A lot of U.S. news commentary and pundits appear to use the words “yuan” and “renminbi” interchangeably to refer to China’s currency, but the fact is that these terms are not simply interchangeable. It is not like using the words “greenback” and “dollar” to refer to USD – and it is not like the difference between “apple” and “Pink Lady.”
So what’s the difference between the yuan and the renminbi?
The Renminbi (RMB) is the proper name for the Chinese currency as such. Loosely translated it is supposed to mean something like “the people’s currency” or “the people’s money.” Please don’t get caught up trying to attach political connotations to that (remember, US currency is also full of all that “In God We Trust” posturing). The Renminbi distinguishes China’s currency from Korea and Japan, but also from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
By contrast, “yuan” refers to a unit of measure of the renminbi – but also, more importantly, it refers to a unit of currency in general, so when some Chinese speak of the American dollar they might say “mei yuan” (or “mei jin” in Mandarin; U.S. gold is called “mei gum“). Taiwanese can refer to their own currency in yuan; even though it is a different currency than China’s.
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In many ways “yuan” is like the word “dollar” – except that what we do to distinguish among “dollars” is just add the nationality: Canadian dollar, American dollar, Australian dollar, New Zealand dollar.
So just keep in mind that “yuan” is a general term – both Chinese and Taiwanese use it to refer to their currency, even though they are different currencies. If you like, think of it like saying “bucks” – it is just a general, although not quite slang, term. It would probably be more appropriate to at least distinguish between “Chinese yuan” and “Taiwanese yuan,” etc.
Whenever you want to talk about currency movements, purchasing Chinese currency, or, especially, distinguishing particularly Chinese currency from a group – use the word Renminbi. Yuan is a slightly more ambiguous, if not completely inaccurate, term.
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That’s interesting. Both worlds kind of mean the same thing, but not exactly… Could it be language level? I know someone from China and there is kind of 2 languages, the language you learn in the villages and the one of cities… Or something like it. So one term is proper, the other more like “street” word for money.. Would it be it? lol Waiting for other posts…. Have a nice Sunday. Hope you watch my link movie and that you like it.
Thanks for clarifying the distinction in terms.
This is interesting… I was always confused about the difference between the two as well, until our teacher in my Mandarin course explained it to us one day :)
It’s basically like you said… “yuan” is a more generic term which means dollar, while “renminbi” is the currency.
For fun, here it is in Chinese:
yuán : 元; it is more common to actually use the word kuài: 块 which basically means the same thing.
rénmínbì: 人民币
I don’t believe the latter is used in everyday speech, just as you don’t go to a store and say “here is 5 american currency”, you say instead “here is 5 dollars”.
Don’t matter what you call it, Yuan, renminbi – heel, call it Chinese paper money, it still outranks the U.S. fiat paper nonsense foisted on the world by corrupts corporatists and falling like a stone in value as we speak! It still commands a larger share of the world’s finite resources than the U.S. sawbuck, oil included, and it will soon reign supreme as international currency of choice after American manipulations of the sawbucks’ value were discovered. Face it, Yankee Doodle got greedy and shot himself in the foot! The Wall street Banksters fiasco is enough to shake foreign investors – thank God the OPEC boys still take the sawbuck or we would really be firked! America! Sinking like a stone in the world now with the Gulf oil fiasco to deal with! No wonder some Americans are heading for the hills with fists full of seeds! Timeas are changing for Yankee Doodle, and not for the good! The next normal, predictable and natural downturn of the corporatist American economy holds in its troughs the “Great Depression” and no money left for a bail out this time around! Hang on folks! the trip to the bottom is quite a ride!
Great info… I hope its absolutely correct. I visited this webpage because i actually searched for difference between ‘yuan renminbi’ being chinese currency and ‘hong kong dollar (HKD)’ being currency of hong kong i guess.
hong kong is in china.. so how can a country have two different currency together?
pls reply me on my e mail shasashu@gmail.com
Well, I don’t think there’s much difference to the quality of RMB and USD. Any currency is only as good as the government/bank managing it. The more corrupt and less systematic, the less reliable the currency. In this sense, I think RMB and USD are on par.
You are right that yuan means something like “dollar”, which is a generic unit of currency. In some Slavic languages, dollar is called “toliar”, but is often obsolete. The only thing that makes it “taste” American is its popularity. I can instantly think of a minimum of four countries that denominate their currency in dollars, not all English speaking.
@Sunny. There’s many different dialects in China which use the same, standardized written language. The official dialect is mandarin but that doesn’t mean that the other ones are considered any less or ’street.’ The 2 languages you were referring to probably were the dialects Mandarin and Cantonese, the two main ones (there’s like hundreds though). Really, the two different words are just two different words, like how any other language has words for similar, but slightly different, things
@Kevin – thanks for that!
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