More Beijing embassy cables show China sees gold as central in currency war

Submitted by cpowell on 05:58PM ET Monday, September 5, 2011. Section: Daily Dispatches
9:17p ET Monday, September 5, 2011

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

More news media-monitoring cables from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to the State Department in Washington show that both China's government and the nation's financial press, tightly controlled by the government, consider gold to be the main weapon in a world currency war that is under way.

The additional cables, published a few days ago by Wikileaks and located by GATA's Irish friend R.M., disclose that China thinks that the United States is trying to prevent China's foreign exchange surplus from being converted into gold because the U.S. and its European allies plan a return to a gold standard that will favor them because they hold most of the world's gold reserves.

China itself has acknowledged that it is rapidly building its own gold reserves to facilitate international use of its currency, the renminbi.

The citation of the gold-related commentaries by the U.S. embassy cables suggests that China's acquisition of gold is of great concern to the U.S. government as well.

One of the cables from the embassy in Beijing, dated February 8, 2010, quotes commentary published that day in the China Business News newspaper in Shanghai, as follows:

"This time the quick change of the U.S. policy (toward China) has surprised quite a few people. The U.S. has almost used all deterring means, besides military means, against China. China must be clear on discovering what the U.S. goals are behind its tough stances against China. In fact, a fierce competition between the currencies of big countries has just started. A crucial move for the U.S. is to shift its crisis to other countries -- by coercing China to buy U.S. treasury bonds with foreign exchange reserves and doing everything possible to prevent China's foreign reserve from buying gold. The nature of such behavior is a rogue lawyer's behavior of 'ripping off both sides': taking advantage of cross-strait divergences, blackmailing the Taiwan people's wealth by selling arms to Taiwan, and meanwhile coercing China to buy U.S. treasury bonds with foreign exchange reserves and extorting wealth from the mainland's people. If we [China] use all of our foreign exchange reserv es to buy U.S. Treasury bonds, then when someday the U.S. Federal Reserve suddenly announces that the original 10 old U.S. dollars are now worth only one new U.S. dollar and the new U.S. dollar is pegged to the gold, we will be dumbfounded. Today when the United States is determined to beggar thy neighbor, shifting its crisis to China, the Chinese must be very clear what the key to victory is. It is by no means to use new foreign exchange reserves to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. The issues of Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, trade, and so on are all false tricks, while forcing China to buy U.S. bonds is the U.S.'s real intention."

The cable quoting the China Business News commentary can be found here:

http://cables.mrkva.eu/cable.php?id=247683

The second gold-related cable, dated December 4, 2008, quotes commentary published the previous day in the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper, People's Daily, as follows:

"Be vigilant when considering restoring the gold standard system.

"Recent Western opinion has advocated a new Bretton Woods system with the U.S. dollar as the core and restoration of the 'gold standard' to solve the financial crisis. The appearance of such thought is not accidental. There is a great deal of background. The American financial crisis has caused the loss of the U.S. dollar's credit. Therefore, American financial strategists seek to use the gold standard system to maintain the global financial system led by the U.S. The reason that the U.S. and Europe choose to use gold standard is the fact that the most of gold reservation in the world is in their control. The restored gold standard system will not be the original gold standard system, but instead a 'partial reserve system' partially based on gold. Therefore, rapid economic growth will be relatively limited in the area of currency supply. The possible consequences would be: first, due to the economic growth of the U.S. and Europe is low, the partial reserve system can satis fy their currency supply and will not form serious restriction on their economy, but will greatly restrict China, India, and other developing countries. Second, developing countries have to spend lots of foreign reserve to purchase gold. This decision betrays the common wish of the international society to substantially reform the international financial system."

The December 4, 2008, cable can be found here:

http://cables.mrkva.eu/cable.php?id=181326

And at GATA's Internet site here:

http://www.gata.org/files/USEmbassyBeijingCable-12-04-2008.txt

On Saturday the Internet site Zero Hedge was first to call attention to a U.S. Beijing embassy cable from 2009, published by Wikileaks, showing that China's government has been aware of U.S. and European government efforts to suppress the price of gold to support their own currencies, and that the U.S. government knew that China knew: