China needs to significantly revalue the yuan again for its own sake, not that of the United States or anyone else, a prominent Chinese economist said.

China is under growing pressure from its trading partners to let the yuan rise faster. The U.S. Congress is on course to pass legislation meant to force it to do so, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will visit Beijing next week to press the leadership on the issue in person.

Chinese policy makers have repeatedly insisted since a modest initial revaluation of the yuan in July 2005 that they will allow the currency to become more market-orientated -- and thus worth more -- only gradually.

Officials and many academics argue that another one-off revaluation is too big a risk because it would hit export firms, which employ millions of workers.

But Zhong Wei, a professor at Beijing Normal University, said the undervaluation of the currency and the course of gradual appreciation were causing a potentially more serious problem of "capital replacement".

Namely, foreign money was currently rushing into China to share in the country's booming economic growth, while Chinese funds, in the form of the foreign exchange reserves it is rapidly accumulating, were being forced into low-yielding assets overseas.

"If the current policy continues, China could see problems similar to those of Japan in the 1980s -- when the yen was rising, domestic interest rates were kept low, and domestic capital flowed out of the country," Zhong said at a regular forum of economists hosted by Reuters this week.

He is also the editor-in-chief for a journal of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, the foreign exchange regulator.

AVOIDING A FLOOD

Zhong's view is firmly in the minority. Many other government economists are firmly opposed to another revaluation.

"I can't agree," Mei Xinyu, a researcher with a think-tank under the Ministry of Commerce, said in response to Zhong's proposal. "This would shake our advantaged manufacturing industry to the core."

The yuan was trading around 7.5625 per dollar on Friday.

It has has climbed by 7.2 percent since being revalued by 2.1 percent and decoupled from a dollar peg to float within managed bands two years ago, with heavy central bank intervention preventing a sharper advance.

Zhong argued that the undervalued currency had made domestic asset and resource prices artificially cheap, meaning swathes of China's rapidly growing economy could be bought for a song by international investors.

"The money has already come in and is still coming, and they will make profits at the end of the day -- can you find another way to stop it?" he asked.

Zhong likened foreign capital to water, saying China needed enough of it but could also not afford a flood. The exchange rate should be raised to the point where there was a sufficient inflow of foreign money -- but not a deluge.

"We could revalue the yuan to 6.5 against the dollar, so there will be enough water," he said.

"We could wait and see, and if that's not enough, we could move the yuan to 4.5."