Guo Shuqing, chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC), said in an interview with broadcaster CCTV on Monday that China’s stock and foreign exchange markets had not panicked.
The official said Beijing has never taken measures to deliberately devalue the currency.
Elsewhere in the interview, Guo, who is also the Communist Party official overseeing the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), reiterated that speculative short sellers would suffer “heavy losses” if they bet against the Yuan.
Guo also said in a speech delivered at a forum in Beijing on Saturday that Washington’s escalation of trade tensions would not solve any of its problems but will create volatility in global markets and hurt the world economy. He stressed that higher US tariffs will have a “very limited” impact on China’s economy even if it raises levies to the maximum level, and would hurt the US about as much.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang on Friday accused American officials of lying to the public about the ongoing US-China trade war.
Washington and Beijing have been stuck in a months-long trade war. US President Donald Trump initiated what is effectively a trade war with China last year, when he first imposed unusually heavy tariffs on imports from the country. Since then, the two sides have exchanged tariffs on more than $360 billion in two-way trade.
The two sides have already held talks to settle the issues, but all to no avail so far. Their latest round of trade negotiations ended earlier this month without reaching a deal to end their persisting trade dispute.
They have yet to set a date to resume trade talks, with the US president announcing an increase of tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports and Beijing hiking its own tariffs on $60 billion worth of American products.
China strongly opposes US tariff hikes, saying they are harmful not only to China and the US, but to the whole world.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that an escalating trade war between the US and China, the world’s two largest economies, will “jeopardize” global growth this year, weakening confidence and pushing up prices for consumers.
Washington, for its part, says a primary goal of the aggressive tariff strategy is to decrease the trade imbalance with China, which totaled $379 billion in 2018.
Trump has urged China to either sign a trade deal now or it will be forced to sign a far worse agreement in future. However, China says it won’t make concessions on issues of principle.
The US economy is considerably consumer-reliant. The country imports hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods from China on which Washington has imposed tariffs. Many Americans complain about lost export markets, disrupted supply chains and higher costs.
Some China experts have speculated that Beijing could use Yuan devaluation as a weapon in a broader trade war with the United States.
