Asian Version Of IMF'S Chief Executive'S &Nbsp; China And Japan Play A Leading Role.

It is not easy for the ministers of ASEAN and China, Japan and South Korea to unanimously select a research director. Even if we have done enough coordination in advance, we still can not solve the problem at the annual meeting.

It is a director of a research room.

The Xi'an conference was fruitless.

In November 2010, the Southeast Asian Union Organization (ASEAN) and the China, Japan and South Korea (10+3), a deputy ministerial official in charge of Finance and financial affairs, held an annual meeting in Xi'an, China.

More than 100 representatives from the "10+3" Member States and international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank and the ASEAN Secretariat attended the meeting.

Li Yong, Vice Minister of finance of China, led the Chinese delegation composed of the Ministry of finance, the central bank, the Ministry of foreign affairs and the Hongkong monetary authority and attended the meeting with the Vice Minister of finance of Vietnam.

Deliberation "

The financial and national weekly reporter learned that China, South Korea and Japan have launched their own candidates for the director of the research office. The candidate of Japan is a senior official with a doctoral degree from a famous overseas university, and has led the work of the International Bureau of the Ministry of finance of Japan.

In the past year, Japan's key candidate has been recognized by some countries, and China once agreed.

But at the annual meeting, China opposed it.

According to the information disclosed in this meeting, China and Japan are the focus countries of this conference in the "10+3" countries, especially the subtle change of the position of the Chinese delegation has aroused strong concern from all sides.

According to the analysis of Japanese media, the recent friction between China and Japan has led China to change its original softer attitude, and decided to launch its own candidate against Japan.

The Asian version of IMF has a long way to go.

The Asian version of the International Monetary Fund, the AMF, refers to the East Asian regional monetary reserve fund. Its role is to provide financial assistance to the economies that need assistance in the financial crisis.

As of 2010, the mechanism has not yet been fully established, but the ASEAN countries tend to develop it into an Asian version of IMF, which has the practical power to master the macro-control of monetary policy, and Japan has been advocating and trying to take charge of this institution.

The United States opposes China's position.

AMF has been going on for 13 years from the first time to the embryonic form.

After this idea was put forward, Japan was strongly opposed by IMF and decisively rejected by the United States. The main reason was that the yen would challenge the US dollar and affect the dominance of the US in Asia.

When Japan turned to China for support, China chose silence.

In the 13 years, the "bilateral monetary agreement" and "multilateral swap" are the two key steps.

In particular, the two financial crises in 1997 and 2007 brought great impact to all countries in East Asia.

IMF failed to help in time of crisis, and often imposed harsh conditions to invite discontent in East Asian countries.

The idea of establishing IMF in Asia has been gradually recognized by East Asian countries.

However, AMF was rejected by IMF, but the "Chiang Mai agreement" formulated by East Asian countries was approved by the US and IMF.

In May 2000, the "10+3" finance minister jointly signed the "Chiang Mai agreement" in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Through the establishment of a "bilateral currency swap mechanism", it allowed Asian countries to get financial help from neighboring countries in the short term sharp flow of funds.

This agreement is an important first step for regional monetary cooperation, which effectively boosted confidence in small and medium-sized economies at that time.

However, because the content involved is rather complicated, the amount of interchangeable amount is small, which can play a limited role.

In addition, the funds used for relief are actually "safeguards" by different countries and have not been isolated from foreign exchange reserves of all countries.

This is another reason why financial crisis can not be dealt with in time.

Who cares for $120 billion?

Therefore, in May 2007, all countries agreed to make the Chiang Mai agreement multilateral and take second steps towards AMF.

The process of changing bilateral to multilateral is to establish a pool of funds.

Put the emergency funds held by each country in a common "big pool" to provide a certain proportion of loans for members in crisis.

At the same time, the regional repository will also set up special supervision and management institutions to monitor the regional economy and formulate rules for the use of funds.

From 2007 to 2009, countries made a series of research on the scale of investment, the conditions of loan and the monitoring mechanism.

The Central Bank of China and the Central Bank of Indonesia have taken the lead in studying the elements such as the currency of the investment and the conditions of the loan, and jointly with the Central Bank of Thailand to study the elements of the capital structure and managers.

By 2009, countries agreed on the main elements of the US $120 billion regional reserve pool, of which China and Japan contributed $38 billion 400 million, accounting for 32% of the total reserves.

The establishment of the regional reserve pool brings new challenges: where to put it? Who will manage it? How to use the money? According to whose interests will it be designed?

AMRO is responsible for setting up a set of rules and systems from scratch.

Wang Yuzhu, director of the Regional Cooperation Research Office of the Asia Pacific Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that if AMRO becomes a real power institution, it will play a great role in the use of the current 120 billion US dollar reserve fund. It will not only carry out the implementation of the standards, but also have the functions of assessment and monitoring.

This is very similar to the institutional structure of IMF, which determines the voting rights of the member states according to the share of the investment and is linked to the funds available to the country when applying for economic assistance.

AMF is likely to include two functions: first, monitoring the regional economy, publishing research reports at regular intervals, and giving policy advice; two, the conditions for the use of funds, the amount of loans and whether there are additional conditions.

However, Liu Junhong, an expert in China Modern International Relations Research Institute, told reporters in the finance and economics weekly that at present, there are still many uncertainties about how the institution will develop before the dust of the director is settled, including management mechanism, committee setting, and management rules design.

Liu Junhong believes that if there is a real way to fulfill the functions of AMF, there is still a long way to go.

But no matter who can be elected director of AMRO in China and Japan, it means that it will have greater leadership in East Asia.

First, because AMF can guide the new regional cooperation in East Asia, the two reason is that the construction of a monetary and financial system behind AMRO will have an impact on the political and sovereign issues of the future world.

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Two disadvantages of China

In fact, China and Japan have been trying to influence the formation and development of AMF in the past years, making it more conducive to expanding their geographical impact.

The most advantageous weight of the post of director of China's campaign research office is the cooperative framework of 10+3 based on AMF, which can be said to be built by China.

In the past 20 years, China and ASEAN have increased from dialogues to strategic partners, and trade volume has maintained an average annual growth of more than 20%. At the beginning of 2010, the China ASEAN free trade area was fully built, and China became the largest trading partner of ASEAN.

According to the relevant experts, China's cooperation policy during this period mostly helped ASEAN, in order to give ASEAN confidence in further deepening cooperation.

In this regard, although Japan and South Korea are also promoting 10+1 with ASEAN, the degree of cooperation between them is still not comparable to that of China.

However, China also has two disadvantages: Japan has more share than China, and its influence is less than that of the Japanese yen.

On the face of it, Sino Japanese bilateral investment is "tied first", each of which is 38 billion 400 million US dollars, accounting for 32% of the total reserve pool, but China's share contains 4 billion 200 million dollars in Hongkong, China. In addition, ASEAN's contribution to 24 billion US dollars is 20 billion yuan, which is actually a loan from Japan, and the canal is official development assistance (ODA).

Liu Junhong told the "finance and economics weekly" that all of these are the share of the system, and there are many loans outside the system.

In 2009, Japan provided a "financial stability framework" for ASEAN, providing financial assistance at the time of crisis, which amounted to about $67 billion.

At the same time, the Japanese government also provided financial and trade insurance in the form of trade and insurance, about $20 billion or more.

In fact, the various kinds of assistance provided by the Japanese system are about 87 billion dollars.

In addition, in the regional foreign exchange reserve bank, the yen can be used as a reserve currency, while the RMB is still not free to circulate.

This has also had a certain impact on China's overall soft power.

Liu Junhong said that changing the swap currency in multilateral agreements into reserve currencies actually reduced the status of the renminbi.

In 2002, bilateral currency swap agreements signed between China and Japan had created the equivalent of the yen for the renminbi.

But when it was converted to reserve funds, the status of the renminbi was weakened because it was not a reserve currency.

This gives Japan a more dominant advantage in AMF.

At the October 2010 East Asia Summit, the United States and Russia announced that they would join the summit in 2011.

For this reason, some scholars believe that the return of the United States to Asia is likely to completely change the original pattern of East Asian cooperation and also have a decisive impact on the dominant power between China and Japan.

In 1999, economist Huang Fanzhang wrote that if the establishment of the Asian Monetary Fund can make the United States and Japan compete for differences in economic interests in East Asia, it will be good for China.

But 10 years later, China, the second largest economy in the world, is hard to ignore the United States.

In response, Liu Junhong said that because Japan is an ally of the United States, the United States is more likely to put pressure on China.

This trend can be seen from Obama's Asian trip and high-profile military exercises by the Korean and Korean incident.

This exacerbates the complexities of the situation.

On the other hand, some experts think that Japan should be vigilant in promoting the internationalization of the Japanese yen by leading the AMF.

In the 10 years after the AMF proposal was rejected in 1997, Japan has repeatedly pushed forward the establishment of AMF on various occasions.

Liu Junhong explained that promoting the regional yen and building the Japanese yen reserve mechanism will bring many benefits to Japan.

Not only can it establish its dominance in East Asia, restrict China's development power, but also enable Japan to win some independence from the US and IMF.

In addition, Japan hopes to expand the yen's influence in the East Asian economy and gradually form the "yen area", hoping to form an international monetary fund system of Japan, the United States and Europe.

However, Jiang Ruiping, an expert on Japanese issues at China Foreign Affairs University, believes that the internationalization of the yen has passed away. At present, China's total economic output exceeds Japan, and it is almost impossible for Japan to realize the internationalization of the Japanese yen.

With regard to how China can better promote regional cooperation in East Asia after its accession to the AMF, Liu Junhong believes that on the one hand, China should increase its research in related fields so as to play a more active role in the construction of the international monetary system. On the other hand, in the process of participating in the construction of AMF, China should attach importance to the integration with the international environment, and build a large framework to match the current framework of international organizations, such as IMF, in order to better play its role in the international arena.

The focus of East Asian cooperation is still on Sino Japanese cooperation.

Zhang Yunling, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that at present, China and Japan have not yet reached a common strategic stage at a high level, and their cooperation and joint efforts are of vital importance.

If China and Japan can not enjoy common interests and unite with each other in the East Asian Free Trade Area, financial cooperation, security strategy and regional mechanism construction, the integration of East Asian regional cooperation can not be realized.

Because both China and Japan want their representatives to take the lead, the setting of the director candidates will be difficult.

But most experts believe that East Asian cooperation must rely on the common consultation between the two countries, and both sides must make concessions.