“It” is China’s currency, at times referred to as the yuan, and at others, the renmindi or “RMB”… China abruptly announced that it was going to permit some measure of “free-floating” in response to market conditions of its long-pegged currency.
Well, well. China (unlike, say… the United States…) has come to the conclusion that it is attached to the rest of the world, and in the end, sucking up all of the world’s reserve currency… might pose as much risk to China as to everyone else (what good is owning all the money if you can’t buy anything with it?)
So, China (the People’s Daily piece is splendid in its Orwellian pronouncements that this has “nothing to do” with international pressure) must adjust its game plan, and let its currency float.
Somehow, I still think China will play the game well…
tdog
For all the babble about China being autocratic and the real enemy (they are, and they aren’t, but could become so) I personally believe that China has managed its immersion in the modern world about as well as could be expected.
Thirty years ago they were a closed, rigid, early industrial age society. They have modernized and begun the process of opening up with a minimum of the kind of disruption that befell TFSU. Not that there’s been no trouble: you simply cannot change a society as massive as that of the Chinese without some disruption. But they have really managed it as well as anyone could expect.
Except those who are dogmatically for the forceful downthrow of tyrants and the rapid imposition of ‘free markets’. They expect that China should just adopt a US – style constitution and open stock markets everywhere and things would be just dandy. Of course, those same people thought that there’d be spontaneous celebration and adoption of democracy after the invasion of a certain middle eastern country, too.