China will send two very senior officials to the Group of Seven meeting on Friday and Saturday but they may only engage in what is essentially small-talk, with any chance that Beijing would choose this venue to make a startling announcement of the imminent end of the fixed yuan being very remote at best.

"If the past is any guide, China will not adjust its exchange rate right after the G7 meeting," said Wang Zhao, an economist at the Development Research Institute, a top government think tank.

"It would show China surrendering to (international) opinion."

For the image-conscious Chinese leadership, that would be a fate worse than death by a thousand tariff cuts.

There are also good fundamental reasons why Finance Minister Jin Renqing and central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan probably carry few surprises with them to the British capital.

Keeping the yuan in its place will help stabilize the dollar at a crucial time when US policy makers are seeking a measured slowdown of their economy, according to Andy Xie, a regional economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong.

"A soft landing of the US economy is a necessary condition for China to achieve a soft landing, in my view," he said. "This is why I believe that China will keep the currency stable in 2005."

As if to drive the point home, a remarkably long list of Chinese officials, from Vice Premier Huang Ju on down, have stressed that the yuan, fixed at about 8.3 to the dollar since 1994, is not about to disappear.

"We do not have a specific timetable for the exchange rate regime but we have to take into account several elements," Huang told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"We need to have a stable macroeconomic environment, well established market mechanisms and a healthy operational system. This is the first prerequisite."

"Leave this issue to the Chinese people and the Chinese government," he said. "We will certainly figure out what is the most suitable approach for China's economic development."

To most observers, it all adds up to a signal that China will use its second invitation to the grouping of the world's leading industrial nations as an opportunity to discuss the yuan but little more.

"China won't move just because of the G7," said Frank Gong, chief China economist at JPMorgan.

Li Deshui, deputy governor of the central bank, used the same gathering to politely tell the world to mind its own business.

That has not deterred the markets, which have engaged in frantic speculation that new Chinese exchange rate policies are a near-term prospect, as they have done time and again over the past several years.

This time around, investors have looked at statistics coming out of China, including data showing massive fund inflows into Asia's second-largest economy towards the end of last year.

In the two last months of 2004, China's forex reserves jumped 67.5 billion dollars, widely seen as evidence that large amounts of speculative capital have been pouring in, waiting to cash in on a rise in the yuan.

Hot money in sufficiently large amounts does make it harder for China to wage sensible monetary policies at home but the pressure is not so unbearable that Beijing will be forced to let go of the peg, according to analysts.

"It's a case of not letting the truth get in the way of a good story," said Callum Henderson, head of global foreign exchange strategy at Standard Chartered Bank, commenting on the market's behavior.

"The market has been getting itself lathered up for something to happen and when it doesn't, there will be a retracement," he said.

What forex traders around the globe may have learned from the recent string of public announcements is that China is getting adept at the essential central bank skill of being obscure.

"It's possible they could revalue this year but it is one hundred times more difficult to predict what China is going to do than to predict the (US) Federal Reserve," said Yonghao Pu, head of Asia regional research for UBS Wealth Management.