Editor's note: Michael Wang, the author, is a CGTN anchor. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

With the Strait of Hormuz under severe disruption, the world is facing a genuine physical shock to oil supplies. According to the International Energy Agency, around 20 million barrels of crude oil and oil products per day transited the Strait of Hormuz in 2025, representing about a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade and nearly 20 percent of global LNG exports.

One might have expected that, in the face of such a major disruption, traditional safe-haven currencies such as the US dollar and the Japanese yen would outperform. But a recent study by the China Finance 40 Institute (CF40), one of China's leading economic think tanks, offers a different explanation. Examining exchange-rate movements during the Middle East conflict, CF40 concluded that, across 13 major economies representing more than 70 percent of the global GDP, currency performance was driven largely by each country's net exposure to imported oil and refined petroleum products.

Countries with the biggest oil import dependencies saw their currencies weakened the most. Heavy oil importers such as Japan and the Republic of Korea faced the steepest currency pressure during the peak of the war.

CF40's analysis suggests that the US dollar held up reasonably well, but mainly because America is now a net oil exporter. The Japanese yen, by contrast, behaved more like a risk asset, reflecting Japan's heavy dependence on imported energy. The think tank argues that neither currency received the usual extra "flight-to-safety" premium that markets normally award the yen and the dollar during periods of uncertainty.

Then there's the Chinese yuan. Even though oil now accounts for less than 20 percent of China's total energy use, the country is still a net oil importer. Yet CF40 economists observed that the yuan remained stronger than China's energy exposure alone would have suggested. This led the think tank to suggest that the yuan may be showing early signs of safe-haven behavior: Markets appear to be pricing in China's economic stability, diversified energy base, and policy resilience.

Since the start of the Iran war and up until May 15, the Chinese yuan has strengthened by about three-quarters of one percent against the dollar. The Japanese yen, Swiss franc and euro all weakened. The pound sterling was roughly flat. More oil-exposed currencies, including the Republic of Korea's won and the Indian rupee, fell much more sharply.

What makes the yuan's performance interesting is not that it has suddenly displaced the safe-haven currencies. It clearly has not. The renminbi still faces capital-account management, limited offshore liquidity, and the fact that most global reserves remain concentrated in dollar assets. A safe-haven currency is not created by one episode.

But this episode may still matter because a safe-haven status does not arrive all at once. It is accumulated through repeated moments when markets discover, under stress, which economies offer resilience, policy credibility, and insulation from the particular shock at hand. In this crisis, the shock is not primarily about abstract geopolitical fear. It is about access to energy, exposure to imported oil, and the ability of an economy to absorb a physical supply disruption. On those terms, China looks more resilient and even antifragile than many other large importers. Solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, coal, a growing electrified industrial base, and diversified oil imports give China a broader energy buffer than economies that more tightly exposed to imported petroleum.

The broader implication from CF40's research is that the definition of a safe-haven may be changing. Currency safety is often equated with the depth of Western financial markets, central-bank credibility, and the availability of highly liquid government securities. Those factors still matter enormously. Yet in a world of sanctions risk, fractured supply chains, commodity chokepoints, and weaponized financial infrastructure, markets may increasingly treat real-economy resilience as part of the safe-haven equation. A currency backed by industrial capacity, energy diversification, policy continuity, and a large domestic savings base can begin to acquire a different kind of defensive value.

This does not mean that the renminbi is already a full safe-haven currency. It means the yuan may be developing situational safe-haven characteristics. Its appeal may be strongest not in every risk-off episode, but in shocks where China's structural advantages are directly relevant such as energy security, manufacturing continuity, trade, infrastructure capacity, and state balance-sheet flexibility.

The test now is whether this behavior repeats. If future geopolitical shocks continue to produce yuan outperformance relative to China's measured external challenges, then the current episode will look less like an anomaly and more like the early stage of a market reclassification. Safe-haven currencies are ultimately built by habit. Investors run toward them because, in previous crises, they worked. The CF40 findings suggest that the renminbi may have just passed one of those early crisis tests.

The US dollar remains the incumbent global haven. But the hierarchy of global currency safety may be becoming less automatic and more conditional. In a world where the next crisis may be a supply-chain shock, an energy shock or sanctions shock rather than a conventional financial panic, the currencies that outperform may not necessarily be just the ones with the longest safe-haven reputations. Markets may also look to economies that can keep producing, trading, and absorbing shocks when the system is under pressure. On these measures, the Chinese yuan's performance deserves attention.