Zhu Min, deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund, has chosen to lunch at a Chinese restaurant around the corner from his offices in downtown Washington DC. Dressed down in khakis, a blue checked shirt and a navy jacket (it’s a Saturday), he still looks every bit the international diplomat.

Because Zhu, 61, goes on more than 30 overseas trips every year, it has taken months for the meal to be arranged. Two days after our lunch he will be off to Brazil, Kyrgyzstan, Jordan and Paris. His appointment in 2011 to one of four deputy MD positions at the fund made him one of the most senior Chinese people serving in a global policy organisation.

Zhu’s life is very different from that of his peers in Beijing. While he spends more time on an aeroplane than at his Washington home, state officials back in China have strict limits on their movements. They can only take two trips abroad a year and have further restrictions on the number of countries they can visit and how long they spend outside the mainland. Such constraints “are horrible,” Zhu says. “You have to understand, in the effort to treat everyone the same and have a unified policy, people with real business abroad [suffer], because local government officials want to travel when they don’t have any real business abroad.”