China’s central bank has bought gold for 23 straight months, the longest streak on record, adding about 23 tonnes in September, its biggest monthly purchase in almost three years, according to State Administration of Foreign Exchange data. Households and companies are buying even more aggressively: the country spent a record $158.8 billion importing more than 1,000 tonnes in the first eight months of 2026, already exceeding the $96.5 billion and 886 tonnes imported in all of 2025, per customs data.
The motive is part strategic, part domestic. Beijing is cutting its dependence on the dollar: China Treasury holdings fell to an 18-year low of $618 billion in July, and Julius Baer’s Carsten Menke pointed to the weaponization of the dollar and the freezing of Russia’s reserves as the political driver. At home, the multiyear property slump, an 8 percent drop in the CSI 300 this year and one-year government bond yields near 1.2 percent against 4.46 percent in the US leave gold as one of the few safe stores of household wealth, with record consumer imports and rising onshore premiums signaling strong winter seasonal demand, per State Street’s Aakash Doshi.
The accumulation is changing gold’s usual behavior. Prices pulled back more than 8 percent in September to about $4,176 an ounce, down from January’s record above $5,500, but Chinese buying has held prices up against high US rates and a strong dollar, a break from the historical pattern where rising real yields pushed gold down. Analysts expect prices to rise to $4,750 to $5,500 a troy ounce by the end of the first quarter of 2027, with Invesco’s Christopher Hamilton noting gold now behaves as a real-asset diversifier in a market where bonds no longer move inversely to stocks.