The Lujiazui Forum held in June 2026 released a clear plan to the outside world. Shanghai will work with Hong Kong to jointly promote offshore financial construction, aiming to create two supporting centers that can allocate global RMB assets and hedge various cross-border risks.
Behind this move is the dual impetus of long-term structural demands accumulated in my country’s foreign trade field and changes in the global financial landscape.
In 2025, my country’s total foreign trade exports will far exceed imports, and the surplus will exceed US$1.2 trillion, setting a record high.
But what many people don’t know is that only a small part of this huge income has been transferred to the official foreign exchange reserve account. The vast majority of the funds have been stranded overseas for a long time and have not been fully transformed into a driving force for domestic economic development.
For companies that have been engaged in export business all year round, most of the settlement currencies they receive are US dollars.
In the early years, companies usually converted U.S. dollars into RMB for daily operations, and most of the foreign exchange collected was concentrated and used to purchase U.S. Treasury bonds. At its peak, my country’s U.S. debt holdings reached 1.32 trillion U.S. dollars. The book reserves seemed sufficient, but the actual income was low. A lot of funds indirectly flowed into leading overseas technology companies, equivalent to the foreign exchange we earned through labor and production capacity, and became a disguised source of funds for the development of our opponents.
Data show that in April 2026, the scale of domestic U.S. debt holdings has dropped to 651.1 billion U.S. dollars, nearly half of its peak. However, the funds to reduce the purchase of U.S. debt have not returned to the domestic market. The total amount of funds invested by various domestic enterprises in overseas stocks and bonds has exceeded 570 billion U.S. dollars. It has been circulating overseas for a long time, and it is difficult to mobilize it back to support local science and technology innovation and high-end manufacturing industries.
The most direct function of arranging offshore finance is to gather the wandering foreign trade surplus and complete internal digestion: relying on Shanghai’s exclusive offshore account system, it gathers idle RMB and foreign currency funds at home and abroad. It no longer allocates low-yield overseas assets in large quantities, but instead issues free trade offshore bonds to provide funds for domestic innovative enterprises and overseas projects. It reverses the one-way cycle of “earning US dollars, saving US dollars, investing US dollars” in the past, and allowing foreign trade profits to truly flow back to nourish the real economy.
In 2026, the overall trend of the world’s major currencies will be weak. The Japanese yen has been fluctuating around 160 for a long time, and the Indian rupee and Indonesian rupiah have hit record lows one after another. However, relying on the advantages of a complete domestic industrial chain and the support of surplus, the RMB has emerged from an independent market. The exchange rate has steadily risen, gradually approaching the 6.5 mark, and its anti-fluctuation advantage is particularly prominent.
However, there are still long-term shortcomings behind the strengthening of the RMB: in the past, the rise and fall of offshore RMB prices were basically determined by the two major overseas trading markets of Hong Kong and London. The mainland lacked formal offshore trading venues. When encountering international speculative funds speculating on exchange rate fluctuations, there was a lack of hedging and buffering methods, and the pace of exchange rate rises and falls was passively controlled by the outside world.
Shanghai launched offshore RMB foreign exchange-related pilot business, and the first-phase transaction amount reached 7.238 billion yuan, which is equivalent to establishing an independent offshore price formation channel in the mainland.
Backed by a huge domestic real industry foundation, Shanghai focuses on cross-border investment and financing and offshore trade-related businesses for local enterprises; Hong Kong follows mature international operating rules to connect with global overseas investors. The two places have coordinated and coordinated. Currently, they have opened up two-way issuance channels for free trade offshore bonds to jointly expand market space and firmly grasp the initiative in exchange rate risk management.
In addition to fund collection and exchange rate pricing power, offshore financial construction will also make up for the shortcomings in my country’s marine insurance field.
The global marine insurance business has long been controlled by leading European and American institutions. In 2024, the overall premium scale of global marine insurance will be close to US$40 billion. European institutions will capture nearly half of the market share. my country’s maritime insurance volume ranks among the top in the world, but more than half of the risk business needs to be transferred to overseas reinsurance institutions. Risk pricing and insurance thresholds for ocean-going ship navigation, overseas infrastructure and new energy projects are deliberately restricted by overseas institutions.
Shanghai promotes offshore financial construction with offshore reinsurance as the focus of breakthroughs, relying on the mainland’s huge basic insurance market to build a core platform for undertaking cross-border reinsurance business. In the first five months of 2026, the Shanghai International Reinsurance Platform has accumulated premiums of 7.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 256%. It has jumped out of the original Western financial framework to build an independent risk pricing system, master the financial control authority behind the cross-border transportation of goods, and build a solid underlying security barrier for massive foreign trade business.
Currently, the U.S. dollar is frequently used as a tool for geopolitical games, and more and more countries are beginning to take the initiative to reduce their reliance on a single U.S. dollar for settlement. IMF data shows that the U.S. dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has dropped from more than 70% in 1999 to 2024.
of 57.4%. The proportion of RMB settlement in Saudi Arabia’s crude oil trade with China exceeded 40% in a single month in 2026. Brazil, Argentina, Russia and other countries have successively established direct settlement channels in their own currencies. The majority of developing economies are looking for more reliable cross-border financing and settlement alternatives.
The offshore financial system jointly built by Shanghai and Hong Kong exactly matches the current global market demand: many Southeast Asian countries are closely tied to the domestic industrial chain, and there is strong demand for RMB cross-border settlement and low-cost offshore financing; oil-producing countries in the Middle East want to diversify the hidden dangers of excessive concentration of US dollar assets, and the scale of RMB settlement of energy trade continues to expand. The offshore market can undertake oil and gas trade settlement and long-term project financing needs. At present, Egypt, Kazakhstan and other countries have completed financing operations through free trade offshore bonds, which has obvious advantages compared with the cost of US dollar loans.
my country’s promotion of this system is not to compete head-on with the existing international financial system, but to rely on its own advantages in foreign trade volume to provide developing countries with more reliable financial exchange options, and gradually shift from passively complying with externally formulated financial terms to participating in jointly polishing new multilateral cooperation rules.
In general, Shanghai and Hong Kong’s synchronized deployment of offshore finance is a systematic adjustment to address the two major problems of outflow of trillions of foreign trade surplus and external constraints on key financial links. While gathering outflows of foreign trade funds to feed local industries, it will also make up for the shortcomings in the exchange rate and the right to speak in the insurance field, and steadily weaken various potential risks brought by the single dollar system. It has far-reaching strategic significance for the long-term stable development of my country’s foreign trade and the advancement of RMB internationalization.
