China, bristling at calls to revalue the yuan, ruled out any change to its currency peg during a visit by US Treasury Secretary John Snow yesterday but offered a token easing of its capital controls.
Snow, who landed in Beijing yesterday afternoon, is under pressure at home to urge China to revalue the yuan, which is pegged to the dollar, to save jobs at hard-pressed US factories.
The International Monetary Fund weighed in yesterday, saying it was in China's best interests to move towards a more flexible exchange rate system.
"Such a move would improve the central bank's ability to control money and credit growth, and also help cushion China's economy from domestic and external shocks," IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler said in a statement.
But China stood its ground.
"There won't be any change in the exchange rate just because someone is visiting China," a spokesman for the central People's Bank of China said.
Shortly after Snow arrived, Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan (
"The stable exchange rate of the renminbi is conducive to the economic stability and development of China, Asia and the world," he said.
American manufacturers claim a cheap yuan, held at around 8.3 to the US dollar, gives Chinese rivals an unfair edge.
Snow has said little publicly while in Asia about China's currency but Japanese Finance Minister Masajuro Shiokawa said they had agreed in talks in Tokyo the market should set the value of the yuan.
Snow was due to meet central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan (周小川) and Finance Minister Jin Renqing (金人慶) yesterday.
"I think John Snow is wasting his time because China is not going to revalue its currency because the US wants them to," the Economist Intelligence Unit's chief economist, Robin Bew, said in Hong Kong.
China is worried about the damage a revaluation may cause to export growth that has helped fuel one of the world's fastest-growing economies.
The state-run China Daily newspaper said it did not want the yuan to be caught up in the 2004 US presidential race.
"China's currency, unfortunately, is in a position of finding itself involved in the finger-wagging sessions that accompany this essentially American saga," it said in a commentary under the title "Don't meddle with the yuan."
But Beijing, continuing with a series of adjustments to capital controls aimed at easing the yuan's appreciation, said it would raise the limit on the amount of foreign exchange Chinese travellers could buy from banks.
Super Typhoon Kong-rey is the largest cyclone to impact Taiwan in 27 years, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. Kong-rey’s radius of maximum wind (RMW) — the distance between the center of a cyclone and its band of strongest winds — has expanded to 320km, CWA forecaster Chang Chun-yao (張竣堯) said. The last time a typhoon of comparable strength with an RMW larger than 300km made landfall in Taiwan was Typhoon Herb in 1996, he said. Herb made landfall between Keelung and Suao (蘇澳) in Yilan County with an RMW of 350km, Chang said. The weather station in Alishan (阿里山) recorded 1.09m of
NO WORK, CLASS: President William Lai urged people in the eastern, southern and northern parts of the country to be on alert, with Typhoon Kong-rey approaching Typhoon Kong-rey is expected to make landfall on Taiwan’s east coast today, with work and classes canceled nationwide. Packing gusts of nearly 300kph, the storm yesterday intensified into a typhoon and was expected to gain even more strength before hitting Taitung County, the US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said. The storm is forecast to cross Taiwan’s south, enter the Taiwan Strait and head toward China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The CWA labeled the storm a “strong typhoon,” the most powerful on its scale. Up to 1.2m of rainfall was expected in mountainous areas of eastern Taiwan and destructive winds are likely
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday at 5:30pm issued a sea warning for Typhoon Kong-rey as the storm drew closer to the east coast. As of 8pm yesterday, the storm was 670km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) and traveling northwest at 12kph to 16kph. It was packing maximum sustained winds of 162kph and gusts of up to 198kph, the CWA said. A land warning might be issued this morning for the storm, which is expected to have the strongest impact on Taiwan from tonight to early Friday morning, the agency said. Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) and Green Island (綠島) canceled classes and work
KONG-REY: A woman was killed in a vehicle hit by a tree, while 205 people were injured as the storm moved across the nation and entered the Taiwan Strait Typhoon Kong-rey slammed into Taiwan yesterday as one of the biggest storms to hit the nation in decades, whipping up 10m waves, triggering floods and claiming at least one life. Kong-rey made landfall in Taitung County’s Chenggong Township (成功) at 1:40pm, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The typhoon — the first in Taiwan’s history to make landfall after mid-October — was moving north-northwest at 21kph when it hit land, CWA data showed. The fast-moving storm was packing maximum sustained winds of 184kph, with gusts of up to 227kph, CWA data showed. It was the same strength as Typhoon Gaemi, which was the most
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