Amid mounting strains on the US dollar-dominated global monetary system, renminbi internationalization is emerging as an increasingly important trend — one expected to underpin China's high-quality development while contributing to global financial stability and development, experts and business executives said on Monday.

Zhu Min, former deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said promoting renminbi — or yuan — internationalization has become not only an intrinsic requirement of China's economic development, but also a broader necessity for global financial development and stability.

"As China's high-quality development gathers pace, a stronger renminbi is becoming increasingly vital to supporting innovation-driven growth, industrial upgrading, green transformation and companies' expansion into global markets," Zhu said at the China Development Forum 2026 in Beijing.

He added that the US share of global economic output has fallen from 45 percent to around 25 percent, while its share of world trade has dropped from 25 percent to about 13 percent, suggesting that "the US economy is no longer strong enough to underpin a single dominant currency system in a globalized world".

Moreover, the weaponization of the US dollar, along with trade wars and other policy moves, further eroded the currency's global standing and raised fresh concerns over the independence of the US Federal Reserve, Zhu said.

That trend has also been reflected in international markets, he said, with rising gold reserves and increasing holdings of non-major reserve currencies, including the RMB and other alternatives to the greenback, the euro, the yen and the pound, pointing to a clear move away from the dollar.

"This is a clear sign of dollar avoidance and a visible decline in confidence in the US currency," he added.

Against this backdrop, renminbi internationalization has gained strong momentum in recent years, Zhu said, noting that the RMB's share in cross-border financial activities had risen from 20 percent to 63 percent, while its share in China's trade payments had increased from 10 percent to 35.4 percent over the past decade. "The progress has been quite fast," he said.

Still, the RMB's global standing remains far below what China's economic and trade weight would suggest, Zhu said, adding that the currency accounts for just 2.1 percent of global reserves and 1.6 percent of global trade payments, far below the country's 16.6 percent share of the world economy and 14.4 percent share of global trade.

"As the world's second-largest economy, China still has a currency whose global standing does not yet match the country's economic strength," he said.

Policy support is also moving in the same direction. The outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) for national economic and social development calls for advancing renminbi internationalization, with efforts focused on broadening the currency's use in international trade, investment and financing, and building an independent and controllable cross-border yuan payment system.

Business executives at the forum also underscored the importance of a bigger global role for the RMB. Bill Winters, group chief executive of Standard Chartered, said financial innovation is crucial to China's high-quality development and is closely linked to the global standing of the yuan.

"China plays a pivotal role in global trade and finance. Financial innovation, therefore, is expected to be both sound and secure," Winters said.

Tan Su Shan, CEO of DBS Group, said broader use of the RMB would help diversify capital sources, improve liquidity and facilitate cross-border flows between Chinese and foreign businesses.

"We are operating in a world marked by divergent trade and capital flows, as well as different rules. It is therefore important to encourage broader investor participation, allow more overseas investors to access China's financial market and advance renminbi internationalization so the currency can play a bigger role in global markets," she said.