Chinese officials told European Union business executives that the yuan will achieve "full convertibility" by 2015, EU Chamber of Commerce in China President Davide Cucino said.

"We were told by those officials by 2015," Cucino told reporters in Beijing yesterday, declining to identify the government departments involved. People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said that while there is no timetable for convertibility, the offshore yuan market is "developing faster than what we had imagined."

A freely traded currency would mark one of the biggest policy shifts since China's leaders embraced private enterprise three decades ago. Such a timeline would help China deflect criticism from U.S. and European lawmakers that the world's second-biggest economy is gaining an unfair advantage in global trade by artificially keeping the yuan undervalued. It would be a year faster than the schedule expected by 57 percent of 1,263 global investors in a Bloomberg survey published in May.