The Belt and Road Initiative has brought many changes during the past five years, not least the creation of a variety of infrastructure and investment projects worldwide, all of which have boosted the Chinese yuan's usage internationally. 

As of the end of June, China's total commodity trade with countries along the Belt and Road reached five trillion US dollars. And the renminbi (RMB), of course, has been the primary vehicle for the trade. 

"Many infrastructure investments and their finance use the RMB as the primary currency. There are the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank providing finance in RMB. Any project with the countries along the Belt and Road needs to purchase construction materials and RMB can be used as the payment currency, especially for those projects that China is responsible for constructing," said Shao Yu, the chief economist for Orient Securities.

Investment projects are not the only way in which the internationalization of the yuan is being advanced. To strengthen the role of the Chinese currency in international pricing, China has launched several new financial products in the past few months. 

One of the most significant is the crude oil futures that were launched in March in Shanghai. Those futures are paid in RMB, and as of the end of July they had a total value of 3.67 trillion yuan (around 538.3 billion US dollars).

These activities in the financial markets have been well coordinated with Belt and Road projects to further internationalize the yuan, and traders see more coming in future.

"There are a lot of infrastructure and energy projects that probably will happen in the coming few years. Regarding this, we also launched crude oil and iron ore future onshore trading in the past few months. That will actually help to cooperate with the program itself to further globalize the Chinese currency," Jimmy Zhu, chief strategist for Fullerton Markets, explained.