Xi Jinping doesn’t like a weak yuan. A soft renminbi feels, at least to the Chinese leader, like a loss of face—a sign of weakness he’d rather not project to the world. And yet, by the reckoning of one of the most respected currency hands in Washington, China’s currency is between 20% and 30% below its true value.
That’s the paradox at the center of this week’s column, and I owe it to a conversation with Mark Sobel, a former senior U.S. Treasury official who spent decades on international monetary policy and later represented the U.S. at the International Monetary Fund. Sobel, now chief economist at the independent Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, walked me through why the yuan’s cheapness is baked into the structure of the Chinese economy.
China has accelerated its deployment of civilian and military hardware into orbit, with technological advancements and growing constellations of satellites that help Beijing track events on Earth in real time and in greater detail than ever before.