11月22日，我院钱军教授接受CCTV NEWS《NEWS HOUR》栏目的连线采访，关于上海国际能源交易中心最终在上海自由贸易区内建立的原因，钱军教授分析认为，吸引外资和人民币国际化是重要促成因素。

Host: And for more, we can speak with Professor Qianjun from Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance. Hello, Professor, thank you for being with us. First of all, may I ask you why have this center be launched in the free trade zone, do you think, and not somewhere else?

Qian Jun: Good to be with you, I think there are a number of reasons. I think one of the most important reasons in the, setting this up in the free trade zone is to attract foreign investors. And in order to do that, you need to lower transaction cost in terms of taxes, commissions and so forth. And that is, one of the main goals in the free trade zone is to set this up such that such transaction cost would be minimized as compared to any way in China. The other reason to put this in the free trade zone, I think, is related to the globalization of RMB as an international currency and if you read all the documents of guidelines about one of the most important purposes of the zone, they want to promote RMB as, not only as a major settlement currency but also as an investment currency as well. And this is again a major part of the free trade zone. So, for these two reasons and other related reasons, they put it in the free trade zone.

Host: Alright, what do you think the specific aims of the new trade center and guess what would be the benchmarks for the success-fail value, do you think?

Qian Jun: Sure, I think maybe medium, longer term goals of doing this. I think there are two causes. One is, again, as you’ve seen many documents to discussions about the important central government meeting just finished a couple weeks ago and if you read the guidelines, a central message from the meeting is China needs to develop markets and let markets be the focused and critical force in allocating resources. So basically, we are going toward a more and more market-based allocation system and obviously, energy is the big part of resources. So, this is certainly in line with the general philosophy. The other thing that is very important for China specifically, as you know, China is a big importer of all sources of raw materials and energy and the biggest importer of oil. So, right now, if you look at globally, there are a lot of these markets, including futures markets for oil and related product, but China wants more sorts of ability to price these contracts and this is certainly a critical step in doing that. And again, as I said earlier, if you want to price, you know, obviously want a big platform to increase the volume and in order to, and that is how you become a major force in terms of pricing, right. But in order to do that, you should attract foreign investment, foreign institutional investors. So, I would say a big and important benchmark is to foresee how big the volume would be, maybe in twelve, maybe in six months or twelve months time, because that would be a major indicator. And the other thing is, as I understand, we are going to use, we are going to start both RMB and dollars as the currencies. So, again, the idea is to promote RMB as a major settlement currency in the trading of these contracts. So the second benchmark would be we want to see maybe in one year or or so time or want to see how important RMB has become a major settlement currency in these kinds of global trading of these contracts.

Host: Alright, we leave it there. Thanks very much for your time, today, Professor.

Qianjun: Thank you.

NEWS HOUR 11/22/2013