China is in the process of destroying the PETRODOLLAR, by preparing to buy and sell it in Yuan, which is immediately convertible into GOLD. This is a DEATH threat to the petrodollar, which I personally hope the Chinese are able to realize, GDA! That being said there are many people in China who can't wait to get their wealth out of there, to someplace they have more control over it. When wealth is TRANSFERRED out of the geographical control of ANY nation state, that nation's power is reduced. That's why you can't use PAYPAL outside of the US. That transfers money or items of value outside of the geographical control of the USA. They consider it ECONOMIC WARFARE; even though the persons who are getting hurt the worst are retired-expatriates of ALL nations. Durring WWII, which was basically a civil-war between AMERICA's wealthy elite, 50 milion people lost their lives, most of whom were CIVILIANS. Guess what, they're doing it AGAIN!!!!!
Interesting comments on a subject usually ignored though attempts to create a new currency to compete with the petro dollar has always failed, unless you count the Euro, but the US petrodollar still accounts for 60% of the transactions worldwide. Both Ghadaffi and Hussein attempted to use their oil to back up a competing currency and the US took direct military action to prevent it from happening. The US keeps tight control over the major oil producing countries in order to keep control over the world oil supply, that way the Western banks maintain the hegemony of the petrodollar. We are in Afghanistan in order to prevent a pipeline from being built from the Middle East to China to keep the Chinese from getting enough oil to back the Yen up with.
You are suggesting the Chinese are returning to the gold standard, which the US moved away from under Nixon. There is a problem that you did not address: The US moved away from the gold standard was because other nations were simply redeeming their paper money for gold which was depleting the US reserves, so the US switched to using oil to back up the dollar, creating the petrodollar.
So where is China getting enough gold to back up the Yen with and somehow deal with other nations redeeming their virtual or paper money into something tangible like gold? The value of the world's money supply now by far exceeds the amount of gold in the world so unless the Chinese have a secret supply of gold somewhere they aren't going to be able to sustain a new monetary system with it.
Oil is the number 1 commodity traded for in the world economy, all transactions for oil are conducted by the Western banks which gives them unprecedented wealth and control over the world economy. But oil is not a mineral that is essentially worthless and can be stockpiled forever, when people buy oil, they buy it to use, it is burned and then is gone, people then have to return to the market to buy more which keeps the trade cycle indefinitely running. Gold has no actual use other than as a marker of wealth or coin for merchants to use, it can be stockpiled indefinitely and if there's too much there will be a glut, if the Chinese do have mine somewhere filled with more gold than the legendary mines of King Midas and redeem every Yen one for a nugget of gold then eventually there will be so much gold around it will be worthless.
If you disagree please explain how the Chinese are going to resolve these issues and make this new "gold standard Yen" a true rival for the Western petrodollar.
All that being said it would be best for the world to not be under the thumb of the world banks and multinational corporate exploitation, I just don't see how some "gold standard" currency is going to get the job done.