The Chinese are at it again.
In September, the People’s Bank of China added roughly 23 tonnes of gold to its ever-growing mountain of gold reserves. That marks the biggest monthly purchase in three years and the 23rd straight month of buying gold.
China bought while the gold price fell more than 6%. Wall Street bros call that “buying the dip.”
The Chinese central bank apparently calls it policy.
As I’ve written before, China is buying gold because it is preparing for a world where the US dollar is no longer the global reserve currency. All that gold also means the country has vast sums of hard wealth in the event of a financial crisis. (To view my special briefing on how all this could lead China to engineer a dollar crisis in the US—and what you can do to protect yourself—click here.)
What I find amusing about Chinese gold stories in the US media is the cheerleader who inevitably shows up to assure Americans that Uncle Sam owns far more gold than China, so who cares?
True, if you believe the numbers posted by two governments with a fondness for propagandistic hokum.
The US Treasury says it owns about 8,130 tonnes. China’s central bank reports about 2,410.
Maybe those numbers are accurate.
Maybe they’re malarkey.
The American figure hasn’t moved in decades, down to the decimal point. Seems suspect.
China’s number is the opposite problem. Goldman Sachs and other experts in the gold market say that the gold flows they watch imply that China has vastly more gold and that Beijing’s official figure reflects reality about as accurately as Scooby-Doo reflects crime fighting.
If America’s number is padded and China’s is shaved, that comfortable gap is a lot narrower than the cheerleaders think.
Either way, there’s a bigger story afoot.
Chinese customs data show the country imported more than 1,000 tonnes of gold in the first eight months of this year. That’s more than all of 2025 and more than a quarter of all the gold the world’s miners dug up last year.
And then look at the gold mines inside China.
The Middle Kingdom has ranked atop the league tables of gold mining for much of the last two decades. In the first half of this year, domestic mining accounted for 153 tonnes of new gold. And because of export restrictions, only the tiniest sliver of that gold ever leaves the country.
It’s not just the Chinese government that has a fondness for glitter… The government has also actively incentivized the public to buy gold.
In the first half of the year, Chinese households bought a record 314 tonnes of gold bars and coins, even as jewelry demand fell to its weakest quarter since the World Gold Council started counting in 2010.
Beijing helped fuel that trend. Bars sold through the official Shanghai exchange are tax-free, while jewelry now carries a bigger tax bite. With one change to the tax code, a nation of necklace buyers became a nation of bullion hoarders.
And I’m betting the mandarins in Beijing are quite pleased with themselves that China’s national gold wealth is surging—the central bank, consumers, and even insurance companies are getting in on the trend after Beijing allowed certain big insurers to add gold to their balance sheets.
It’s almost like the entire country is turning into a giant non-dollar hedge fund, with more than 1.4 billion managers.
The state buys gold because it doesn’t trust the dollar. The people buy gold because they don’t trust real estate and stocks inside their own country. Not that the government minds because all that wealth that would go into paper assets and into an overbuilt property market is flooding into gold.
No matter the reason, more and more gold ends up inside China’s borders, and none of it leaves without Beijing’s permission. That’s a pile of wealth no Western government can touch.
Washington can sanction Chinese banks and freeze Chinese Treasuries held abroad.
But it can’t freeze a gold bar at the People’s Bank of China or under a mattress in Guangzhou.
Wrap it all together and you get China building a version of itself that doesn’t need the dollar to survive.
If the dollar never falls, Beijing has still bought itself leverage, because a country that can sell Treasuries and buy gold bargains from a position of strength.
And if the dollar does crack, Beijing’s gold cushions the losses on whatever Treasuries it still holds. And China’s middle class will be holding an asset that gains purchasing power, while America’s middle class holds savings measured in a currency that’s losing it.
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