It was a hamburger giant that introduced corporate America to dim sum — not the dumplings, but the offshore yuan debt commonly known by that name. And now, after two turbulent eras and multiple rebirths, it’s Wall Street’s turn to tap the market in Hong Kong, though for reasons very different from when McDonald’s Corp. sold these bonds 16 years ago.

The world’s systemically important banks have raised 134 billion yuan ($20 billion) in dim-sum bonds so far this year, nearly triple their total for all of 2025. Citigroup Inc., Barclays Plc and BNP Paribas SA are the biggest issuers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Wells Fargo & Co. has seen its issuance jump more than tenfold, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has roughly tripled its volume.

Consider how improbable this looks geopolitically. Globalization is supposedly in retreat. The US and China are locked in strategic competition over everything from artificial intelligence to the future of the global monetary system. So why are Western banking institutions embracing the Chinese currency? According to Bank of America Corp., itself a major issuer, the offshore yuan has overtaken the British pound to become the third-largest funding currency for global banks.

This all feels very different from previous cycles. In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, investors saw the yuan as close to a one-way bet: They expected it to steadily appreciate and were therefore willing to accept minuscule coupons. Corporate America was an unlikely beneficiary. Companies expanding in China, such as McDonald’s, could borrow cheaply in yuan and spend the proceeds there, matching their debt with local-currency revenues. Others could swap the proceeds back into dollars, effectively turning investors’ appetite for yuan appreciation into synthetic dollar funding at a steep discount to US borrowing costs.

The shock 2015 devaluation of the yuan ended that craze. To prevent the more freely traded offshore currency — the CNH — from becoming a weapon for speculators betting against the onshore yuan, Beijing engineered a brutal liquidity squeeze, briefly driving overnight CNH borrowing costs in Hong Kong to 66.8% in 2016. A second boom, fueled by Chinese developers seeking alternatives to dollar debt, ended with the collapse of China Evergrande Group.

The third era rests on a very new foundation. Forget the financial engineering that drove the first boom: The currency-swap arbitrage that once turned cheap yuan debt into even cheaper dollar funding has largely disappeared. The prize today is access to China’s vast, captive reservoir of savings. Chinese technology giants such as Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. are already drawing on it to finance their AI expansion at coupon rates far below comparable dollar yields. Increasingly, Wall Street wants access to that pool of money too.

Ready issuers are finding willing investors. With mainland property in a deep funk and domestic yields near historic lows, Chinese insurers, asset managers and wealthy individuals are starved for returns. Yet Beijing cannot allow that money to flow freely overseas without risking destabilizing capital outflows. Its solution is a calibrated pressure valve: the Southbound Bond Connect, which lets mainland investors put money to work offshore while largely keeping it within the yuan ecosystem.

The consequences are transforming the financial center at the heart of the West’s engagement with China. For the first time, banks in Hong Kong are on course to arrange more bond sales in yuan than in dollars. The shift could accelerate as Beijing, having recently allowed mainland pension savings to flow south, makes fuller use of the city’s deep capital markets to expand the yuan’s role as an international funding currency.

Recycling Chinese savings offshore is only half the equation. Beijing also wants to reduce its exposure to Western sanctions. Russia provided a harsh lesson: After the invasion of Ukraine, the G7 and its partners immobilized about $300 billion of Russian central-bank reserves. For China, the implication was difficult to ignore. In a confrontation with the West, dependence on dollar assets, correspondent banks and Western-dominated payment networks could become a strategic vulnerability.

Alternative payment rails such as Project mBridge, the multi-central-bank platform that can reduce reliance on the dollar-dominated correspondent-banking system, offer part of the answer. But plumbing alone isn’t enough. As China encourages more trade and energy contracts to be settled in yuan, the recipients of that currency need somewhere attractive to put it. That requires deep, liquid yuan capital markets where offshore wealth can earn a return without first being converted into dollars.

This is already happening. Mainland-linked investors in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan still absorb the lion’s share of dim-sum notes, but sovereign wealth funds, central banks and other buyers across Belt-and-Road markets are gaining ground. Institutions outside Asia, which accounted for just 3% to 4% of primary allocations before 2022, now take 8% to 10% of new-issue books, according to trading platform Tradeweb.

The yuan is nowhere near challenging the greenback. Its share of global central banks’ reserve assets is a little over 2%. However, the search for an alternative to the dollar is real, and the irony is hard to miss. Even as Washington debates financial decoupling and policymakers fret about the yuan’s expanding international role, America’s megabanks are tapping the very pools of Chinese capital that are helping deepen the offshore market in Hong Kong. Instead of retreating from globalization, Wall Street is quietly helping Beijing turn the yuan into a viable funding currency — one dim-sum bond at a time.