Yuan goal 'hinges on stable rate'

China's plan to free up the yuan fully could take some more time to achieve as the current top priorities for the government are to maintain a stable currency value and prevent risks from cross-border capital flows, economists said.

There may not be any once-for-all measures to complete the foreign exchange rate reform. Instead, the more important effort is to build a mechanism to keep the yuan stable and to some extent keep the exchange rate still under supervision, Chen Weidong, head of the Bank of China's international finance research institute, said at a forum at Renmin University of China on Sunday.

His comments came after the central bank's foreign exchange trade system confirmed on Friday that banks that can suggest the yuan's daily exchange rate against the US dollar have eliminated the effects of the "countercyclical factor" - one of the existing three elements to determine the currency's exchange rate.