The Chinese yuan

Who issues the notes and strikes the coins

The People's Bank of China issues the renminbi. It was formed on 1 December 1948 by merging the Huabei Bank, the Beihai Bank and the Xibei Peasant Bank, and it lost many of its functions during the Cultural Revolution. In 1977 it took back sole responsibility for issuing currency. The State Council designated it the central bank in September 1983, and a law passed in March 1995 confirmed that status.

It does not print the money. A state corporation, the China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation, runs printing works in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi'an, Shijiazhuang and Nanchang, and mints in Nanjing, Shanghai and Shenyang. Banknote paper comes from two mills, at Baoding and Kunshan.

What the renminbi replaced

As the Communists took more territory in the last years of the civil war, the People's Bank began issuing one currency for all the areas they held. It pushed out the various notes circulating there. For its first months the new money went by several names, among them "New Currency" and "People's Notes", before "renminbi" stuck in June 1949. It came only as paper at first.

Ending the hyperinflation of the last Kuomintang years was among the new government's first tasks. Once that was done, a revaluation in 1955 exchanged one new yuan for 10,000 old ones, and the first series was withdrawn between 1 April and 10 May that year.

Why renminbi and yuan mean different things

Renminbi is the currency and yuan is its unit, the way sterling is a currency and the pound its unit. In everyday Mandarin neither word comes up much: people say kuai for a yuan and mao for a jiao.

The ISO code joins the country code CN to a Y for yuan. Banks use RMB as if it were a code. It is not one. Renminbi traded offshore carries a separate designation, CNH, and can fetch a different price from the onshore CNY, because flows in and out of the mainland are still restricted.

Where the yuan is not legal tender

Hong Kong and Macau keep the Hong Kong dollar and the Macanese pataca under the one country, two systems principle and their basic laws. Shops there sometimes take renminbi. It is not legal tender in either territory, although banks in Hong Kong let their customers keep accounts in it and banks around the world have offered renminbi deposit accounts since a change in legislation in July 2010.

Zimbabwe opened its banks to the yuan in 2014, during the years it ran on foreign money, along with the Indian rupee and the Japanese yen. Customers could hold yuan accounts, but no yuan cash was yet changing hands there.

How the notes changed across five series

Five series of banknotes have been issued. The second, introduced on 1 March 1955, printed the denomination in Uyghur, Tibetan and Mongolian on the back, and every series since has carried those languages together with Zhuang. The fourth series brought the ¥50 and ¥100 notes and was withdrawn on 1 May 2019.

The fifth series began in 1999. It dropped the ¥2 note, added a ¥20, and changed the colour of each denomination. A revised set of ¥1, ¥10, ¥20 and ¥50 notes and ¥0.1, ¥0.5 and ¥1 coins went into circulation on 30 August 2019. Coins run from ¥0.01 to ¥1, and the fen coins are seldom used; retailers tend to round prices to a whole yuan.

When the dollar peg was lifted

For most of its early life the renminbi was pegged to the US dollar at ¥2.46. Reforms in the 1980s devalued it, and on 21 July 2005 the People's Bank lifted the peg, with a one-time revaluation to ¥8.11 per dollar. Pilots of a digital renminbi, the e-CNY, began in 2020 in cities including Shenzhen, Suzhou and Chengdu.