[selectodude]

Paying Chinese companies in RMB isn’t the issue. If I sell something and a Chinese company pays me in RMB, I can’t really do anything with a billion yuan. Can’t buy a company (limitations on foreign ownership), can’t buy property (99-year lease that can be canceled on the whims of the government at any time), can’t buy Chinese debt (terrible yields, very small foreign market access, incredibly opaque laws and accounting), and nobody else in the world wants it so I have no choice but to sell it back to China in exchange for a real currency at whatever horseshit exchange rate they’ve concocted.

It’s worthless money and I don’t see anything out of china that would cause that to change.

[HWR_14]

What about buying rare earth metals or containers of electronics or purses? It's a bit more work, but it's not impossible to solve the problem.

Also, it's not like a 99-year lease has no value. That's your entire lifetime+.

[terminalshort]

Because if I am running a business I just want to be paid in money that I can pay my bills in. I don't want to have the additional task of managing rare earths and electronics inventory. That's not "a bit more work." It's running an entirely different business that I don't know how to run.

[woodruffw]

I think OP's point is that a "99 year lease" isn't worth very much without a firm guarantee that the least in fact lasts that long. I don't really have an opinion on land leases in the PRC, but it doesn't seem facially unreasonable to suspect that a foreign lease holder's land value wouldn't be a priority for China's leadership during an economic crisis.

[mullingitover]

> Can’t buy a company (limitations on foreign ownership)

This is quickly going away[1].

[1] https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publication...

[throw310822]

I guess this is naive, but can't you use it to buy (or sell it to people who want to buy) Chinese products? It's not like China doesn't have an enormous amount and range of products on offer.

[KaiserPro]

Thats a feature not a bug.

The Chinese government spend a lot of money keeping the value of the RMB low.

[irishcoffee]

This is actually an interesting point. Wouldn't it be bad for China if the US isn't the reserve currency/the RMB gains a lot more in value relative to the USD? It would proportionally, negatively, affect their export profits, no?

[jama211]

I mean, you can buy goods and services within china, and you can sell those goods and services. The “horseshit” exchange rate can’t deviate too far from the real value or it incentivises laundering too much. The exchange rate isn’t _that_ bad as a result.