Hong Kong-based financial news group Finet reports on remarks by Liu Xiangmin of the People’s Bank of China on FATCA; I’ve translated their article below. Risk.net and Reuters have similar reports in English: “US should show more respect over Fatca” and “China central bank official slams U.S. tax dodging law”.

Up until now, the Chinese government has been keeping its cards very close to its proverbial chest on FATCA, only making vague statements about “promoting financial market stability” and “looking for cooperative solutions”. The most recent significant movement was a seminar on the topic held in September by the China Banking Association, the Hong Kong Institute of Bankers, and the Xiamen Association of Banks. The only media report I could find at all on that was this photo-heavy, information-light one (in Chinese), in which the reporter declined to tell us about about the concrete contents of anyone’s remarks.

The seminar was held in the southeastern city of Xiamen — kind of a strange destination for a banking conference whose participants came mostly from Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. That in itself may be significant, though I can’t quite figure out how. Perhaps making all participants travel rather than telling the Hong Kong bankers to make the pilgrimage up to the capital may be a nod that Hong Kong’s concerns are being taken seriously in what is no doubt going to be a coordinated national-level policy-making decision? And of course, Xiamen being the mainland city with the closest links to Taiwan, this may also have been a subtle invitation to Taiwan, which itself seems to be looking for help in resisting FATCA but so far has not approached Beijing on any response.

Or maybe everyone just wanted to get out of the smog and take a nice scenic vacation on the coast. It’s hard to tell, so we’re reduced to amateur Kremlinology in trying to guess what happens next …

Note what Liu did not state in his remarks: that other countries have “no choice but to comply”, nor that Chinese authorities should start jumping up and down and getting an inter-governmental agreement wrapped up. This is a far cry from remarks by people like Jamaican prime minister Portia Simpson Miller siding with the United States against her own country on FATCA. Indeed, Liu seems to be calling for the same thing that Taiwan’s ABAC representative sought a few months ago: a multilateral coalition to pressure the U.S. into scaling back FATCA’s most intrusive violations of other countries’ sovereignty.

Reuters was careful to emphasise Liu’s statement that his remarks expressed his own views and not the official position of the Chinese government. This hardly means that Liu has gone rogue. At minimum he no doubt discussed the theme of his planned remarks with his bosses before making them; more likely, he was delivering a trial balloon, and not a particularly subtle one at that — this is far from some unattributed “official remarks” which got leaked in regional newspapers, or an unsigned editorial.

Liu Xiangmin, deputy director general of legal affairs at People’s Bank of China, said the U.S. should find a better way to tackle tax evasion than the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) … “China’s banking and tax laws and regulations do not allow Chinese financial institutions to comply with FATCA directly.” Liu said. He emphasised those were his views and not necessarily the opinions of the central bank or the Chinese government … Liu was giving a speech on the foreign impact of financial regulation. He also noted the challenges posed to foreign banks by some of the regulation contained in the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act, such as the Volcker Rule. The rule bans banks from engaging in proprietary trading and will apply to many foreign banks if they have a branch in the U.S.