Economic Daily: Promote Financial High-level Opening in Multiple Dimensions

The Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Party clearly stated the need to expand high-level opening up to the outside world and actively expand independent opening up. As the lifeblood of the national economy, the financial sector occupies a crucial position in the entire economic system. By promoting the free flow and efficient integration of financial elements at home and abroad, optimizing the overall resource allocation efficiency, high-level financial opening up will provide more efficient support for the high-quality development of the real economy. Objectively speaking, although China's high-level financial opening up has achieved remarkable results, it still faces some difficulties in advancing to a higher level. For example, the internationalization of the Renminbi needs to be further enhanced. According to SWIFT data from August this year, although the Renminbi has become the sixth largest payment currency globally, accounting for 2.93% of global payments, the gap compared to the US dollar and the euro is still significant. Furthermore, the participation of foreign capital in the Chinese market is significantly low. This year, the market value of A-shares held by foreign capital is about 2.57 trillion yuan, accounting for around 2% of the total market value of A-shares, and the scale of bond holdings by overseas institutions is approximately 4.35 trillion yuan, accounting for about 3.6%; in contrast, in mature markets, the proportion of foreign participation in the US stock and bond markets exceeds 17%. The level of foreign participation does not match China's global economic status. Moving forward, efforts should be made to continuously expand the use cases and increase the promotion of Renminbi settlement in international trade. Building on the foundation of Renminbi pricing and settlement for bulk commodities such as crude oil and iron ore, expanding to more categories such as thermal coal, liquefied natural gas, and precious metals, establishing a "futures + spot" linked pricing mechanism based on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange and the Dalian Commodity Exchange. Encouraging Chinese banks to carry out Renminbi cross-border credit business in jointly building the Belt and Road countries, especially in key regions such as ASEAN and the Middle East, to provide solid financial support for Chinese enterprises venturing abroad.