The SDR was a product of the Bretton Woods System, set up after the second World War to establish a globally coherent monetary order based on the gold peg using the US dollar as a stand-in at US$35 for an ounce of gold.

As the system collapsed following America’s decision in 1973 to get off the gold-dollar direct convertibility, the SDR’s role as a dollar alternative was also left off the agenda.

The SDR, an artificial currency, on the other hand, is rarely used except for occasions when the IMF granting emergency loans to fiscally distressed countries.

So what exactly will China gain from having its currency in the basket, other than being declared by the IMF as “freely usable”, a definition to which no textbook answers can be found.

Professor Frank M. Song, director of The Centre for China Financial Research at the University of Hong Kong, said an inclusion would have more symbolic than realistic bearing on the renminbi’s liberalisation.

“It is a milestone in the renminbi’s road to be a global currency, but there is nothing more than that. It is a prolonged process for the renminbi to be globally accepted, and the SDR status by no means declares that job done. Neither will a non-inclusion amount to a setback of that task,” said Song, who was the leading author of the 2011 book, Road to the Third Largest Currency, in which he painted a roadmap for the renminbi to be the world’s third most used currency after the US dollar and euro by 2020.

By the same token, added Song, authorities should not orient policy-making objectives to an SDR addition.

The People’s Bank of China’s mini-reform on August 11 to change the yuan’s fixing mechanism and the devaluation resulted has been viewed as a step to woo the IMF, which revealed its key concerns on the currency’s prospect joining the SDR just a week earlier.

“It took half a century, during which there were two world wars and a great recession, before the US dollar supplanted the pound’s dominance. Renminbi’s globalisation needs a calm and realistic approach. It is not globalisation for the sake of globalisation,” Song said.

Recent measures by the PBOC to contain capital outflows may have somehow counteracted the fixing change’s goal of a higher chance of inclusion, noted Ken Dickson, the currency investment director at Standard Life Investments.

“The new fixing mechanism is a big step toward meeting the IMF’s demands,” Dickson said. But none of the subsequent measures taken “will accelerate the chances of SDR inclusion,” he added.

“It will be a very close call on the inclusion. The key now lies within Chinese authorities’ ability to convince the international community that these measure are only temporary,” he said.

Global central banks have to hold a certain amount of reserves in the SDRs, so by that virtue the renminbi will see a slight increase in its share of a reserve currency if included in the basket. But whether it will bode for more central banks holdings is up solely to market conditions, said ANZ senior economist Raymond Yeung.

“An inclusion will have more actual benefits on the IMF than on China, as the SDR risks losing representativeness if it doesn’t account for the currency of such an economic power,” said Yeung, who added there were also disadvantages when a currency held as reserves by other countries, which were accounted as liabilities in the host country’s balance of payments.

Although the yuan is nowhere near a reserve status as the US dollar in the foreseeable future, among the many benefits that America has enjoyed from being a global liquidity provider, that privilege has also been at the expense of America running perennial trade deficits - a phenomenon known as the Triffin dilemma - which experts such as Andrew Sheng, chief adviser to the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said was the cause of the last financial crisis.

Yeung likened the case of an SDR inclusion with previous “national image projects” such as hosting the Olympics. “But it is not the goal of capital account reform,” he said.