The People’s Bank of China didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside normal working hours.
Western journalists continue to be the dumbest fucking people on earth.
Swapping existing dollar loans into lower interest-rate renminbi liabilities “is part of the bigger Chinese strategy of internationalizing the yuan,” Lesetja Kganyago, South Africa’s central bank governor, said in an interview in Washington on Oct. 16. China’s one-year prime rate is currently 3%, compared with 7.25% in the US.
If China is to be paid back in yuan from these loans, that ultimately drains the international supply of yuan. This conversion runs counter to the internationalisation.
Of course, you still have currency swaps, but in a currency swap (Ethiopia gets yuan, China gets dollars), I'm pretty sure you have return the currency after a while (otherwise it would just be forex trading and not a swap).
Unless the Chinese plan is to just perpetually keep swapping. But it would be easier to just buy and sell currencies.
Of course, the real internationalisation seems to have come from cross-border payments in yuan.
as China aims to grow the global use of its currency
How much of this is just the Chinese wanting to do international trade in their own currency rather than aiming for unrelated countries to trade with each other in yuan?