Back in October 2015, as then prime minister David Cameron welcomed President Xi Jinping to the UK, China’s central bank issued one-year bills in London’s offshore renminbi debt market. The move was viewed as cementing London’s status as the centre of renminbi business outside greater China. Two years earlier George Osborne, then Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, had said that the Chinese currency would “become almost as familiar as the dollar” within his lifetime.
The International Monetary Fund would later add the renminbi to its reserve-currency club, the Special Drawing Right basket, describing it as a “milestone in the integration of the Chinese economy into the global financial system”.
But even before the IMF’s decision took effect in October, there were signs that SDR recognition might turn out to be the high water mark of the renminbi’s internationalisation rather than the dawn of a new, more diversified global monetary system.