HONG KONG — Every weekday morning this year, China’s currency has followed the same ominous path.
The central bank in Beijing fixes the initial value for the renminbi, the center point for the currency’s daily trading range. It is roughly the same value, 6.12 to 6.13 to the dollar.
Then the markets open in Shanghai, and the renminbi quickly sinks close to the bottom of the currency’s trading band, roughly 2 percent lower. Only frequent intervention by the central bank — buying renminbi and selling dollars — prevents the Chinese currency from falling even further.
The weakness in the renminbi is a growing worry for government policy makers and corporate executives.
The currency’s decline reflects the money flowing out of the country. Wealthy Chinese are moving large sums overseas, troubled by President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign and the country’s slowing economy. Foreign investors are also growing more skeptical of China.
For many years, China kept the renminbi weaker than economic fundamentals dictated, to help its exporters stay competitive in foreign markets. But a weak renminbi is no longer an unalloyed advantage.
The value of China’s currency is fixed at the start of each day’s trading, but has quickly fallen below that each day in recent trading
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Adding to the outflows, China is developing a sizable and widening deficit in trade in services, notably tourism.
As recently as 2009, foreigners spent as much to travel in China as the Chinese spent to travel overseas. But the huge crowds of mainland Chinese tourists who have swamped destinations like the Louvre in Paris are now spending ever more lavishly, and that is starting to make a difference. In the fourth quarter of last year, China’s trade deficit in tourism almost tripled from the same quarter a year earlier, to $36.37 billion.
And Chinese tourists do not just pay for hotel rooms and museum tickets when they go overseas. Many are extraordinary shoppers, finding prices much lower abroad than in China, which imposes a 17 percent value-added tax plus a 20 percent import tax on a wide range of goods, particularly luxuries. They sell tens of thousands of renminbi to buy dollars for each trip.
Qiao Huiying, 50, a high school history teacher from Beijing who recently visited France, Italy and Germany, paused recently while taking photos of Hong Kong harbor with her husband and daughter.
“Things are cheaper in Hong Kong,” she said, laden with purchases from a morning of shopping. “So we have bought new clothes, cameras and cosmetics here — especially for cosmetics, we purchased brands that we cannot find at home, like Aesop and YSL.”
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