About the AUD/CNY rate
The AUD/CNY rate is how many CNY one Australian dollar buys. It moves constantly with interest-rate expectations, commodity prices and global risk sentiment - see what moves the rate. Tradergy shows the mid-market reference rate and does not forecast where it’s heading. For the 52-week highs and lows and a daily table, see the AUD/CNY rate history.
The other directions of this rate: the reverse rate, CNY → AUD, is on the receiving Chinese yuan view, and sending Australian dollars to China is covered on the AUD → CNY transfer page. Every AUD pair sits on the convert hub, and to work in more than one currency at once there is the currency converter.
Two markets in one currency
There are two markets in the renminbi, and only one has a published starting point. Each business day the China Foreign Exchange Trade System, authorised by the People's Bank of China, calculates a central parity, and how it does so is set out in public: it polls every market maker before the market opens, discards the highest and lowest offers, and takes a weighted average of the rest by trading volume. Onshore dealing happens around that figure. The parity against the Australian dollar is produced by the same poll without the weighting.
The second market is offshore, chiefly in Hong Kong, and it has no parity at all. The same currency is bought and sold there by whoever wants to, at whatever price they agree. The two prices sit close together and are under no obligation to be identical, because what separates them is not distance but law: China's capital account is open for trade and largely closed for investment, and the annual foreign-exchange allowance that mainland individuals work within is one expression of it. Two names attach to the one currency and both are correct: renminbi is the currency, yuan the unit of it, as sterling is the currency and the pound is the unit.
The published recipe has a consequence worth drawing out. Because the parity is built from what market makers quote and from the previous day's close, it moves with the market rather than against it, so the arrangement is neither a fixed rate nor a free one. It is a daily reset of where trading starts, and that is a third category most currency lists have no column for.
Sources: China Foreign Exchange Trade System, CNY central parity rate · State Administration of Foreign Exchange, Official answers media questions on regulating large-sum overseas cash withdrawals with bank cards