Among Sinophiles and Sinophobes alike, it is an article of faith that China is committed to opening up its capital account. Before long, goes the belief, private investors will be able to convert Chinese financial assets into foreign financial assets and vice versa, at market-determined rates of exchange. Official rhetoric tends to encourage them: last month a senior People’s Bank of China policymaker said that Beijing should aim to “basically realise the goal of full yuan convertibility” by 2015.

Note that qualified verb, and the implied distinction between full convertibility and free convertibility. Over the past decade the State Administration of Foreign Exchange has relaxed controls around many of the 43 capital-account transaction items identified by the International Monetary Fund. Safe says cross-border renminbi transactions totalled $59bn in 2010, 13 times more than in 2009. Yet even if China eventually satisfies the letter of the IMF’s prescriptions, their spirit is likely to be a different matter.

As Joseph Yam, former chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, notes, it is hard to imagine China granting any entity carte blanche to switch between currencies, no questions asked, as happens in Hong Kong and most developed economies. Memories are still very fresh of Guangdong International Trust and Investment Company (GITIC), the country’s second-largest non-bank financial institution that collapsed in 1999 with foreign dollar debts double the registered amount.