With extraordinary speed, China has morphed from a diffident player in international finance into an impatient table-banger. The Chinese are pumping almost $40 billion into a new East Asian version of the IMF, browbeating trading partners into using the yuan, and floating fantastical ideas about a new international reserve currency. Visiting Beijing last week, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva picked up on his hosts’ changed mood. Calling for a “new economic order,” he suggested that it was time to stop denominating trade in dollars.

It’s great that China is speaking up. The country accounts for a large share of the world’s savings and much of its growth; if a stable economic order is to emerge from this crisis, it will need Chinese buy-in. But there’s a not-so-great side to China’s transformation, too: Its contribution to the global debate is mostly muddled.

Why have the Chinese found their voice? Put simply, they have bought so much of the international system that they can no longer be indifferent to it. By running colossal trade surpluses, they have accumulated vast holdings of bonds and shares denominated in dollars, the currency at the core of global finance. If the greenback declines, China’s government stands to lose a fortune.

The political backlash from such a loss could be brutal. Already, Chinese bloggers have ripped into the officials who invested $3 billion in the US private equity group Blackstone, only to see the stock plummet. “They are worse than wartime traitors,” one online chatter fumed, according to the Financial Times. A large fall in the dollar would make the Blackstone loss look like a picnic.

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