one of the first central banks to commit to launching a CBDC back in 2016 and has been a leader in exploring cross-border implications.
One of the most promising ideas was M-CBDC Bridge, started under the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) with the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and United Arab Emirates. A pilot program directly transacts CBDC among central banks and commercial banks with no role for the US dollar or SWIFT, albeit in small volumes. While the project aims to build a functional payment architecture, major hurdles from governance and risk management to foreign exchange conversion would need to be surmounted. The project has also proven politically controversial.
Soon after, the BRICS countries2 stepped up rhetoric about jointly building a new BRICS cross-border payment system, which Russia deemed the “BRICS Bridge.” These efforts became a bridge too far for the BIS, which pulled out as it could not risk being seen as contributing to efforts to bust sanctions. As a result, M-Bridge’s future is in doubt.
The Federal Reserve and the Eurosystem’s central banks are working together on other BIS projects like Agora (which does not include China) that include cross-border payments, but they diverge in their enthusiasm for use of CBDC at home. The ECB is developing a CBDC for retail use in the Eurozone in part to enhance its financial independence from the United States (Westermeier 2024), while the Federal Reserve been more conservative.
CBDC systems do not represent a near-term threat to dollar dominance because they remain in their infancy. No major economy has a fully operational CBDC. Thus, even if China becomes the first, it will not have any network of CBDCs that would give it an advantage in supplanting the dollar. The European Union and United States should, however, continue to carefully monitor CBDC developments for breakthroughs to ensure their currencies and financial institutions can engage with new infrastructures that gain traction.
CONCLUSION
Chinese efforts to establish parallel financial infrastructures and promote the renminbi as an international settlement currency need to be taken seriously, especially with the greatest headwinds to US dollar dominance in many years, even if they pose no short-term risk to the dollar or euro’s roles. As Russia’s shift to Chinese financing since 2022 suggests, both central bank swaps and the CIPS system can function as safety valves for countries cut off from Western financial systems, even if secondary sanctions retain their power to force major Chinese entities to cut off trade with sanctioned entities.
China’s limited success in actively stimulating wider international usage of the renminbi speaks to the inertia of the global financial system and the reluctance of Chinese policymakers to further relinquish control of their capital account, but neither can be taken for granted in perpetuity. The renminbi may be valuable as a settlement currency for bilateral trade with China, and thereby impact many countries, but it is more difficult to overcome the established roles of the dollar and euro for trade between third parties.
Nonetheless, as alternative systems like CIPS become more established, the risk will rise that sanctions overreach will push countries into Chinese settlement systems and renminbi usage. Moreover, China’s use of swap lines may undermine the multilateral financial safety net and require more attractive and accessible financial assistance facilities in dollars and euros to maintain global financial stability. The Fed and the ECB’s recent standing repo facilities are positive steps in that direction, which could be extended to more countries. Beyond judicious use of sanctions, US and European policymakers should avoid complacency and continue to improve the incumbent systems to leave less space for China to present a more attractive alternative.
结论：
中国致力于打造平行金融基础设施并推动人民币成为国际结算货币，即便这些努力对美元和欧元的地位不构成短期风险，尤其在美国主导地位遭遇多年来最大逆风的背景下，各方仍需认真对待中国的行动。俄罗斯自2022年转向中国融资渠道的案例表明，无论是央行货币互换还是人民币跨境支付系统（CIPS），都能成为被西方金融体系隔绝国家的安全阀——即便美国次级制裁仍能迫使主要中资机构与被制裁对象切断贸易往来。
中国在积极刺激人民币国际使用方面成效有限，既反映出全球金融体系的惯性，也体现中国政策制定者对进一步放开资本账户的审慎态度，但这两者都不是永恒不变的。人民币作为对华双边贸易的结算货币具有重要价值，因而会影响众多国家，但要想取代美元和欧元在第三方之间贸易的既定角色则更为困难。
尽管如此，随着CIPS等替代性体系日益成熟，制裁过度扩张推动各国投入中国结算体系和人民币怀抱的风险将会上升。此外中国对货币互换机制的运用，可能削弱多边金融安全网的有效性，这要求国际社会提供更具吸引力且更易获得的美元欧元融资机制来维持全球金融稳定。美联储和欧洲央行近期设立的常备回购机制是向正确方向迈出的积极步伐，此类措施可扩展至更多国家。欧美政策制定者除了需要审慎使用制裁手段，更应避免自满情绪，持续改进现有体系，从而压缩中国打造更具吸引力替代方案的空间。