Trade war, global instability push de-dollarisation into China’s academic mainstream

Global instability has also pushed a once-niche academic debate into Chinese policy circles

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Beijing has sought to reduce its vulnerability to the US dollar in recent years by reducing US Treasury holdings and boosting the yuan’s international use, among other measures. Photo: dpa

Published: 8:00am, 2 Feb 2026

Interest in de-dollarisation has spiked in Chinese academic and policy circles, as Beijing grows increasingly wary of the United States’ potential to weaponise its currency.

The surge has been most visible in the volume of research. A search by the South China Morning Post on China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), one of the country’s largest academic research databases, showed the number of papers on the subject more than doubled from 2023 to 2025 compared with the preceding three years.

De-dollarisation gained further traction as global economic uncertainty intensified following the start of US President Donald Trump’s second term in early 2025. After launching a global trade war in April, Washington abducted then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in early January – staking a claim to the South American nation’s oil reserves – and threatened eight European allies with tariffs after they pushed back against Trump’s vow to acquire, and potentially seize, resource-rich Danish territory Greenland.

Chinese scholars have called for greater urgency in reducing reliance on US dollar assets, particularly after Washington and its allies froze about US$300 billion in Russian foreign exchange reserves in 2022. The CNKI search showed more than half of all papers about de-dollarisation over the past three years were published in 2023 alone, one year after the US took action against Moscow.

Beijing has taken several steps to reduce its vulnerability in recent years: cutting its holdings of US Treasuries, strengthening cooperation with emerging markets and calling for reforms to international economic and financial governance.

China has also pushed ahead with its yuan internationalisation strategy, bought record levels of gold and launched digital currency initiatives.

Trade war, global instability push de-dollarisation into China’s academic mainstream

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Global instability has also pushed a once-niche academic debate into Chinese policy circles

Global instability has also pushed a once-niche academic debate into Chinese policy circles